An Interview with the Urban Hermit: A Nobody for Our Time Part II

By Henry David Toro

“My instinct tells me my head is an organ for burrowing; as some creatures use their snout and forepaws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.” H.D. Thoreau, Walden

HTD: After the last interview, I have some understanding of why you call yourself a hermit. But why “urban?” That doesn’t seem to go with the tradition of hermits at all.

UH: Yes, hermits are usually in the forest or out in the desert, like St. Anthony facing down his demons, not living in the middle of Utica. The hermit archetype we’re familiar with is associated with wilderness for a good reason: the hermit’s “job” is Self-knowledge, and wilderness is a good metaphor for the Unconscious, or the Soul. One answer is, I designate my hermit self as urban because that’s where I am, here in Utica, and since the wilderness of the hermit is also an inner experience, why not here as well as anywhere? If I imagine I need to be out in Nature, I’m done for, since that’s not in the cards for me. And it isn’t in the cards for many people who lack the means or the freedom from responsibility to just up and take themselves off to the mountain or the ashram or the desert.

HTD: But isn’t that a mistake to impose limits on yourself as to where you can go, as well as to what you can be? Isn’t it true that one’s intention, at least to an extent, allows the unforeseen to happen in one’s life? So isn’t it self-limiting to say “I can’t do such and so because I can’t afford it?” What about dreams and visions?

UH: I am a major proponent of following dreams and having a vision. But even dreams have to stand up to some standard of the common good, or what is good for the community, first of all. Not that all dreams are held to such standards, of course. No independent council of community elders checked out Henry Ford’s dream and its consequences down the line, or the development of atomic weapons, or Monsanto’s seed technologies before they went on line. Some “good” is always served by these innovative dreams, but who is looking at the larger good? With the earth being destroyed at an ever increasing rate, with social structures in shambles, the welfare of children down the tubes, dreams have to refer to the context of the world we are in, and to an ethic of compassion and justice. Living in the city, with its strong essences and real diversity, I can never abstract too much, or get too ”spiritual” and lost in my own head. I am frequently annoyed, frustrated, and even depressed by the reality around me. But my job is to remain awake, no matter what my surroundings: if I can’t “bloom” here, what am I saying about myself? That I have to have a $250,000 house in the suburbs or I cannot be happy? In a way, living here forces me to go against a tendency in me to seek a kind of undisturbed gated peace. There is a part of me that really wants badly to go to sleep. I’d rather be awake, no matter what it is I am awake to.

So, really, like Booker T. Washington famously said, “Cast down your buckets where you are.” These words have been misinterpreted to mean “make the best with what you have and things will get better by and by.” Spoken to former slaves who faced a futile competition for industrial employment with white laborers and even immigrants, Washington was counseling a kind of self-reliance; rather than continuing to run futilely after the white man’s economy, black men and women should establish their own, from the bottom up. Today, the advice seems prescient, for what has running after the white man’s economy done for any of us? If we wish to “carve and paint the very medium through which we look,” and “keep ourselves awake,” first we must see that where we are, the limitations that bind us, are our allies in some way. The tasks of consciousness are great enough if you are in one place, married to one person, as Thoreau eloquently pointed out to us. This is a limitation I have chosen to live within. In these momentous times calling for us to change our way of life, this is something I have wrestled with in fine St. Anthony fashion: that is, how to be “stuck-in-place” (Utica or wherever) and prepared to find that “richest vein” at the same time. The answer to this conundrum might save a lot of marriages, as well as slow down the destruction of the planet.

In a well-known Russian fairy tale, The Maiden Czar, the boy Ivan finds himself at the Baba Yaga’s terrifying cottage in the middle of the deep woods. He is asked by the crafty Baba, Have you come here by compulsion or of your own free will? Ivan is no slouch in terms of cunning, either. He answers her in a way that keeps him out of being eaten and his skull added to the other trophies lined up along the Baba Yaga’s picket fence: “Largely by my own free will and twice as much by compulsion,” he replies.

To live within limitations such as place and marriage, for example – and don’t forget, life that is circumscribed between birth and death is the biggest limitation of them all - one has to be possessed of an alive imagination, and, not only that, one must be able to connect with the other realm - the spirit realm, which is the realm of true freedom. If we believe literally that either we must be able to escape a circumstance that has come to seem intolerable or we will be chained to misery the rest of our life, we are missing entirely the third way, the way of being in that circumstance consciously or imaginatively, and thereby transforming it. One cannot be a bliss-follower without learning this approach to the seemingly intractable problems that confront each of us during the course of a lifetime. Putting the problem out there, on the spouse, the environment, the neighbor, the crime-ridden city, means your answer to the Baba Yaga’s question is that you are here by compulsion. She’ll eat you for dinner.

If on the other hand, you insist that you are entirely a free agent, free to do or be whatever you want, she will eat you for dinner. Being brought up in the materialist American context, with its accompanying belief in free will, it is nearly impossible to answer the Baba Yaga’s question except with an answer that will get you eaten. That is why there is such a dearth of genuine aliveness and thoughtfulness in our modern culture, and so much addiction, numbing out, and escape. Many of our society’s adults have failed their encounter with the Baba Yaga. Or rather, they are unaware of that level in their being, and so simply pass from one sleep to another. We are taught not to believe in the invisible, spiritual realm, that if something cannot be empirically proven; if it does not meet with the criteria of rationalism, then it must not exist at all. This is a terrible and consequential narrowing of consciousness. The consequences of such a rigid materialist or secular view begin with unconsciousness on the part of adults toward the very real fears and sorrows of childhood, and their very real needs for intangibles like solitude, and unprogrammed experiences with nature.

Robbed of the inner realm, individuals are helpless to withstand the message coming from a society that has mysteriously become the Baba Yaga, out of control and devouring her young. If we ignore Nature, or if we refuse to learn what Nature teaches us through our bodies and souls, that does not make Her go away. On the contrary, it causes her to gain in destructive energy; in these times it is easy to picture the Baba Yaga having had to build multiple fences to hold all the skulls of her hapless visitors who have upgraded to their flat screen high-def TV and 500 channels on the cable, or who believe that being on Facebook is a good way to be a friend. So, for me, one part of my answer as to why I call myself an “urban” hermit is very much connected to this great lesson of learning to live within the given limitations, as consciously as possible, which is also, I must point out, not the path of deprivation but of desire.

HDT: You mean the Baba Yaga can be defeated by people following their desire?

UH: Well, yes. I hadn’t been thinking that, but it is true, and that’s in the fairy tale as well. In the fairy tale, Ivan is following the “maiden czar,” the awakener of his own spiritual longing for beauty, meaning, a relation to his own soul. Thoreau expressed it as the desire to not “live meanly.” Another way I have of picturing this is that we are called to live the artist’s life, even if we do not think of ourselves as artists.

Prophetic voices today are calling for contraction of our economy, and that means contracting our way of life as well as the whole idea of a global, ever-expanding-without-limits economy. As we can see, the engines of the economy are helpless to stop themselves. Only individuals who themselves can manage the contraction of their way of life – fundamentally a spiritual undertaking - can begin to withdraw themselves from the economy based upon ever increasing consumption. To me this simply means we have to learn once again to honor eros, or the longing of the soul for this adventure of meaning and purpose that we have tried as a society, and failed, to do without. Nothing else – other than our changing the “very medium and atmosphere through which we look –“can turn the sacrifice of contraction into a bountiful feast of a different kind - a feast of beauty, meaning and deep connectedness to Nature and all of life.

H.D. Toro: So an old rust belt town’s lack of illusions, pretense, or false purity can make it a good place to mine for Thoreau’s alternative wealth?

UH: Loss is always a good starting place to meet up with the soul.

An interview with the Urban Hermit, A Nobody for Our Time
By
Henry David Toro

Interested as I am in how people at all levels in our society are responding to the growing environmental calamity, and to what seem to be death throes of our western civilization, I determined to seek out individuals who characterize themselves as living out a response to this crisis, albeit not by means of traditional activist venues. Being myself a sort of deep ecologist, and knowing that nature thrives in diversity, I assume there have to be a multiplicity of these responses. The days of the mass movement driven by a collective ideology, to which individuals sacrifice their individual “light” for the greater good, are gone. Secretly, I have long envisioned a grassroots response guided not by ideology but by that which is innate, instinctual knowing of the individual. My anarchic vision would be for a change originating in individuals, in, metaphorically speaking, each grass root, each dandelion, each nondescript clover that we walk over without noticing, sort of a revolution of the “silent and plant-like,” salvation by the utterly unextraordinary.

My proclivities bring me with great interest to the Urban Hermit. It was her nom de plume at first that intrigued me. Its anonymous declaration of retreat from the world, following a tradition going back to the desert fathers, offered an interesting contrast to the mass striving for stardom, the desperate craving to be recognized in this massest of mass societies. In such a massified context, the central message of which is the replaceability of the individual, I wonder, how can we return to the spirit of localism, local economy and local culture, to the diversity that can challenge the corporate-powered centralized monoculture and its destructive, hell-bent joy ride.

So here, in the person of the Urban Hermit, is someone doing it, that is, choosing to be ordinary and to make a difference, to perhaps slow that apocalyptic joyride down simply by opening up the imaginative possibility of another way.

HDT: What is it like, being a hermit in modern life? And how do you feel being interviewed – an unlikely activity for a hermit?

U.R. First of all, Henry, everybody, or every adult, anyway, were we each able to reconnect with the invisible parts of ourselves, that is, with soul and spirit, is a hermit. Hermitry is simply a way of being whole. It is a metaphor for the particular individual located within the collective of society. What we have in mass society is a loss of that which is absolutely requisite for individuality. Human beings are imaginative as part of their intrinsic make-up; what is called “reality” must feed imagination as well as body, so to speak. We require, to be healthy, a basis which includes all parts of the human organism, rather than what we have, a materialist-defined reality that excludes spiritual reality. On the other hand, as you suggest, the last thing a mass person wants is obscurity, which has already been thrust upon her. Cut off from the stable context of community over time, families crumbling right and left, encouraged to follow a career climb that will bring one the material rewards of the culture, as well as identity and a measure of power, (but will further assure one’s estrangement from self and others), the choice to be anonymous and ordinary – a hermit - seems like choosing to be buried alive.

But the reason there is such distaste – not really distaste, but a lack of imagination about - for the local and the ordinary is precisely that materialist base. Outside of the materialist base, and that is an addictive context, by the way – since man cannot live on matter alone, the craving for spirit leads directly to addictions – if one can find her/his way there, it is possible to find a way to live human life meaningfully. Just as religion provided the context of meaning for generations before us, that realm of meaning is still open to she or he who will “knock.” The God that died - as Time magazine declared in the 60’s - was not the eternal reality that is beyond language, but the particular metaphoric version – the collective archetype - that guided western civilization since the middle ages or so.

As to being interviewed, it is a great treat for me. I have no rules against interacting with the society, but I do not seek it, even though I have mostly been convinced it will never come and discover me. In medieval times and later, if you read your Brothers Karamazov, (which I just did last year!) devout people sought out hermits for a perennial truth or a wisdom less bound by society’s fleeting standards. Did you see, by the way, Michael Caine’s brilliant performance as the hermit-hippie Jasper in the movie Children of Men? There is something undeniably nutty about us hermits, but, as with the Caine character, it is a principled nuttiness. Or better yet, a nuttiness that understands, with Blake, that the fool who will persist in his folly will become wise. Today we cannot understand someone who isn’t motivated by fame or status, whose creativity is driven not by ego but by the need to embody the wholeness prefigured in the Divine. Witness the general cluelessness regarding J.D. Salinger’s choice to do exactly what he had been led to do by the “divine” inspiration of his own writing: to become, in effect, a hermit. If we are to become a society of ordinary, common-as-daisy kings, that can bring humanity into its full flowering bloom by bloom, this change is necessary. It depends completely upon switching from the materialist base to the “spirit-in-matter” base.

H.D.T.: Two questions occur to me: what do you mean by the materialist base vs. the ‘spirit-in-matter” base, and what does it mean to “knock” on the door of the realm of meaning?

U.R. The materialist base is simply what we have in our culture to base meaning on. It is the view that the only real things are the things we can see, touch, eat – the things with physicality. There are many consequences to our having reduced reality in this fashion. We have only to switch our gaze cross-culturally and we can see that not all cultures are so drastically materialistic as we are, and that our extreme and strenuously defended (often in the name of “freedom”) materialism is a consequence of our affluence. Peasant cultures, for instance, where people have few to none of the things that for us make life interesting and “worth living,” often have an abundance of spirit. We enjoy being among these people; they make us feel comfortable, at home and “good enough,” in a way that our own cultural context does not. Indigenous cultures, where the separation is not made between spiritual and material the way it is here, do not base human worth according to the criteria of materialism, and can live meaningfully in circumstances we would consider “reduced.” To say nothing of the fact that they also know how to live harmoniously with nature, as we emphatically do not. I’ll say more about “spirit-in-matter” at some other point, but suffice to say it is a base for meaning (familiar to indigenous people but not to our deeply dualistic worldview) that rejects neither the material nor the spiritual. It is a “middle way” that is also the way of living harmoniously with the planet.

To answer your second question, I can use my own case. First of all, the expression, “Knock and the door will be opened to you,” probably is familiar to many in a historically Christian culture like ours. ("Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7) What door? That is what I might have responded with, had I given it that much thought, for much of my life. What I learned is that “the door” is not the door to belief, but to inner experience. Experience precedes belief, or ought to. And when one has experience, the matter of belief, and of different beliefs, is nullified. ( I suppose the fact that one calls a certain profound and private kind of experience “spiritual” or a “conversion” means that the mind decided to call the experience this and not that – which is a kind of belief This is precisely the reason we need guidance from tradition, so that such numinous, individual experience can be understood as being humanly meaningful. No matter how far out and obscure the images in a dream, for instance, we pay attention, and take insight from them if we understand these as being the voice of the soul.)

To materialist, rationally based people like myself, as I was raised to be, the matter of belief in God as promulgated by mainstream Christian churches is a serious stumbling block. My own situation was further complicated by the fact that my father, being an artist, moved the family a certain distance away from 100% acceptance of the materialist base. Clearly something else (i.e., my father’s painting) was very important which could not be explained materially. Perhaps partly for this reason, I would never get out of the cul-de-sac of materialism by surrendering my will to, essentially, the religion of Jesus defined by others. In my family, received, conventional wisdom already had a crack in it.

For whatever reason, I had to knock on the door for myself, the door, that is, of direct experience of the Divine. Sounds mystical, is mystical, but that doesn’t mean it’s at all exclusive. We are all mystics, as Matthew Fox among others points out. We are all mystics, but if we remain within the materialist, rationalist context we are not going to find this aspect of our nature. What is more, we will remain afraid of seeking that door. We will dismiss our wildest most profound dreaming, like Ebenezer Scrooge, as being caused by the modern, low-carb, high in Omega 3 equivalent of “ a bit of bad beef.”

My own discovery of the door was the result of a process prompted in part by the deeply unsettled state of mind I found myself in through much of my twenties and thirties. I was utterly clueless as to a path or a purpose in my life, though I ended up with a Masters degree in Divinity by 1979. Marital conflict was also a huge factor in the pain that was driving me toward exploring my inner realm by means of psychotherapy. Mind you, in my region of upstate NY, and this is still true, one does not discuss in public such things as analysis and psychotherapy. There was a sense at that time of moving out from the norms of my original culture even just in going to talk to a therapist about my depression. In combination with this was the fact that I had prepared for the Unitarian Universalist ministry and was serving a church in upstate NY during my 30’s (the 1980’s, roughly). This clergy identity was another way in which I was in, but not of, my local central NY culture. Because of the ideas afloat in liberal religious circles of that time, I began to delve into feminist spirituality, Jungian psychology, and eventually the 12 step recovery process. The process of finding out “what was wrong with me” was turning into a spiritual process! All of this culminated in the summer of 1988, after I had left my job in the church, declaring my need to “find out who I am.”

That July, my husband and I got ourselves down to Kirkridge retreat center in Pennsylvania to attend a workshop offered by Ann Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes An Addict, Codependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated, and other books. The mantric phrase for the weekend, repeated often by Schaef, who encouraged personal reflection even to the extent of doing that rather than listening to her talks, was “Trust the process.” There I experienced, amidst much anguish that came up for me during the three days, the most profound awakening of my life thus far. It was Anne Schaef’s use of those words, “Knock and the door shall be opened unto you” that did it for me. For the first time I understood that the Christ was within me, and that that inner Christ (or
Self archetype, in Jungian terms) was what I must follow. My life up until that point had involved, even for our culture, an extraordinary amount of repression. I was so terrified of my interior I had avoided going near any kind of counseling or therapy during my 4 years of training for ministry, when my fellow ministers-in-training at Yale Div were flocking to it. I was terrified of that immersion that must have felt to me then like the threat of annihilation.

Well, dear reader, of course it was an annihilation! But what joy there was for me in that reunion with my lost Self, with my long-rejected soul! I cannot exaggerate. The experience at Kirkridge led to a greater commitment to 12 steps, to a conversion experience to belief in the Christian God, and to eventual confirmation as a Roman Catholic in 1990.

HDT: Yikes! Catholicism? From the perspective of the New Age, that could sound to some people like a great leap backward!

UR: Well, don’t forget, I was devoutly following my process – or my heart rather than my head - at that time. Catholicism appealed hugely to my starved protestant imagination. Also, it appealed to the powerful need I felt at that time for Father. Having been influenced by archetypal psychology and the comparative mythology preached by Joseph Campbell, I was certain that my being there in the Catholic church was part of the re-emergence of the feminine, of the Goddess, in that theology and tradition. I felt belonging as I had never known before or since, and the period of my Catholicism was great for my marriage as well. Everything was finally making sense. The fact that I was shunned by my liberal friends did not bother me. I was “On the road to find out,” as Cat Stevens, another convert to a scripture-based faith, used to sing.

HDT: I know from things you’ve written that this period of reprieve from “the struggle” for self knowledge ended with a kind of scary and profound collapse in early 1994. After all the work you had done at that point, which after all, was more change already than most people experience, and now you say things were going well with your spiritual life - why do you think this happened?

UH: Brief answer: With the new and strange experience of happiness I was having, I believe for the first time I was strong enough to experience the real initiation. Just recently I was reading an interview (The Sun) with Malidoma Some, the West African spiritual teacher and author, where he talks about the initiation experience. He mentions in a couple of places that in fact, initiates in his Dagara tribe do not always make it through the initiation. They die, literally. Initiation is real; it is an experience of coming against the power of nature, of the death-life-death cycle, of finality. This is the awareness of the initiated adult, not of the pre-initiated child. For all the work I had done, I was still not initiated. Through my first conversion, and the deep sense of safety and belonging it brought me - belonging in the sense of belonging in my life and also of belonging in a religious tradition - I had achieved innocence at last. Experience, that of meeting up with the dark aspect of God, was still ahead of me.

HDT: Are you saying that experience or initiation has to involve the actual risk of death or, as in your case, of madness?

UH: I am saying the process is not for the faint of heart, yes. On the other hand, I was faint of heart – never would have taken on the type of experience that forces one to face mortality in this way, which is perhaps why in my case the hand had to come up and pull me down. But remember, the path of initiation, while in many cases brought on by an accumulation of pain from grief or loss, is also and equally the path of desire. Joseph Campbell’s oft-repeated adage Follow your bliss was intentionally meant to bring people into initiation. No way you can follow your bliss without meeting up with the Baba Yaga for real!

HDT: I don’t remember Campbell ever saying this. You make it sound as if he had an agenda beyond just teaching comparative mythology and encouraging folks to follow their true desire.

UH: It’s not hard to figure out. He was a teacher, remember. Everything he talked about was there by intention to help convey his teaching. Remember his showing us the planet earth as seen from space, and telling us we need a new mythology that crosses boundaries and will include the planet? He preached a revolutionary message, but subtly, as befitted someone who actually thought about his audience. As he pointed out, if you are out there preaching against the status quo, you too will risk crucifixion. I hear his story about the tiger and the goats as being exactly about this issue, and as explaining his choice to “appear as” a mellow, kindly, tweedy college professor – an acceptable persona in our society. That’s what he truly was, but he was also, and really, the tiger.

HDT: As we all are.

UH: As we all are.

Interview to be continued. Next installment, the interviewer asks the Urban Hermit to talk about” spirit in matter” in an accessible way.

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.

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.