The Age of the Goddess and the End of Free Will

In our little Utica Temenos group we have an “assignment” to tell our individual stories. We took this on as an “elder” activity, taking off from Robert Bly’s list of “qualities of the adult” at the end of The Sibling Society (“…an adult is able to organize the random emotions and events of his or her life into a memory, a rough meaning, a story.”)

I think I understand why Bly used the adjective “rough.” Although for many people, seeing a meaning or pattern in their lives is an almost inconceivable challenge, never before attempted, others have too much tendency to see everything that happens as having had the hand of Providence guiding it. Excessive uncertainty on the one hand, and a surplus of certainty on the other!

The question I see emerging, for all of us in this group, is how far we are going to take the notion of being “divinely guided,” the idea that we serve something greater than ourselves (and what does that mean in our post-death-of-God world?) We can’t help the fact that we grew up in a liberalized, post-vertical (to use Bly’s term) collective consciousness, that we’ve known from childhood on we could take what we wanted from the certitudes presented to us and “leave the rest.” This was especially true in my case, growing up in a liberal, secularized home in which the barely churched adults served no power or reality beyond themselves. But even strictly raised Catholics in those days had to be aware that there were choices, in behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, etc., even if they dared not choose until the time came for breaking away from the parents. So the notion of having no choice is foreign to us. Like everyone else, our tendency is to act in all matters as if we were free to do and to choose what we want. In that way, we live as if we would live forever, as if we had all the time in the world.

Thus, though we are drawn to archetypal/transformational and eastern spirituality, the idea that we would bend or surrender our will to “Spirit” may not even occur to us. The idea that there was a “plan” for us, a trajectory for our lives, just does not fit with the freedom of will we were taught that we have. Dreams, or other transmissions from the spiritual realm have fascination for us, and we recognize them as communications from our soul, but even they do not suggest the kind of binding force that would oppose our personal freedom. What does it mean that we are given significant, suggestive dreams? Is there anything to give us pause in our enjoyment of these treasures from the unconscious?

In our Temenos group, I am in the minority in that I had a St. Paul-type falling off the donkey experience in relation to “non-ordinary reality.” My “breakdown,” back in the mid-nineties was an unambiguous experience of finding myself in relation to forces or powers far greater than my own, that could swallow me up and spit me out at their leisure. My inner furniture got drastically rearranged because, in my view, up to then I had refused what mythologist Joseph Campbell refers to as “the call to adventure” for too long. As Campbell says in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “the refusal (of the call) is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest.” Further he says, once one has refused the call, “the divinity itself becomes one’s terror; for obviously if one is oneself one’s god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one’s egocentric system, becomes a monster.” My second birth, with “the hound of heaven” gnashing at my heels, did not feel optional.

But even for me, and maybe for St. Paul too, after a period of time, the sense of urgency lessens, and the “illusion” that I have choices returns. Because of modernity, the time and place in which we live, the question reappears as to what place this “spirituality” has in one’s life. There is no political or religious force great enough to “make me” do anything against my own will. I’ll draw down on myself no public censure unless I do something considered bad by conventional morality, but my soul can burn in hell – or starve in abandonment - without a remark from anyone. In this modern context, though we still recognize the motivational power of guilt, we do not recognize the necessity to a meaningful life, of conscious surrender. Especially we do not recognize the necessity of conscious surrender to the Immanent voice of the Goddess to become the full flowering of our particular, individual being.

I don’t really believe in signs, but on this Good Friday just past, I received what could be perceived as one by somebody who does believe in them. Even to me, it is worth looking at. Each year, the inter-faith Living Stations of the Cross takes people on a walk outdoors that includes stops at various places of significance in the crumbling inner city of Utica. This year the walk concluded with a ceremony invoking the names of the “saints” from various traditions who have stood up for truth, justice and love for humanity. The group of us stood in the Copernicus park in a large circle. The idea was we’d be given one of these names, we’d speak it, and than all would say together “Presente.” When the basket of names came around to me, I was handed “Mary, mother of Jesus.” Orin whispered to me, ”Wow – the Goddess!” If he had not done so, I might not have bothered to even notice, or to ponder this interesting coincidence.

But if you have dedicated the past 20 years of your life to transformational spirituality, and the past 2 years to bi-weekly honoring of the Divine Feminine specifically, as I have, one can imagine a connection even if one is not quite willing to assign the “coincidence” to the hand of Providence. And Mary, remember, was she who was stunned by the news that she had been chosen to give birth to the godhead. Just put yourself in those shoes!

I mean it: put yourself in her shoes. For this is still our story. Even for those who reject or have outgrown Christianity, the story retains its power to speak to us directly as a confrontation with the Goddess/God nature within. What are we to do when we are likewise called to give birth to+ God? If we are really listening, we will do as Mary probably did – check to see if there isn’t some mistake. Seek a clarification. Attempt to strike a bargain. The offer feels more like the announcement of death than birth, and the immediate reaction is to run like hell for the hills.

There is no way to give birth to God without changing one’s life utterly, without surrender to a power beyond one’s own. When we play at the edges of goddess consciousness we play with a serious reality. In the book we are reading in our group, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness, the authors discuss the mind-body connection using a description written by C.G. Jung in 1954 as “two cones whose apices, meeting in a point without extension,- a real zero point – touch and do not touch.” Jung’s intuitive insight has received support in recent years from neuroscience which posits in the mind both a “physical substrate, which is the body and the brain, and…another immaterial substrate that has to do with information moving around.”

The authors continue to say that “in the imagery of the Feminine, this midground between spirit and body, the subtle or metaphorical body, is the place of the Virgin…Like the virgin forest that carries all the potential of new life, within her is the seed of the new consciousness that may be quickened by the spirit and brought into life.” Specifically what is nurtured and brought into life according to Christian mythology is the “Bridegroom,” the “masculine energy strong enough to partner the Virgin.” This ultimate “wedding” of archetypal energies is the realization of the transformational or individuation process.

On the one hand, it is true to say that we have a choice (i.e., to accept the seed of the new consciousness or not). Mary has a choice. “It’s my life and I’ll do what I like,” as the Animals sang it back in the 60’s. Modern life is defined by our having more choices, at all levels, than ever before in history. We can marry whom we please, or not marry. We can choose to not give birth to children, through contraceptives and legal abortions, or we can choose to have children with or without the father in the picture, with or without a personal “father” at all. We can prolong the dying process by keeping the body alive even when spirit has all but flown away, we can divorce without serious censure, we can change jobs, move to Boulder, reinvent identities over and over. Given the amount of choice we have compared to our ancestors, it is far more difficult to imagine anything in relation to which we are not free.

But what that is, simply, is a failure of our imagination, for our bodies, our beings in nature, dictate that we are not free. For beginners, we are not free of aging, disease, death, decay, dissolution. We are not free of our utter dependence on earth, water, air, plants and animals. In fact, the purported free will is an illusion cooked up by overexcited 18th century rationalists, aided and abetted by various technological innovations and the enormous riches of industrial and post-industrial civilization. The illusion of freedom we’ve enjoyed for the last couple of centuries has led to the unparalleled destruction of the planet and must now be relinquished. Freedom of choice must be re-examined. In the absence of what Robert Bly calls “the vertical,” in the absence of hierarchical absolutes or of biological determinism, if we are to avoid the rigid, dogmatic and oppressive interpretations for society and social roles coming from the right, we have to choose our limitations and our bonds.

The guidance for following these chosen limitations is mainly inner and intuitive, for God had shifted in our era from heavenly transcendance to bodily immanence. There will be no 10 commandments carved in stone to transmit body-centered wisdom. It will be learned by each individual as she comes to terms with her real and painful limitations, her non-optional needs for community, for beauty, for meaning, for lasting, committed relationships that represent the hard limitations of natural life. It will be learned as she lives with awareness of the mortal life span, its cycles, births, deaths and rebirths. As the authors of Dancing in the Flames express it, the Virgin who mediates between body and spirit, who accomplishes the work of transformation of consciousness “seems to know that our place of wounding is where she will come in, where we will meet others in love, where we will celebrate our planet in love.”

Notice that in talking about these matters, I rely entirely upon metaphoric, mythological language. We will know that we are no longer playing at the edge of Goddess consciousness when our dependence upon metaphor becomes apparent, when, after too many hours of being “productive” or answering demands, or otherwise justifying our existence, we can feel starved for the “nonproductive” language that puts us right in that midpoint place between body and soul and containing both.

In his discussion of the mythological motif of the refusal of the call to adventure, Campbell refers to the story of King Minos. Minos refused to make the sacrifice of the divine bull (i.e., to answer the divine call ), for reasons of economic advantage. Minos achieved his “empire of renown,” but with disastrous consequences. To return for a moment to another metaphor, that of the virgin birth, mentioned above, and of the birth of the “Bridegroom,” which Woodman and Dickson make equivalent to the “masculine energy strong enough to partner the Virgin.” Here is the ultimate surrender for a woman of our age taught to serve other peoples’ interests before her own, to make herself likeable out of the perpetual fear that she will offend. Such a woman will not be released to her full being by following the conventional path to success (i.e., money, status, material possessions) offered by the culture, anymore than Campbell’s King Minos was. Inasmuch as she has not wedded with her own masculine energy – the power to manifest her own specific nature (destiny) in the world, she will continue to serve the dominant culture and to “serve” the ongoing catastrophe.

The demand of the Goddess is that each individual make her own full expression, her own contribution to the community and the world that is in keeping with the limitations and the abundance of nature. Is this demand negotiable? Can we ignore this call? Can we behave as if we have forever to make up our minds, to give up our half-stepping lifestyles of co-dependently making sure that we are liked, and respond to the inner call to a very humble sort of greatness? Put another way, can we forever refuse our differentness, which is to deny the Goddess? For She is only interested in genuine diversity, a diversity in which each individual, plant, animal or human, is fully present as itself.

As for me, I take the fact of my freedom as a priceless good and an even greater aspiration. But as an individual of my place and time in history, I have learned vastly more from the effort to live consciously within my limitations. The most difficult limitation of all may not be death, but the limitation of my own particular (Goddess) nature, acceptance of which is a most demanding discipline.

Reviving Matriarchal Consciousness

“You can’t purchase soul; it isn’t a commodity doled out at toney workshops. It doesn’t come in a jar of high- end supplements. There’s no greater supply of it in Rhinebeck, NY or Denver or Nepal than right here….” Orin Domenico

“…The Black Goddess Kali, the terrible one of many names, difficult of approach, whose stomach is a void and so can never be filled, and whose womb is giving birth forever to all things….” Joseph Campbell


In my experience, people love to hear the “good news” that what is chiefly wanted of us in this life is to fully become ourselves. Our souls rejoice at this message, voiced in all the major religious traditions (I think of “Jesus loves me,” and of a rabbinic tale I heard at a bar mitzvah once that conveyed this message that we are loved as individuals and that what God wants of us is that we be who we are.) When they hear this message pronounced, our souls leap in hope that we, their earthly caretakers, will actually take the project on seriously. .

Like most profound messages, however, this one gets fairly well misconstrued, misheard, and/or ignored, in our culture of shallowness, wherein the project of “being ourselves” gets mixed up with the culture’s idealization of youth, of slender body types, of happiness measured materially, of freedom from constraint, and all kinds of media blather. In fact, in a culture based upon the individual’s being a replaceable worker, passive consumer, “mass man and woman,” banal and opinion-less, what we learn best is self-hatred. In particular, we learn to hate our bodies, and the inner knowledge for which the bodies are the medium. Far from having cause to rejoice, our souls are the first thing to be jettisoned in order to make a “fit” with the culture; they, and the “young feminine” by which the soul is archetypally represented, are left outside to starve. Thus there is precious little information in the mainstream that refers to this business of “becoming who we are.” The phrase is used to sell things, as is the young feminine body. By teen age, most of us are enjoined in the culture’s fear and hatred of the feminine; we are, in effect, the enemies of our very souls, counter-insurgent forces against the now become revolutionary goal of “becoming who we are.”

At the last gathering of our Temenos group, we discussed what the role of people like us might be in our community and world. I had brought up the fact that we are a group, being “Divine Feminine-centered,” whose traditions have been lost, wiped out significantly during the witch burnings of the 16-17th centuries. The “crones” of that day, those women who had achieved, in terms of wisdom, experience, and psychic autonomy, an embodiment of the crone aspect of the Goddess in their lives, were exterminated.

This is a profound loss to all women today of which we are at best, dimly aware. For the most part, we have never even been taught to acknowledge, let alone to grieve, let alone to understand that somehow we must regain essential knowledge that was lost, never to be passed down generationally mother to daughter ever again. Realization of what was done to us centuries ago can help us to appreciate those wounded, partial women of the 1950’s who were our mothers. It can help me to appreciate the difficult gap between my daughter and myself; to the extent that she is a child of the culture in which the feminine archetype (goddess) is effectively banished, how can I ever communicate to her knowledge that can be useful to her in her development of her own goddess aspects, her own inner strength, power, creative expression? Not necessarily the knowledge itself, since that can only be gained experientially, but the awareness, the blessing, for which I as her mother am the first representation (and perhaps also the primary obstacle) in her life? Is there anything we can do to prompt the initiations of younger women, so painful to watch as they collide with, and imbibe, the culture’s toxic hatred of the feminine?
(Some might object to my use of the word “hatred,” and prefer I use a word more nuanced, such as “ambivalence.” Hatred, as my students would say, is so blunt. Okay. To be more balanced, I will correct myself: there is love for women as well; but the destructive culture will not be transformed by this love until the hatred is consciously acknowledged. That is my completely biased opinion.)

The initiation I am speaking of, the development of “goddess aspects,” the true process of “becoming who we are,” is also the passage into genuine adulthood. The distinction must be made between what passes for adulthood in our modern culture and what I am calling “genuine” adulthood, because the dominant culture seeks to keep individuals infantilized as passive consumers and powerless citizens. Initiation, on the other hand, accomplishes a change in consciousness into fully individuated, self-responsible, discerning, generative adults. As far as the dominant culture is concerned, it is quite okay, preferable in fact, that individuals retain their memberships in their families of origin, never venturing beyond that limited, socially constructed consciousness into the deeper consciousness made possible through the “second birth.” The avenue to this deeper consciousness, the “hero’s journey” or transformational process, was taught and practiced, we conjecture, in matriarchal traditions, and is available today via the process of intensive psychotherapy.

If the diaspora had not occurred, the genocide against our kind, I’m guessing our culture would impart to us awareness of the Goddess’s gift of genuine aliveness, and therefore of how to become who we are.. However, according to Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, authors of Dancing in the Flames, the Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness, we actually do know the Goddess but being “sons and daughters of patriarchy,” (i.e. of the diaspora, of the post-witch-burning era) we are “locked in fear of her judgments.” She is perceived, the authors say, as a negative mother who could destroy [us]; therefore we wish either “to please her or to dominate her.” This tendency to either placate or dominate can be seen in the most fundamental ways men and women of today have of relating to each other and to the world. Furthermore, if we are tempted to say that it has been patriarchy’s approach - and many men’s within patriarchy - to dominate, might we say that women’s approach to the Goddess is to placate?

Just the other day, in the group of women I meet with monthly, we addressed the topic of “what would our relationships be like if we knew we were completely loved by everyone?” The immediate response given by several of the women was that they would be free, they would have more energy, because they would not have to give so much of it away in the effort to make themselves likable. This was a remarkable admission from well-educated, intelligent, relatively successful women. And how is it that the world has become for them an “other” which stands ready to judge, destroy, devour them if they fail to make themselves pleasing first? Surely this fear is not attributable to the fear of men, since it is generalized and demands a generalized response to the world. This generalized fear-based attitude is like the mentality of a slave, whose personality has been warped to fit into the social reality of domination by the white man. It is a projection of the fearsome, devouring “Teeth Mother,” the dark aspect of the goddess, upon the world.

As long as the fear is misplaced, displaced “out there” and attributed to the very world we live in, then our project of “loving ourselves as women,” of becoming “who we are,” will only go so far, not far enough for those of us who truly desire a kinder society, more harmonious relationship to the earth, a better world for our children and grandchildren. How do we become women and men who can steadfastly contribute to the better world, a world safe for our individual passions and for compassion, no longer allowing it to be the case that, in the words of Yeats, all the “passionate intensity” is expressed only by “the worst?” That projection has to be seen for what it is, if we are to regain our full and rightful measure of creative power as women (and this is also true for men).

As long as we do not take back this projection, own it as our fear of our own innate goddess power, we remain sitting ducks for that which daily erodes our integrity as it destroys the earth, one species after another, one indigenous culture after another. If we won’t give up our ego position, which, for many women, clings to a deep identification with worthlessness, we cannot say no to any technological enhancement sold without discussion to the masses, nor to the commodification of the world (which gives us a false sense of power over it), nor to the dead end of materialism. If we cannot make our way back to the source of archetypal spiritual energy – which is the power to change - we will have none; our lives will be embodiments of the death we fear.

In other words, the Goddess does her work whether or not we are in conscious relationship to Her. But in relationship to her, we are in relationship to Nature itself, to the life-death-life cycles that keep us within nature’s limits. In relationship to her, open to her archetypal energy, we can switch from unconscious complicity in the destruction of the earth to conscious participation in divine creative energy through our art, our work, our loving relationships

Conscious awareness of the Goddess is so difficult because it is a gift that can only be “opened” by individuals. To receive it, one must let go of the authority one has transferred to others, to society and its institutions, to “the world” in general and expect it to come only from within. Unlike the rewards of the culture, it cannot be received by “masses,” or “consumers” nor by replaceable employee units. It does not serve to distinguish “high” from “low.” Only at the level of the individual can Goddess-change happen, and here, in this most local of localities, is where it must happen. Fortunately, the individual and the particular, the great variety and specificity of nature, happen to be the Goddess’s agenda. She who is divine spirit immanent in all living things, pushing everything and everyone toward greater consciousness is par excellence the champion of particularity and cheerleader for presence. In the form of nature, she has produced the incredibly intricate and diverse biology of the planet. And she has produced that variety and diversity in the human part of creation as well, which is why each of us is enjoined to be fully who we are. Destiny, in matriarchal terms, is not a facile explanation for why bad things happen, like attributing them to “ God’s will.” It is that acorn destiny, inborn in me and in you, which can only be known from within the organism, through the medium of the body itself.

This is the precious, dangerous, astonishingly “blunt” message which was lost in the witch burnings and successively buried under the rise of nation states, industrialism, and global corporations, all extensions of the patriarchal power drive, unchecked by feminine concern for balance and relationality (peace and harmony based in mutual respect) among all living things. Now we are in a period of planetary crisis, when all the old political and reform-type “solutions” have lost their mojo, and can be perceived, by everyone who cares to look, to be inadequate for the radical, systemic change that is needed, and when hope itself seems like another illusion. We are left either with clinging obstinately to fundamentalism of right or left, or of allowing our very selves to be changed, by time-honored well tested processes known to the mystical wings of the major religious traditions, and in esoteric, wisdom traditions, all of which teach from the inside out. Only individuals in the privacy of their own hearts and souls can receive this message; it is up to individuals to hear and respond, or to resist and deny the call to change. No institution can address, publicize, promote, or impede this change because they, by their “nature,” are part of the old paradigm. Each individual is left free to be a pioneer of the spirit, or, if you will, a Mary, faced with the prospect of becoming Mother to God, surrendering to the unwanted and terrifying divine call to give birth to new life within.

Because the inner journey is inherently frightening, and because our culture conspires in a thousand ways against our hearing, let alone responding to the call (think cell phone, video games, internet, 500 cable TV channels, food and process addictions and all the other lures of banality) few will make the journey who are not driven by their pain. And as pharmaceutical companies make even pain negotiable, the odds against consciousness grow even greater.

Happily, in the call to this kind of change, numbers do not matter, for this call cannot refer outside itself – at least, not to the dominant culture - for confirmation or encouragement. Beyond inner confirmation, it can only be confirmed in the experience of heroes who have taken the journey themselves, such as hidden heroes at local AA meetings who have surrendered to the cosmic call for their real presence through entering recovery. Or it can receive encouragement from the works of those poets, mystics, scholars and spiritual adventurers who have escaped the binds of literalized, dualistic thinking and stepped on to the Goddess path of spiritual transformation. Men and women who have been willing to defy the accepted truths of their times, who were willing to be prophetic fools for their visions, who stood by their opinions against the hegemonic, even at the cost of their lives, can provide nourishment for the difficult journey. ( I here omit the list of heroes whose genius was in the area of making money, which is a paradigm we know well enough.)

But even the heroes do not remove that very tough requirement for inner, personal assent, nor the need to continuously translate the message for oneself, into one’s own local (personal) idiom to address the relationships in one’s own particular life and circumstances, and to the culture and the world. And what does it mean to address the dominant culture from the perspective of inner transformation?

There is some confusion here. More and more, I am clear that surrender to the transformational process is a surrender not only to a “nice” Goddess saying “you go girl”, but to a terrible one as well. To face her, to face Nature, to face death, entails a recognition of that which we most reject. For many post-feminist women, myself and those I have observed, that which we reject spontaneously and unreflectively is all we associate with patriarchy and the so-called masculine. At some level we hold on to our anger at men, and our self-righteousness in relation to men. In this area of relationship we continue on in the old paradigm; perhaps we have not fully left our home of origin, ruled over by its archaic gods, at all. And where I see this clinging to old gods most clearly is in the refusal among women of their “grandiosity,” their steadfast persistence in being “ego-less,” in never, ever pursuing seriously their own expression as though it were as serious as accepting knighthood. (If the Queen offers you knighthood, do you refuse, and on what grounds?)

Many women still accept patriarchy’s version of womanly virtue to the extent that we feel our own expression unworthy of being that which we place at the center of our purpose and our devotion. We adhere privately to the belief that suppression of expression is more virtuous than “dominating the conversation,” and those who do dominate, often men, we resent. Plain and simple, this refusal of our inner Queen is refusal of the goddess, tantamount to acknowledging that we are keeping our bets on the old patriarchal guy-God we love to hate. For it doesn’t matter what we say about goddesses or fairy tales or archetypes, or how many yoga classes we attend, or how natural our diet, or how much spiritual knowledge we have attained if we still refuse our grandiosity, our “know-it-allness,” our right to stand up for that which has no other advocate: that is, our own soul. The assertiveness that matters does not end with landing the great job but with bringing out, baldly and yes bluntly, our own individual, philosopher’s stone of truth. To achieve this may be the project of a lifetime, but such, it seems to me, is a worthy life, and a lifetime well spent.

In the end, the fear of grandiosity, of being “too much,” is groundless. The crone, so long missing from our pantheon and at such great cost to individual psyche and to the anima mundi, is not a “diva.” I take a diva to be a woman who has become a “goddess icon” of her age, but not the Goddess. The Goddess points back to the crowd of common people, to ourselves, common as dirt, and enjoins the goddesses in us all to her great work of abundance and diversity. Our highest work and the only nobility is in sacrifice; the Queen herself gives back of her Highness to her community; from our wholeness we give back our art, our creative expression, our sturdy and elaborated opinion, our service in a priestly/prophetic role. The fear of being “too much,” passed on through our fear-bound mothers, is false and can no longer be heeded for in heeding it, we turn away not from false pride but from the call to humbly serve Her Immanence.

Endangered Opinion and the Life of the Soul

Driving home from the coffeehouse where we’d gone to hear our young friend perform, having left early during the set that followed our friend’s first set, Orin blazed forth about singers who don’t speak their words. I was uncomfortable with the coloration his anger gave to our reason for leaving; I had thought we’d left because of next morning’s early duties at the Café. His vociferously expressed opinion (pretty much Orin’s preferred mode for the expressing of opinion is vociferous) suggested to me we’d left because he could not tolerate the music. I felt he was being unfair, that anger was the wrong response, as these were young kids just making their first attempts at performing. They need our feedback in order to develop, I rebuked him, not our harsh criticism.

In part, we were enacting the same old Mother vs. Father argument, the mother’s archetypal role to unconditionally care for vulnerable others, the father’s to make distinctions and demand excellence. Something like that. Letting go of my hurt feelings for a moment, however, another way of looking at the disagreement began to enter my awareness. What he was pointing out, albeit with too much energy, was something I myself had noticed many times with students and with my own children: the habit of using language as if the words did not matter. (Think of it: with the advent of cell phone cameras, no one will ever have to struggle for words to describe anything, again, ever!!)

After some thought, though I maintain I am right in feeling that it is the job of elders to encourage expression, not to squash it, I concluded that Orin’s point was well-taken, for words do matter. As we have so often found in the course of our 32 year marriage, both truths can co-exist and become more than each alone, supremely in the right and squared off against the other, could be. Further, though my hearing is undoubtedly worsening, and my samples no doubt skewed by the stranded outpost of a city I live in, there does seem to be a trend afoot to kill words, and with them the strong and definite, if connotative and metaphoric, meanings words imply. TV and other mass media have of course been instrumental in this trend, driven by their imperative, because they are aimed at the “masses,” to dumb down messages and remove the need for thinking on the part of the audience.

Because for the past decade and more I have dedicated myself, like a medieval hermit, to a practice of solitude in which my own voice, my own words and ideas are given their due, this war against words is hard on me, who am generally not able to express myself in the common, dumbed down, flattened idiom (not because I’m so smart, mind you, but because I am out of practice!) Moreover, such a war on words makes it difficult for anyone whose soul needs to know that other souls exist; others who, like themselves, are engaged in the struggle to preserve meaning and need to hear, once in awhile, the sound of another individual’s genuine thought or imagining. Further, using my own personal experience and my experience teaching writing and public speaking to college students for 26 years, upon which to base my opinion, not only are words mattering less, but the having of genuine opinions is a behavior decidedly on the decline.

One of my early awakenings in the late 1980’s resulted from a weekend spent with author Anne Wilson Schaef at Kirkridge retreat center in the Poconos of PA. She had recently published her insightful book When Society Becomes an Addict, which had been helping me make some connections between my newly discovered childhood wounds and the society at large. Many of her words that weekend went right to my core, where there was so much unacknowledged pain that by the end of the weekend, in the final gathering of the large group, the dam burst in a spasm of sobbing and some passionate words I no longer remember. In the way I understood it at the time, she had pointed me inward, to the “Christ” within, to the separate world of my interior which had been completely sealed off from my consciousness for many years.

To this day I remember Anne Schaef telling the story of a young man – perhaps her son – who had gone on a date with a woman who turned out to be excessively passive. The quite remarkable young man’s words to the date were, “You have to have an opinion.” Imagine anyone today holding this as a qualification for a second date!!

In this story is the suggestion that some forms of shyness, reticence, or passivity are inauthentic, they are ways of feeding the disease of “addiction,” or of denying the reality of the vivid interior that every one of us possesses.

In an essay by John Taylor Gatto I am having my students read for an upper level college writing course, called Against School, Gatto argues that our system of compulsory public school education is purposefully designed to render children into passive “servants,” suitable only for employment in mass corporate jobs and as mass consumers. In the rousing conclusion of this prophetic piece, he remarks that “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.”

Many of my students at a public university in upstate New York (as well as I myself!) are examples of the success of this mass passifying project, in place now for perhaps as much as a century. While most of my students offered no comments on the amazing reading I had given them, one young man sitting in front gave me a clue to where the rest might be at. A bit older than the others, himself a father I gathered, he was clearly uncomfortable with Gatto’s radical critique. He chose to pick on one of Gatto’s historical examples of an individual – Admiral David Farragut - who performed successfully in war as a teenager without having undergone what we know as “schooling.” Not being as informed as my student on the historical fact, I conceded the point. But privately I wait to see what happens to this young man over the course of the semester, now that he has received notice – perhaps for the first time - that the(his) soul has its champions in this world. From the many teachers I speak with who complain about the quality of their students, I know that my experience with a passified student body is not unique. But the teachers don’t get that they are equally ill- prepared to accept the news they too have a genius within that they, and they alone, are responsible for bringing forth into this world!!

For the most part, the having of an opinion is not understood as the expression of one’s “genius,” and as necessary for the bringing to life of one’s own character or personhood. Stuck within the dualistic, dichotomizing pseudo-thinking of the dogmatically rationally-based culture, people will position themselves so as to stay within the dualistic frame they know. Much of what we hear passing for opinion is actually the consequence of everyone’s having being taught, from childhood on, that their individual opinion is unimportant. Genuine opinion is substituted for with taking sides in “arguments” of no substance or consequence, at the meaning level of the Coke vs. Pepsi controversy. Others substitute for genuine opinion with being smart but unprincipled, or with being unprincipledly partisan. These last, from whom we hear so much these days, will say anything, no matter how fallacious, to maintain the dualistic “comfort zone.” Dualistic thinking, which has to think in terms of either/or, \is particularly threatened in these tumultuous times as our civilization collides to its end; thus one sees desperate, fundamentalist attempts on all sides to keep faith in enmities, rather than in reconciliation, in our society and in the world.

With each passing semester in my public speaking classes, the persuasive speech assignment presents a crisis in my student’s lives. They have not been expected to have genuine opinions and they do not have them. Recently I sat next to an intelligent and likeable young man at a bar who commenced to express his opinion on some topic. Finding his opinion objectionable, I was forced to express my opposing opinion, hoping, I suppose, for a conversation.. To my surprise he began instantly to agree with me!

Genuine opinion rests upon having a relation to one’s own true thoughts “in a marrow bone.” They are the consequence of pondering what one finds to be true, what resonates as truth within one’s own heart. These are not “easy opinions,” like Corvettes vs. Mustangs, this rock band vs. that rock band, or Democrat Vs. Republican, but opinions worked over a low fire, with some heat and pressure applied. They do not come without effort, and even pain. Thus, the having of them would be greatly enhanced if the culture taught us that having well thought out, expressible opinions is a duty one owes to the larger community.

The writing course I mentioned above, designed for juniors and senior psychology, sociology and criminal justice majors, would be unteachable if I concentrated only on writing. These people have been taught that a shallow, uninformed reaction to someone else’s fully thought out and researched ideas, is enough, as good as a real opinion based upon understanding and appreciation for what the writer has said. Because of this, I have reconceived my job as that of making a strike for consciousness simply by insisting that the students in my class read in order to understand as fully as possible what they have read. I am postponing their expression of an opinion because in any meaningful sense, they cannot have one until they understand what has been said.

I imagine (maybe “fantasize” is more accurate) to myself the joy of that student who one day “gets” what C. Wright Mills means by “mass society” vs. a “public of public opinion,” who gains an appreciation for an idea conceived and fleshed out in someone else’s head and being. I think I understand what a confirmation that can be of the freeing and consoling truth that one is not alone in the universe, that connection and community exist, and that some courageous souls have taken it upon themselves to have and defend an opinion about this world we inhabit, about its effects upon human community, and which indicates how we are injured by unconscious acceptance of status quo, consensus reality. My own radical addition to Gatto’s radical point is that because the expression of genuine opinion is essential to the common good, not just a means for those sanctioned as “genius” to fulfill themselves, it amounts to being what was once thought of as religious duty.

It is in this sense I argue we are all supposed to have such opinions, the ones that come from knowing how we feel within the private wholeness of our own soul’s integrity, vs.ones fed to us by the controlling mass “unconsciousness.” The difficult pre-requisite for having opinions is that one must be acquainted with one’s true feelings. Otherwise, one’s so-called opinions can be at best footnotes to some other “genius’s” more fully developed opinion, whether Plato’s or Marx’s or Betty Friedan’s or Michael Pollan’s or Carl Jung’s. All visionaries are deserving of our gratitude and admiration, and accepting their mentorship makes a good starting place for cultivating our personal genius. But the lesson we should take from reading opinions we admire is that we must do that for ourselves; we must wrestle our opinion out from our very flesh, and “publish it to the world,” as Thoreau put it.

One tires from the effort to maintain the clarity of one’s opinions in the current modern condition. It has always been difficult to find the truth, but today it is culturally encouraged to give up one’s responsibility as an individual to decide what is the truth. Easier to slip back into talk that keeps us within the collective universe of things the culture gives us, which do not disturb us too much, about which “opinion” is pretty effortless. I find this to be particularly true among women, who are culturally and archetypally predisposed to be relational, connective, community and family-oriented. But when this tendency is not balanced, at soul level, with healthy, archetypally “masculine” energy, what we have is a refraining from opinion. (or a falling back into the crab bucket, to borrow an image from author Richard Wright).

At a group I meet with monthly, consisting of 9 or so women friends, all of us white, middle class, middle-aged, I introduced a topic: the serenity prayer. I asked my friends to consider what in their lives is hard to accept, and what they can change, etc. At my turn, I spoke about my difficulty in accepting myself, my pronounced introverted nature, and, ultimately, my spiritual nature. All of my projects here in Utica, I said, are based in the effort to preserve my spiritual grounding, which is also the means of accepting it. I was alluding to the fact that, in my community here, I do some striking things, perhaps admirable, but they are all based in the ongoing struggle I face to accept that which I cannot change; they are rooted in surrender. All else is ego. Even our defeatism, the inability to follow through on projects of our enthusiasm, to write the novel or launch the small business, is ego-controlled, which may make it harder to address than the evil of patriarchal power. I learned years ago that ego works as hard to keep us small and unnaturally passive as to make us what we conventionally think of as “egocentric,” “egotistical,” or grandiose. (All those characteristics we women like to ascribe to men) Women take heed: false modesty is false indeed! It is time to stop disowning our own masculine energies and aggressively make peace with our human opposite, as I described in my opening story. Our souls need us to actively take up their need for transcending dualism and for true soul-level expression.

In writing this piece, I have become aware I do so to push myself toward another level of acceptance of “that which I cannot change.” I continue to seek avenues by which I may do my true work of advocacy for the soul, that source of genius and of aliveness that each ignores, suppresses, degrades, denies at his/her extreme peril. Its invisibility makes it easy prey to our determinedly and lopsidedly materialistic, rationalistic, dualistic way of life, which as we now know irrefutably, is a way of anti-life, and unsustainable. The invisibility and silence of my inner nature allows me to foolishly ignore it, as if it were the puny suffering of some ragged person beneath my notice. But, in truth, my soul’s aliveness is consequence of the interplay of dynamic energies in my nature, the archetypes of masculine and feminine, which can only be realized in surrender to them.

The life force, in an acorn is invisible, but it accomplishes its undeniable – as well as incomprehensible - work of driving the acorn toward its oakish destiny. Who are we to deny that force in us?

To Orin,
and to Adam, Rob, Marshall
On the Occasion of the Debut of
The Rag and Bone Shop Poetry Theater
February 20, 2010
at
The Other Side of Utica

Over the rising beer-fueled din
In the bar we love,
After your reading,
A friend told us where he’d been that night -
A concert at the Aud with 2 remaining Dead.
The Grateful Dead! Rivals to Yeats’ poems
While your doughty cast surprised us,
In the tiny theater dedicated to Her - the Muse -
And to all who’d be so unsavvy, so punily destined
As to follow Her in this town so bloody far from Hollywood,
In this butthole kind of place,
Irishly unwanted -
As distant from “the real” on TV screen
As real stench to its description,
As my real heart to Valentine trinkets
Arrayed in bright discounted piles at RiteAid,
As a man - 61 and steeped in that Sixties ecstatic stew -
Getting up first time to read on stage -
Stage-scared, his customary persona fled -
to the icon Yeats, his poems today unread.

I cannot imagine how ridiculous the world
handed down must seem to our young -
Its mockery of heroism, its erase of humble men and women bent on
Virtue, kindness, honor to the gods whose traces
Linger, though not encouraged, in every human breast -
Where Holocaust survivors and Tiger Woods parade
Before us in celebrity, as though knowledge were value-free,
Accrued in our poor besieged brains by electronic grace.

Can such a world even behold
Acts done purely for devotion’s sake,
Out of love for Her and for those few who in their age
lent Her their voice?
Muse, Great Mother, Goddess:
All names for the One in whose orchard we must
Learn to walk.
In each incredibly humble bite
Of her apple,
Using voice and body and word,
The truth -
Like food for the starving in Port-au-Prince -
Leaks through
Barriers of blindness allied with greed:
All souls of equal worth!
And fight we must to bring each one -
My child, and yours; none purely welcomed -
To manger birth.

Suffering for One’s Life (As Art)

“I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?” Ernest Becker

“I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch
A blind man battering blind men...

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!” W.B. Yeats

“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise and know of no other sort of love.” Dostoevsky

"Life is suffering," Buddha’s central teaching, upon which hung all the rest of that religion, was incomprehensible to me back in 1978 when I was taking my first and only world religion class at Yale University as part of my program for a Masters in Divinity from Yale Divinity School. I was very concerned with the oppression of women, and of people of color. I admired liberation theology even though I was handicapped by my lack of a faith in God, but I was completely baffled as to Buddha’s meaning. Probably I assumed it came from the fact he was addressing those poor Asian people, people whose lives were ground down, I imagined, by poverty, short lives, many children, like I’d read about years earlier in The Good Earth.

My cluelessness was not an accident. The American attitude toward suffering, as I have experienced it and observed it, is complex: for instance, the suffering of “dumb animals” appears to be less tolerable than third world suffering, which we tell ourselves in the face of the staggering problems, “we can only do so much about.” Many stories about this anomaly come to mind, but in particular I remember a young man who used to come to our Café in Utica daily with his young daughter, before he moved away with his family several years ago. During all seasons, he parked his big Great Pyrenees out in front, tied to a newspaper box, but it was in winter that this practice caused disturbance for passers by. He was remonstrated by people from their cars as they drove by, and even received phone calls on the Café phone from people distraught over the suffering of the animal. He would patiently explain that the dog was made for the cold, and much preferred it to being indoors.

But as for human suffering, as far as I can tell, nice Americans like myself aren’t supposed to know anything about it personally. It is entirely something for other people.

True to my culture, I remained a virgin to suffering until, in 1995 or so, during a prolonged and agony-filled period when I was undergoing treatment in intensive psychotherapy, I realized that I had suffered in my childhood. I say “I” had suffered, but to this day I think of the one who suffered as “the child.“ Memory of the terror and the rage had persisted in my body for 40 years, though I had been unaware as I pursued a strenuously ambitious life of career, family, & activism. Gradually, through therapy, I learned to recognize and own those feelings instead of short-circuiting them by means of obsessive compulsions. But the fact that I am the kind of person who by cultural definition is not one who suffers, and who in fact enjoyed in many respects an ideal childhood, remains a strong influence on my perceptions, and vies continually with the truth of my actual experience.

I am interested in the notion my culture clings to, that some of us are not supposed to suffer, because of the serious obstacle it makes to important self-knowledge. Maybe if we were not so culturally predisposed to consider ourselves the luckiest, most blessed (exceptional) people on the face of the earth, we would not be so hard on ourselves, and not being so hard on ourselves might make it possible to be kinder to other people. Why is it that “exceptionalist America” is automatically accompanied by thorough saturation.in the diabolical art of suppression of feelings?

Going back to that Eureka moment in the 90's, the recognition that I had suffered as a child amounted to the same thing as learning I had feelings, just as other people have. In the instant of knowing my suffering, I knew such pain was not unusual or unthinkable, but the common thread binding humanity together. The knowledge humanized me in a way I have ever since been immensely grateful for. I had not known how cut off I was from the human community, from connection with all at a very deep level, until this discovery of my suffering. My story was now changed forever; or rather, I had found my story. I had learned a major truth that took me outside the boundaries of my culture: To be in a body, that is, to be human, is to suffer. In the end it is not the suffering endured that makes one ill, but the fact that suffering is not recognized, not allowed, in the American vocabulary that I grew up with. Not only does this taboo make healing from certain kinds of woundings next to impossible, it contributes to the building of the “shadow American” character that is not so benevolent and generous as we like to think.

Beneath the preferred American identification with exceptional goodness of our character, a whole range of suffering occurs, and is tolerated, which is a result of unconsciousness, rather than of out and out Simon Legree-type cruelty. Such suffering is still suffering, but it is socially invisible, not remarkable, and becoming ever less so, I believe. My suffering as a child was apparently invisible to all who knew me. The many “tics” of my childhood - persistent bed-wetting, nail-biting, food neuroses and insomnia, did nothing more than earn me a single visit to a child psychologist at age 10. In a sense, I was the elephant in the family living room, whose pain, and therefore her reality, was denied by all. My pain was not truly hidden, given all of those neurotic behaviors, but no one around me was trained to acknowledge it as pain. None of the adults around me were trained themselves in compassion, or in the recognition of the suffering of others. In my turn, I simply learned to go with the program: okay, if we don’t talk about these things, then I will do my level best to help us bury them. Thus, I became trained in an ethos that does not recognize suffering, beginning with my own.

An aside about the children: It seems therefore to me eminently possible today that we take the “I’m okay” statements from our resilient children of divorced parents, children stressed out from constant structured activity and parental fears for their achievement and success, who no longer are held by networks of extended family and community, as true enough, and ignore the inconvenient pain growing in the souls of young people. Is it time we stop the blather about the kids being so much more (smart, mature, savvy, seasoned, global, fill in the blank) than we were, and ask ourselves tougher questions, at great inconvenience to ourselves, of course, about how well they are doing in their souls?

The idea I am working on here is that the cultural “face” that one learns to put on as a privileged white American (whiteness itself being the key privilege) plays a huge part in teaching us that we are not the ones that suffer. As one who is fairly steeped in New Age literature, and on a transformational spiritual path, I find that much of the literature of new age spirituality contributes to the persistence of this notion by preferring the word “compassion” to the word “suffering.” In general, it seems that if one is Africa American one is allowed to use the word "suffering," but if one is a member of the group defined by whiteness, one must talk about "compassion." Now I did not embark upon this topic with the idea that I was focused on race. But the distinction I’m talking about, and the suppression of knowledge of suffering entailed, has a direct impact on racism and racial discrimination. Because denial of one’s own feeling trains one to be, while perhaps intentionally kind and compassionate, unconsciously mean.

I believe there is no way around it. And this brings me to what it means to have an embodied, or body-centered spirituality, as many of us involved in transformational spirituality profess to have. Surely the embrace of the Goddess’s Life/Death/Life Cycles, means, centrally, living in one’s body, which means, in turn, suffering! I hazard this claim having myself made the perilous passage from the disembodied existence where suffering is not (consciously) known, to the one premised in feeling, which is emphatically "of the body."

From my earliest experiences with the language of transformational spirituality, the word compassion was given to me to help to explain the pain I was experiencing. I was growing a compassionate heart, these difficult changes would lead to a greater capacity for compassion for others. Such words were right on, in a way, but also they tended to leap over the intense suffering I was undergoing. In the 15 years since then, though I have done no formal study of it, I have observed that spiritual literature consistently prefers the word "compassion," with its high-toned connotations of eastern spiritual traditions, Buddhism in particular, to its poor disreputable cousin, "suffering." Of course, this is not a problem of Buddhism, but may lie in its translation by post-moderns who “choose” their religious tradition like a consumer commodity, taking what they like and leaving the messy parts back in Bhutan or Bombay. And there is the possibility that publishers recognize the greater market appeal of "compassion" as opposed to "suffering."

On the other hand, and directly in contrast to the association of “compassion” with the Buddha, the word and the concept of suffering are front and center in Catholic Christianity’s chosen archetype: the image of Christ on the cross is meant to evoke compassion in the beholder.

Which is not to defend Christianity, nor to make its case, but to make a case for individuals to become conscious of their suffering, and end the long practice of identifying only with the cheerier, more upbeat and optimistic version of ourselves. The case has already been made with the image of the man hung on the tree, but the point of Christ’s agony appears to be lost on many of the faith’s adherents. Being Americans first, and Christians second, means we’ll do our damndest to stay out of our bodies, in perpetual expectation of the heaven lying somewhere up ahead, that greater good, that growth and perfection surely attainable in the future. In the meantime, as best we can, we stay out of the moment, out of the eternal now, out of our bodies and our genuine feelings. As the tumult of violence and news of destruction becomes ever more clamorous, we remain outside it all, numbed and distracted by the pervasive media blitz, by shopping, electronic communication devices, and a slew of other distractions and addictions.

No wonder the rage of the Tea Partiers at the prospect of reduced expectations and a shrinking economy - no one ever told us we would have to suffer in this way during “peacetime!” The wonder is that they consistently fail to direct their rage at those who are not and will not suffer economically; they direct their rage at “government,” rather than at those who control and manipulate government through their power and wealth.

But I want to stay with my own “constituents;” the body of people who, to the extent that we call ourselves spiritual, are connected more with the transformational, “gnostic,” or esoteric wing of religion, rather than the institutional traditions or fundamentalist offshoots. Like the moderns or postmoderns we are, we indeed pick and choose from the traditions. However, if we are to trade “in-our-head” spirituality for heart-centeredness, if we are to follow the Goddess and learn to live in accord with Nature’s life/death/life cycles, if we truly want to stop the long habit of allowing nature, the earth, the diversity of animal and plant species, to suffer in our stead, we’d better start becoming acquainted with our own pain. And lest I be interpreted to mean that I am calling “ the victim” in everyone to stand up and be counted, I assure you I am not!

To be “worthy of our suffering,” a phrase attributed to Dostoevsky, we have now to learn our own joyful song. To accomplish such a soul triumph, victim identity is useless, and so is resolute optimism. Suffering is fearful because it threatens to destroy the meaning some of us have identified with for so long, the “sunny side of the street” optimism that we learn to carry like a potent talisman against the dark. In a sense this is true, but one must trust that giving up that identification will yield something far greater and more valuable. The voice you will have obtained in knowing your suffering, and must now use, is the voice of the artist, the mystic, the poet, the prophet that is you; contact with that forgotten one in you makes your more authentic voice manifest. To be “worthy of our suffering” each of us must learn what her/his song is and offer it to the community, where it is wanted and needed for the long healing.

As the world hurtles toward destruction, we cannot anymore leave the depth and the soul of our humanity, the pain of being human, to be lived out disproportionately by “the others,” the “less fortunate.” We come to know our wounds and our suffering not to withdraw in resentment and self-pity, but to fulfill the complete and magnanimous template we were given at birth. To have any hope at all of being able to “suffer with” those others, and with the planet, we must cross over and learn the rest of what we know, but have not only been afraid to acknowledge, but actively discouraged from attempting by dominant aspects of our American culture. If, at the deepest levels in ourselves, we do not know our suffering then we do not know the joy of connection either, its that simple. The most profound act of love is the one we direct to our own suffering; all else issues from that.

The Most Necessary Liberation Struggle of All

The honoring and the freeing of the individual soul is the necessary liberation story for our time. Society has made gains based upon the willingness of individuals identified with an oppressed group, such as women, black people, gay people and other minorities, including holocaust survivors, to voice their pain and to force recognition of their experience of oppression. These groups, in some settings and discourses, are even privileged to speak from their pain, as in a way that people are discouraged from doing in the general society,.

Last night, at The Other Side in Utica, we heard a talk by an African American professor of classics and Africana studies at Hamilton College in which she set the matter of Cleopatra’s contested ethnicity straight. In the course of her establishing the fragile basis for our concept of Cleopatra - a few writers in antiquity who came along well after her death, the insistence by many modern scholars of her being “Greek,”against all the evidence - the speaker interlaced her own story of growing up black in America. For example, one experience she shared was of having been told in 9th grade by her world history teacher that Asia and Africa had made no contributions to history.

Reflecting on all of this as I lay in bed this morning - a powerful time for such reflection for me - I thought of the speaker’s vulnerability in bringing up such stories, in settings where people are not predisposed to consider the suffering of others. Except where it is part of the program as in church or academe, or during times of particular catastrophe, such as the earthquake in Haiti, or Hurricance Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, this is pretty much everywhere in society. I knew, recollecting from my own experiences in graduate school, that in academia, stories of oppression as a gay person or a black or Asian person are treated very differently. A special place is given to them, their voices are welcomed, in a sincere effort to balance the burying of their stories and their suffering in mainstream society and official history. Such prizes as grants and fellowships can be more readily obtained if one can speak from the pain of being a member of one of these groups.

Let me be clear that in no way whatsoever do I make light of the pain that is inflicted on gay people , black people, Latino people, etc by our society. I’m not a racism denier, nor am I anti-Affirmative Action. Nor do I believe that oppression ended with Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's, as I suspect many people do. For example, the students where I teach, at a local branch of the state university, tend to voice the facile, optimistic cliche that “things are better now,” which frees them, I suppose, and all of us to the degree that we buy it, to pay attention to more important things, like the next text message coming in on the cell phone.

I simply believe that the underlying oppression which all other oppressions arise from is the intolerance for the reality and the expression of the human soul. The individual is the most unprotected “group” within the human species; prejudice, hatred, and violence, including violence against the earth, other species and indigenous cultures, stem from this fundamental spiritual oppression that characterizes pretty much all of modern, post-enlightenment, rational, developed “civilization.”

This oppression, because it is based within the individual, is very different from the others. For one thing, it emphatically includes the “privileged” classes and groups. White, northern European, affluent men, for example, have not been exempted. Although patriarchal predations and brutalities, with its assumptions of privileged status, can never be excused or condoned, men too are a member of this”group“ whose individual natures are violated by their enslavement to a soulless system in turn constructed and maintained by partial humans alienated from their souls.. The oppression of souls is also different in that it is not so much a political condition as an archetypal one. Although there are those who profit, (most definitely!) from the oppression of souls (or simply “soul,” since it is the ground of being that humans share with all other life forms) the focus of the struggle is not on oppressors as such, but on the responsibility of the individual to free her own portion of soul.

Another feature of this soul oppression that makes it different is, as you can see from what I have already said, that the “truth claims” of the individual cannot be backed up with empirical facts. It is a part of the special oppressive condition that that which needs defending is invisible, and thus does not fall into our standard categories of those things that possess “rights.” Like trees and other plant and animal species that cannot speak for themselves, but are accumulating more and more defenders today, the soul has not been granted full legal status. Like a wife in the bad ol’ days, it can be treated pretty much any way its master likes.

And who is its “master?” Well, I am the master of my own soul, as you are of yours. And, as masters, we are likely to be (with exceptions of course) as ignorant of the beauty, worth and dignity of our personal souls as was an antebellum slaveowner of his slave’s personhood, or a drunken abusive husband of his wife’s. We are not reliable persons to be in control of a vulnerable thing like a soul. The reason for this lies in another feature of “soulist” oppression..

Unlike other situations of oppressed peoples, the individual soul is oppressed first by those entrusted with its original care. It receives its initial wounding not from the society, nor from any power-drunk, privileged group or class or gender, but from its human parents within the supposed safety and loving embrace of the family nest. Thus, defense of the soul requires that one let go of the most precious assumption we by-and-large possess: the one that says, in a way that forbids any opposing possibility, “my parents loved me.” And here let me add, that the issue is not whether or not one’s parents really did love their children, but whether or not one can tolerate, based only upon the evidence supplied by one’s subjective feeling and experience, the possibility that they did not. The evidence for this unacceptable knowledge is obtainable only through communication with the deepest level of the soul, depths which by and large our society keeps us from entering. Thus, most of us are thwarted from discovering, let alone freeing, the soul that is silenced and captive within our being.

I sense skepticism budding in the minds of my readers at this point. I wish I could leave out that part about the parents, but I cannot. I want to soften the message so you will not reject it, and me along with it. On the other hand, there is no need to get hung up on that part. Though obtaining the knowledge that your parents did not love you as you assumed they had is essential to defense of the soul, the process does not end with hatred of one’s parents, for that is not the point of the soul’s purpose. The soul’s purpose is to be allowed its measure of expression by its human vehicle, the “you” or the “me” chosen for its time on this earthly plane. The unintentional cruelty of parents, like other more recognized oppressions, is incidental to the larger meaning that the soul is.

With a group of other readers meeting at The Other Side, I have been re-reading the classic tale of a woman’s soul journey, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. There are those who would disagree with me, but this story is less focused on the story of racial and gender oppression than on the archetypal journey of the human soul from its initial condition of being buried in matter to the gradual increase of light, and eventual release/expression of the soul incarnate in the person, in this case, Janie Crawford.

Janie is pressured into her first marriage at age 16 by her grandmother, who raised her and who fervently desires for her to be taken care of. Two marriages later, Janie looks back at her grandmother, and sees the relationship differently than she had as a girl. “Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon - for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you - and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love....She (Janie) had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the marketplace to sell.”

As long as Janie believed, in the conventional way, that her grandmother did what she did out of love, the only possible identity for Janie is the ungrateful, undeserving, unworthy (grand)daughter. She has to be able to defend her own spirit, the jewel of her aspiring soul, against the voice that would call her ungrateful and bad. She has to come to know this yearning for more life that is within her, the sense that she must put into language who she is, and “gleam” herself before other people, as sanctioned, or blessed. Such a blessing can come not from any social or familial source, but only from within herself, from the authoritative voice of her own soul. It is not enough for her soul’s journey that she reject the selfish, loutish versions of love offered by her first and second husbands; she must also see through the self-sacrificial love of her grandmother, as even the stronger imprisoning force.

One writer who might agree with my claim that the soul is the most oppressed “group” in contemporary society is John Taylor Gatto, whose prophetic voice against compulsory public schooling authored the book Dumbing Us Down. As it happens, I am using an essay of his in a writing class I teach. I say “as it happens,” because the essay is anthologized in the text, and I was not aware of it when I ordered it. I’m happy to be using the essay and confronting my students with his challenging, passionate ideas about schools and education, but I did not choose it as such.

Yesterday, in fact, I asked the class what they thought about Gatto’s essay, called “Against School.” We were looking for things like “thesis” and “major ideas” in preparation for writing a summary paper. Here is an essay, mind you, that begins by alluding to the pervasive boredom in high schools, a boredom, Gatto emphasizes, shared by students and teachers alike. There could be not one person in my classroom who did not know the boredom referred to, including from their experience right there in my classroom!. However, very few spoke up to comment, or to analyze the argument with me. It was clear that several did not so much want to analyze as object. While a couple of women in the front row voiced unqualified approval, a young man, also up front, wanted to defend some schools, some “excellent teachers,” against Gatto’s charges.

Towards the end of the essay, Gatto writes, “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.” With this astonishing opinion, he meets the expected objection, one he has heard many times I’m sure, that says some students are just not talented enough to be given the kind of freedom/responsibility for following their own interests and passions that he is suggesting. Sure enough, the young man brought up the very objection, and I pointed out Gatto’s statement to him. He remained unconvinced. And indeed, how does one support this generalization with measurements and verifiable facts? Surely, Mr. Gatto can provide example after example of remarkable, but altogether ordinary students he has known, each capable of following his or her “genius.” But swallowing the statement whole requires one to swallow a formidably large “lump.” Most of us are more comfortable holding to the assumption we’ve been taught: genius is rare, and the rest have been assigned life’s grunt wor, which has consequences for achiever and “underachiever” alike..

Rationally we can grant the argument of differing abilities, but what does it mean to the soul to accept that assumption, an acceptance aided and abetted by the unconsciousness of schools, which ignores the Janie Crawford-like yearning in every human soul for expression of its unique voice and calling?

Our society becomes ever more adept at tuning out that fragile but ultimately powerful voice of the soul. By means of prescription drugs, a deluge of cable and satellite TV channels, constant connectability via cell phones and Internet, unchallenged assumptions about the world and the way it works, whether liberal or conservative, mass schooling, and a thousand other ways, the soul is kept in its place. Everywhere we can see soul pain, the pain of not being seen: we see it in youth suicide, in pervasive violence, and in drug and other addictions, in depression and other mental illness symptoms, in the emptiness of modern living that never satisfies the deeper human need for connection and community, or for a social-political-economic world that reflects our caring and our humanity. We see it in our alienation from nature, in nature subjugated and plundered for its resources as though Nature, the Mother of us all, existed for our benefit.

The good news is that the soul buried in the prison of each body never ceases, and never stops tugging at our coattails to gain our scattered attention. Silenced for lifetimes, she (archetypally, the soul is always represented in feminine form) can awaken and remind us of our individual longing and destiny, the genius in each of us that is “common as dust.” She can reach us through night time dreams, through chance images crossing our awareness, and through the learnings contained in some psychic pain, and other kinds of pain and loss. But the good news is potential only. The release of the soul from captivity is a lifetime journey. It might be wise to remember the words of one who spoke for a people long oppressed:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
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A Revaluation of Renunciation

‘In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels it is simply mentioned that, at the conclusion of the celebration of the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before he went forth. But in the (apocryphal) Acts of John…just before going out into the garden at the end of the Last Supper, Jesus says to the company, “Let us dance!” And they all hold hands in a circle and as they circle around him, Jesus sings, “Glory be to thee, Father.”’ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of that wheel of fortune you will either be above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are in the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow…”
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” William Blake

How are we to live justly, peacefully, and deeply in this world? The last part of the question would not have had to be asked through much of human history; while war was omnipresent and justice evolving, still, people were not asked to live without meaning. Only in the modern age is that so, and I have always been grateful to Robert Bly, since first hearing of the mythopoetic men’s movement back in the 1980’s, for behaving as if this question, a religious one even though he speaks for no religion, were important.

As I see it, meaning depends upon things being in relationship with one another; meaning essentially is the fact of relationship, the fact that everything is connected whether we are behaving as if this deep truth were so or not. I will never forget the moment in my therapy, some 15 years ago, when I realized that I had learned my sense of extreme isolation, hauntingly conjured in my mind as an infant floating in space with no place to plug in its umbilical cord, in relation to others! Being in relation is the source of all good we humans can expect, and of all evil as well. But to behave as if we can reject the notion of deep interconnection is to be just plain wrong. And that is what modern life teaches us to do. And that error is what Robert Bly points us to in his book The Sibling Society, the book we’ve been reading in our Temenos group in Utica..

Bly’s perspective is rooted in archetypal, mythological, religious understanding that sees human life, individual and social, as inextricable from biology, nature, and from human community with its biology-driven, non-negotiable roles. These roles – father, mother, son, daughter, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother, husband, wife, etc. - partake of depth and meaning at the mythological level. They come to us not only or essentially through dictates of the church or law courts, not only through archaic beliefs just waiting for technology to make them anachronistic, but through archetypes passed on generationally, via “the blood.” I’m not a scientist, but archetypal psychologist Dr. Carl Jung was, and this was his contention.

Where Bly gets in trouble with readers is that he speaks from a mythological perspective to people who read literally, not metaphorically. Joseph Campbell was very patient with this problem also, explaining over and over what a metaphor is. God, of course, is such a metaphor, a word frequently used and understood literally, by both conservatives and liberals. In fact, I often wonder, what is the point of someone declaring herself to be an atheist? When I hear someone do that I want to respond: What, do you mean you don’t believe in a metaphor? Well, that’s downright silly. Oh, you mean you reject the God of judeo-christianity – oh, well, that is something different isn’t it??

It took me a long time to work up to the point when I could let go of my professional identity as a minister, back in the late 1980’s, even though I was very unhappy in that work and unsuited to it. The terror lurking for me was that without that identity, there was no me. I had never been able to imagine a work I wanted. Every so often, I would have an urge to go back to school for a graduate degree: school was the only identity I knew, even though I had no desire to be a scholar at that time. But I wanted and craved assignments. Oh Lord, remove this burden from me of my volition, I don’t know what to do with it and it frightens me. When I took the plunge and quit my profession, it was a leap without a net. My simple determination was to find out if there was a me. My secret belief was that there was not, but I had no choice but to find out for sure.

When I emerged from the more intense stages of my inner journey, in the late 90’s, no beam of light awaited me to answer this question I was most desperate to hear answered: what should I pursue “professionally?” That cluelessness remains in place to this day, as I am poised to turn 59 next month. I was and am still compelled to respond only to my inner guidance system; I am never let off the hook on this. My work, it seems to me, has been to contemplate the experience of “uselessness,” of letting go, over and over, of the ideas for ambitions that are not authentically mine; they are “solutions” to a problem godless society gave me, but God did not give me.

In one area of work, however, I have persisted all of these years. That is the area of finding meaning in the traditional roles for a woman in society. The most reliable source for my “continuing ed” has been the alchemical crucible of marriage. After 32 years of experimentation in one marriage, I have determined that marriage makes sense not for reasons primarily of social stability, economic partnership, division of labor, sharing of parenting responsibilities, though all of these are distinct benefits. It makes sense because it is an undertaking initiated in desire, which, due to its scylla and charybdis -nature, and the renunciation required for the voyage, brings the partners willingly or not, into the realm of the mythological.

And here’s where my subject, which might be called the personal quest for meaning converges with the ecological crisis we face today

Few would argue that global catastrophe and the irrevocable destruction of the ecosystems we depend upon, call for us now to learn to live in accord with Nature’s truth: life as a circumscription, not the ever-expanding realm of possibility and free choice epitomized in the American lifestyle. Because marriage is a teacher nonpareil of renunciation, with its vows of forsaking all others, persisting in sickness and health, for richer for poorer, etc., the crisis jokingly referred to as “the honeymoon’s over” seems to me perfectly suited for teaching us what we now need to learn, the antithesis to the dominant ethos.

Moreover, we must learn a different sort of richness than the material, a more metaphorical abundance. Renunciation unaccompanied by delight is as false and one-sided as unimpeded appetite. The richness we must learn to seek is one made up not of ever increasing piles of stuff and opportunities to go wherever whenever, and not of absolute freedom, a fantasy which is fed to us and aided and abetted by our corporate dominated culture and its media priests. It is a richness not of this world, which on the other hand allows the full experience of the gift of this world and our numbered days on it.

The very best, most sure-fire door for entering the mystical, inner realm of non-material riches is crisis, that is, via an experience to which there is no solution, not technology, not cryonic immortality, not increasing our rights under the law, not power and might. Experiences of loss, of deep grief, of illness, aging and impending death offer such a portal. Marriage, endured through its excruciating impossibilities, is such a portal, the advantage of which is, through faithfulness to a vow that includes all of life’s limiting factors, it can bring you into eternity without anybody having to actually die!

The insight that Bly and others brought to me back in the 80’s was, first, the News from the universe is Good. The imperative to “follow your bliss” is an angelic call if there ever was one. But what I also heard was that following my bliss and taking up my responsibility for maintaining the roles bequeathed to me by my ancestors, including marriage, was the same thing. This was a message that helped me as I continued to keep myself in the fire of marriage. Although confirmation of the saneness of my lunacy came infrequently, in those too rare moments of illumination I saw clearly that everything gains its meaning from relationship, from the deep interconnection that make up the natural world and the human-made one. And relationship is indeed a binding, a restriction of very high order! This is “the big point,” so elusive in post-modern, deconstructed, contemporary society.

Those of us who have cut the cord with religion no longer are informed that meaning and joy are the rewards of the renunciations demanded by marriage and the limitations imposed by committed relationships. I was raised by a depressed mother who was very damaged by the inflexible social role assigned to women of her generation as housewife and mother only. Every woman on both sides of my family of her (“the greatest”) generation was damaged by the onerous restrictions of patriarchal marriage. They passed on their damage to me, as they could not possibly avoid doing. Today I am prepared to say that it was not the fact of their being wives, mothers, housewives per se that damaged them. It was not per se the fact that they were discouraged from seeking identity in the world of work that left them so wrecked. It was not only that they were treated as second class citizens and their work, as wives, mothers and housekeepers, unpaid and therefore not of serious worth. It was not only the excruciating isolation of the nuclear family that did them in. It was the fact that they and everyone else in our society has been robbed of the God-given river of meaning transmitted mythologically through our roles in society. .

Someone might argue, well what meaning is there if society does not reward your work with money, the only valuation it understands? Someone might argue what about gay couples and about single mothers and lesbian mothers and unmarried mothers and parents who need access to daycare? What about their needs? What about women’s reproductive rights? How is a focus on traditional roles going to address all of these variants on the “traditional” family? Sounds like back to “barefoot and pregnant (and quite possibly abused)” to me!

To me, these responses are fair questions and also they partake of the literalism of the atheist mentioned above, as do questions like “Well, what can I do if he won’t do his work?” or “After all, I’m entitled to my happiness,” etc. It is quite true, not much can be done to keep a marriage going if only one partner is doing the work. But the larger problem is, who is teaching people that marriage is a symbolon, ( a word provided by Bly in The Sibling Society) and the vow a means by which the longing for God will take you into the deep changeless realms of myth and meaning? Living in the sibling society, we no longer know that all of our most basic roles include these two “ends” of the symbolon. Having lost the other end completely, no wonder our imaginations have stopped working; and instead of thought we have reaction, defensiveness, an entrenched victim point of view. No wonder so much of our motivation is self-righteous, and self-justifying, designed ultimately to support the status quo rather than to heal and transform it.

The point I’d like to end with is that our “bliss,” though attainable through a highly personal, individual, solitary inner journey, can only be had in relationship; it is a function of community. Community has its transcendent (“body of Christ”), and its real world embodiment. The real world embodiment is not arbitrary, made up of infinitely replaceable parts, as we are taught in modern, disposable society. Each particular community contains all the good and all the evil we would ever expect to find in this world. Utopian experiments only worked until some individual wanted something for herself. Traditional religion, so to speak, has to face the fact that in the modern world, even the faithful take what they want and leave the rest. What we in our communities, from micro to macro representations of it, now have to learn is that community, with all of its restriction on our freedom, is the space for real (unmediated) presence and real difference.

Taking my marriage example as one level of community, this means that each marriage must call forth and honor the full presence, the full flowering of the other, which means honoring the intolerable differentness of the other. This inclusiveness, in turn, cannot happen if one partner or the other remains intolerant of the “different one” within himself or herself. In this way, the marriage alchemy works at the level of the individual, and the resulting community is comprised of two integrities, not two fragments leaning together for comfort (all the while growing an incendiary pile of resentments behind a door they implicitly agree never to open.) If we can manage this mutual integrity at the excruciating level of marital intimacy, maybe we have a chance at making peace, justice and harmony with nature work at other levels of our society and of global society.

At the same time that Bly calls for us to become adults, so we can stop passing on to our children soul-killing meaninglessness, what is implied also is that the “duty” to become adults, is at the same time the pursuit of our individual bliss. The authority that calls for surrender to duty comes not from without, but from the archetypes (the soul) within. To submit to this authority (to renounce) is also to surrender to our native, indigenous joy. Bliss and duty are not separate or mutually exclusive; they are the same. As the poet Rumi expressed it, We are drunk and this is the edge of the roof. Hallelujah!

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