Intellectual imperialism

“One of the consequences of intellectual imperialism is that instead of bringing all knowledge under its dominion, it reduces knowledge to its own dimensions.  It is imperialistic in aspiration but reductionistic in result.  Psychologists are inclined to view everything psychologically, sociologists sociologically, economists economically, while biologists want to get to the biological basis of the matter … There are religionists as well who have tried to argue not only that theology is king or queen of the sciences but that the Bible itself offers definitive statements in all these areas, and that all other fields must check the pages of Holy Writ for permissible paradigms, methodologies, and conclusions.  One of the sources of this kind of imperialism is a failure to appreciate the many different languages and concerns which the different disciplines represent.”  Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation:  Genesis and Modern Science, 13-14.

The human mind excels in applying patterns to new experiences and information in an attempt to link the new to the familiar.  The mind delights in its own routines, however, and soon comes to reject new experiences and patterns — the very things which gave it so much richness and complexity in the first place.  Or else it attempts to force the new into the old patterns and categories.  It’s important to remember that the mind is not conscious itself — it’s merely a sophisticated organizing mechanism lit up with consciousness.  The rest of the time it churns away in the background, wholly oblivious to what may be in our actual best interest.  Instead, it favors its own routines and pathways.

The power of the world works in circles

“The power of the world always works in circles, the sky is round, and I have heard the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down in a circle, the moon does the same. And both always come back to where they were. The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood. And so it is in everything where power moves.”  – Black Elk Speaks

Here in this dark of the moon I rest, awaiting the turn and the start of the new cycle.  Eternity or heaven or an afterlife may offer an end to turning, or a pause between incarnations, but I live in this world now, and its dynamic is change.  So let me work with it, rather than squandering my spirit in resistance.  If indeed I can see how all living things share kinship with me, because “theirs is the same religion as ours,” my world would transmute to the next level or stage.  Because it hasn’t yet, it’s apparent I still need the world I have as my teacher, my laboratory for Spirit.  This is training for stewardship, before I am released into a realm where my carelessness and shortsightedness and lack of love could cause much greater damage.  Instead I have this life, this world — we have each other – to mirror back each deed, each thing we achieve, evil and good and everything between.  This life is my “salvation” — now is all I have.  This is it, as Dante names it in his Paradiso: “il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti,”  the point in which all times are present.  Both past and present lie within this instant of awareness and experience.  All that I ever will be and everything I have ever been is right here.  What I do, where I go with this potential, shapes my next moment, and my next, and flows like a tributary into the main waterway of the life of every other person I touch, just as theirs does into mine.

Inner revolt

Gerald Massey, in his The Historical Jesus And The Mystical Christ, notes: “Atheism is at times and in some natures the necessary revolt of the Higher Consciousness, as if the real god within was at war against the sham set up for worship without.”  So much that we worship is human-made.  We lavish it with our hearts and and our hours, and then we wonder why it disappoints.  But the truth will out, even if it must split the little self to emerge.  Necessary the husk, necessary the fruit within, but neither alone the whole.

I’ve been ill the last three days — just a typical stomach flu, though I’ve felt wretched enough — it’s “what’s going around,” and in the democracy of infection, my students have generously shared this with me and each other as they have so much else.  The doctor I first visited when I moved to the area to begin teaching here asked what I did for a living. 

“I teach,” I said. 

“Oh, whereabouts?” 

I told him the name of the nearby high school where I teach. 

“Oh, a private school,” he said.  “That’s just a viral swamp!” 

Feeling like what crud scrapes off its shoes at the end of a long day in the gutter, I can only agree.  I find that illness always returns me to myself.  Yet simultaneously I also emerge from it just a little different, because it has reminded me yet again that I am not this body, however useful a home it can be, for a time, and however insistent its demands and needs have been.  A worthy teacher.

“Where can wisdom be found?”

The ancient question still rings — with greater urgency, if possible, today than in the past.  One place to look, of course, is in books, but also where books point us, back to our lives and the worlds we inhabit.  U. K. LeGuin in her beloved fantasy The Earthsea Trilogy gives her hero deep insight, earned at personal cost:  “From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, and the great slow gestures of trees” (A Wizard of Earthsea, 82).  Whatever “wizardry” we aspire to, we can begin to find it  by attending to what lives all around us. 

Likewise, the Hebrew Bible admonishes us (in a passage I’ve long found very funny, for some reason, as well as wise):  “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6).  You can almost hear the scowl in the words, but they point to wisdom nonetheless.  John Michael Greer in his Druidry Handbook observes, “Psychologists have shown that many kinds of mental illness have a central factor in common.  Despite the stereotype, mentally ill people don’t lose the ability to think clearly; psychotic delusions are often masterpieces of internally consistent deductive logic.  The trouble comes because this elegant reasoning loses touch with anything outside itself.  Deductions become delusions when they stop being tested against the way the world actually works” (144).  All of us carry delusions — about ourselves, our goals and our world — but fortunately our lives usually bring us up against the tests, obstacles and challenges which help to keep us sane. 

When we stand present and alert in the natural world, we increase our chances for sane choices, if only because we begin to perceive more clearly the immense community of lives, human and non-human, of which we are a part.  The natural world flames with the divine, and helps us toward humility and balance, because when we are able to listen to Spirit and not to our own delusions, we walk a saner path. Just as sleep restores us each night, in part by shutting off the internal chatter of our thoughts and fears and desires, and easing us into a rest from the “mind-forged manacles” (as poet William Blake calls them), so contact with Spirit through the natural world quiets us and recreates our own inner worlds, because it offers sustenance our bodies can experience as well as our minds and hearts.

Value of insects to economy: $57 billion a year

“Think twice before you blithely swat, stomp, curse or ignore insects, says Cornell University entomologist John Losey, who co-authored a study that shows the dollar value of some of those insect services is more than $57 billion in the United States annually.”  For the whole article, go here. 

Why I am a Druid

One of the readers of this blog asked me today, “What was the factor that led you to this path?” Spirit has moved me to where I am now, and so the easy – even facile or glib but also true — answer is Spirit. I find myself continuing to ask how to fulfill my spiritual purpose in this life, and I trust where I am led. I can’t do it any other way. There’s nothing else left in me.  I’m spiritually empty when I don’t do this. That’s my faith, if anyone wants to know. The gods speak to us through all things, and often most powerfully through the natural world, the air we breathe every moment, the water that nourishes and sustains the skin of the planet and our own bodies, the heat of the sun and other fires that keep us warm, the earth which sustains us and feeds us. It’s the “dailiness”  of the divine — how the ten thousand things of the worlds greet us each moment of our conscious existence.  These things are not anything that I worship, but what I celebrate as the physical hands and bodies and instruments of the divine in our lives. I’ve increasingly come to realize how much more responsible I am to live my entire life as a gift, on loan for however many years I’m here. It’s not a chance to indulge myself as much as I can, or to consume as much as all our advertisers urge us to. Instead, I want to answer with how I shape and conduct my life for the gift of green earth and physical existence. There’s a sweet hunger in me to devote more and more of my life to Spirit and to celebrate all the gifts of this physical world we inhabit, and which we are too often trashing and ravaging and disrespecting. What I can do matters, no matter how small. Each step is one step more. And this blog is also a step, where I strive to be true to this ideal.

Worship or attunement?

Druidry for me does not mean worship of the earth, or of any thing or being, including a god or gods.  In fact, the act of worship itself has always perplexed me.  A far better word and practice, from my experience, is communion, or perhaps fellowship. 

No god needs a lesser being to offer praise or sacrifices.  Instead, in my experience, the divine wants us to open ourselves to it, and let it animate us, heal us, guide us and fulfill us.  None of these things require worship.  They require attunement — making the self vulnerable to the divine, susceptible to Spirit, open to the gods.  When I’m caught up in my petty concerns, or (especially) when I indulge in anger or irritation (as I did earlier this afternoon reading an email from one of the school administrators), I’m not listening to the divine or keeping open to let Spirit work with me.  We shut down the divine constantly in our lives through our thoughts, feelings and limiting beliefs.   However, change is always possible.

For some, I suppose, worship may be a way to re-open the connection.  Insofar as worship removes my attention from energy traps of emotion, it can be beneficial.  Still, to me, it emphasizes the spiritual distance between human and divine.  The presence of the gods breaks down that distance to nothing.  Spiritual contemplation, and recitation of divine names spoken with love, are two powerful techniques to keep the spiritual vision open to gratitude and love.  The divine then is not something distant that we pray to, but something filling all space, including human hearts, present within us and active in the outer circumstances of our lives.   We’ve all experienced moments of openness and gratitude, just as we know the tense, tight, congested, restrictive feel of anger and annoyance and emotions out of balance.  But they’re just energy flows.  Watch the emotion pass through, don’t stop it, don’t worry about, acknowledge that it’s simply a response and watch as it moves along and past.  All experiences are an opportunity for Spirit to manifest.  I’ll say that again, since I need to hear it as much as anyone:  all experiences are opportunities for Spirit to manifest. 

 My lifelong goal is to manifest spirit in what I do, say, think and feel.  (It’s always good to set high goals, and this one’s a definite challenge, but well worth it!) This is my worship.

A basis for “green” spirituality

In his book Where the Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak observes that the environmental issues that face us today simply reflect our inner spiritual condition.  One thing we need is healing, and here “green” spirituality has much to offer in reconnecting us to the planet and its cycles.  “What, after all, is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention but the inevitable extroversion of a blighted psyche? Like inside, like outside.  In the eleventh hour, the very physical environment suddenly looms up before us as the outward mirror of our inner condition, for many the first discernible symptom of advanced disease within” (72).  Significantly, Roszak echoes the ancient wisdom of several traditions:  as above, so below; as within, so without.  We see this also in the monotheisms — thus, Proverbs 23:7: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” and Matthew 15:10: “Not that which entereth into the mouth defileth the man; but that which proceedeth out of the mouth, this defileth the man.”  While we need not abandon careful and responsible diet, this would reset our priorities! Who knows what changes are possible if we attend first to spiritual transformation?  Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to this opportunity.  For it is possible to see crisis as opportunity, rather than threat alone.

Moon-tide

Tomorrow the last quarter of the moon:  from there it wanes to nothing, and for three days darkness covers the face it turns toward us.  But the darkness is never empty; it broods and makes way again for light.  How will I take its lesson to heart?

Polytheistic sexuality and wider ethics

Many criticisms of Paganism arise from its supposed “immorality.”  It’s undeniable, for instance, that Pagans usually hold a much different set of attitudes about sexuality than Christians.  But different is not always wrong.  Sexuality for Pagans is not so hedged about with restrictions.  As John Michael Greer points out in his book A World Full of Gods, “If lovemaking takes place, according to traditional Christian and Jewish moral theory, the act is acceptable only if it meets a long list of criteria:  there must be only two people involved; one must be male and the other female; they must be legally married to each other; they must limit their erotic play to activities that have some chance of producing pregnancy; they must not stimulate each other with anything other than certain authorized portions of their bodies; ritual and calendar taboos must be observed, and so on” (146).   But if two lovers are not breaking vows they have made to others, if they love in mutually agreed ways, if their lovemaking is safe and responsible, it’s difficult for most Pagans to see where any problem lies.   Christians, it is true, might contend that God demands more of us than this.  But this is a monotheist demand that polytheists simply see no reason to accept.   Philosopher John Harris observes, “For a moral judgment to be respectable it must have something to say about just why a supposed wrong action is wrongful.  If it fails to meet this test it is a preference and not a moral judgment at all” (Wonderwoman and Superman, 42).  A Pagan could just as easily claim that his gods demand a different sexual ethics.  Without any external basis for judgment, we simply have a matter of personal preference.

Greer continues in a broader discussion of Pagan morality.  He acknowledges that a Pagan and specifically polytheist theology may not conveniently deliver “an unquestionable basis for moral decisions, to be sure.  This has been a theme of monotheist criticism for quite some time, from Kierkegaard through Niebuhr to some of the more thoughtful defenders of monotheist religion nowadays.  They argue that polytheism is a fabric of compromises woven of the world of ordinary experience, and is therefore morally inadequate.  Monotheism, by contrast, is superior because it rejects compromise and tears through the fabric of everyday life, replacing it with the total submission of the soul to the demands of a transcendent Other.

Yet this same argument works at least as well in the other direction.  A case for monotheism on this basis comes dangerously close to a justification of fanaticism and monomania:  the viewpoint of the terrorist, the crusader, and the inquisitor, who claim that ordinary human feelings such as compassion for the innocent must be swept aside for the sake of absolute devotion to some higher principle.  A more humane approach weighs all the moral factors in a situation, and finds the best available balance among them.

This approach, as monotheist criticism suggests, provides no certain basis for any given decision.  Still, this is not necessarily a weakness, just as the conviction that one possesses an absolutely sure standard of morality is not necessarily a good thing.  The contrary realization, that each moral decision is simply an attempt to do the best that can be done in the presence of conflicting factors, leads to humility in judgment, and thus to humanity in action” (154-155).

Aspirations toward a single monotheist morality fail to ease the same, often complex human choices that Pagans also face.  But when guided by love and humility, most of our decisions will be good ones.  Who among any of us has accomplished more?  Isn’t it a kind of arrogance itself to presume that all our decisions will or can be perfect?  That is the kind of hubris the gods have punished repeatedly in some of the oldest stories that come down to us.  When we are “correct,” we literally cannot hear advice, accept reproof, or learn and grow.  Better, I assert, that we present our deeds and feelings as offerings to the gods, asking them to hallow the best of them and participate with us in the shaping of our lives.