The Wisdom of Not Knowing Everything

For Session #3 of the ongoing course called: Thriving into the Emerging New World, Jeremy Lent presented Transforming Pathways for a Life-Affirming Future. As hoNework, Mattie Porte, our host, offered several reflection questions. The one that captured me and relates closely to this ongoing blog series is this: “Jeremy points out that as we progress further into this century…it is becoming clear that our generation, along with the next, is engaged in nothing less than a struggle over the future of what it means to be human. What does it mean to you to be human?”

I grabbed paper and pen and began writing. Short sentences slammed onto the page –: I live. I breathe. I vibrate. I am aware. I move. I sense. I respond. I eat. I evacuate what remains. I transform matter into energy. I experience – awe, wonder, delight, doubt, resistance, courage, sorrow, horror. I create, create, create – every moment I create. I love love love and love some more. I trust, trust, trust and trust some more. I respond. I am conscious, noticing, taking in, giving back. I belong…

Yes. I belong. I am embedded in living. I haven’t always felt this way. There was a time in my life when I wished my feet would not touch the ground, because I knew I crushed civilizations beneath my weight. Now I choose to believe that my life passing through gratefully, lovingly, delightedly nourishes the land. I smile often – just because I’m so happy to be alive, to be in this body.

BUT
AND THIS IS A BIG BUTT!
THIS BUTT IS CALLED MY BRAIN.

The human brain witnesses, labels, categorizes, decides, explains, analyzes goodbadindifferent, overrides intuition, second guesses gut wisdom. Thinking really IS a pain in the butt; separates our heads from our bodies, claims humans as superior to everything else.

 We are thinking animals –weighing options before choosing an action. We have a range of responses, maybe more than most other animals because they are confined by their habitat which is largely determined by US. We don’t have to eat huckleberries. A bear does. We don’t have to eat salmon. But for a bear carrying unborn babies, salmon makes survival possible. In general, we, as human animals, have more choice over what we eat, the region where we live, how we quench our thirst. Being an urbanized human today means we skim the surface of life. Heavy-handed. Light-fingered. We take little or no response-ability for how we use our skills, gifts, knowledge and blessings. We care little about nurturing relationships with other humans, other cultures, or the web of life on which our lives depend. That’s delusional thinking.

I doubt turtle, big-leafed maple, hyena, pheasant, trout or cat question the meaning of their lives. I doubt our ancient human ancestors questioned life either. Maybe we ask that question because we have reached a point in our evolution as a species when we’ve lost touch with our souls, with what’s important about being alive.
Which reminds me of Bede Griffiths statement: “We’ve come as a human race to the moment (when) we will have to choose between adoration of the divine – within and without – or suicide.”

So, I leave you with this question: What’s important to you about being alive?

In my last post, I asked: What if the earth is ourselves turned inside out?

That question fuels a meandering flow of thought- a miracle all by itself when you think about thinking – where does it come from, how does it work, why and how can we imagine scenes and scenarios in the interior of our heads filled with neurons, electrons, synapses and complete darkness?

Really, is not the act of thinking worthy of reverence?.

So, my thinking flows, straight as a homing pigeon to roost.  All the patterns, structures and dynamics of our living universe(s) belong to us humans too. We were designed by Creator, Source, Great Mystery, God(de), Cosmos, whatever you want to call that something-other which birthed us millions of years ago. Arriving in ebbs and flows over billions of years everything else arrived before our emergence. We belong to the same cosmic womb. All the constituents, the architecture, the geometry and the designs belong to us as well.

We are but one piece in a giant jigsaw puzzle. Embedded. How will we live when we relax into that truth?

It will be easier for us humans to trust… and that changes everything.

What do I trust?
A list spills out of my pen onto paper:

*I trust in divine generosity. No more reasons to hoard, to acquire, to possess, to consume.

*I trust in the divine rhythms of birth-death, dark-light, fear-love, create-destroy, sleep-wake, etc…No more reasons to doubt, to judge, to compare, to compete, to be dissatisfied with the moment.

*I trust the divine wisdom that cradles us – the: numinous, cosmic awareness and aliveness everywhere present. We only have to re-learn how to listen, choose to “know” it, to relate and respond. No more reasons for anxiety, frustration, and irrational fears. We would be eager to explore, to allow our curiosity to lead us toward, rather than away from the strange, to embrace chaos and complexity as the cauldrons of emergence, perhaps unanticipated delight.

*I trust in divine goodness. For me, evil is the wound caused by lack of love. Maybe the first human wound was an accident. Who knows where and when our trauma began but when we are not affirmed in our glory, we become invisible, inaudible, and disempowered. There’s no joy in being a cypher. Underneath the oppression and suppression lies a seething, a longing for recognition, a yearning for fulfillment…May we fill each other’s emptiness and insecurity with acknowledgement and honor the pain held by the land, grieve for the pain of the tortured soul.

*I trust in divine sentience. Everything is alive in one form or another. Awareness dances among all of us. Consciousness propels life. Pope Francis’ statement on the first page of his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ – On Care for our Common Home affirmed my faith in life’s responsiveness. He wrote: Nothing in this world is indifferent to us. ( p. 7.) Other authors echo the Pope’s statement. To name just a few: Duane Elgin’s:  Living Universe, Jude Currivan’s: The Story of Gaia – the Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of our Conscious Planet, Brian Thomas Swimme’s : Cosmogenesis – An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe, Martin Lee Mueller’s: Being Salmon, Being Human – Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the  Wild,  Robin Wall Kimmerer’s: Braiding Sweetgrass – Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants .

When we trust in aliveness everywhere, we choose to behave with more care.
When we know the forest as an interdependent community of beings, above and below ground, who communicate with each other, we are less likely to clear cut it.
When we experience the river as living, we are less likely to poison it.
When we experience our habitat as alive, we no longer feel so alone.
When we experience Salmon as friend, we expand our sense of family.

So I leave you with a question that stumps many:
In what do you trust?

I am richly inspired by a 4 month course I’ve begun, Thriving in the Emerging New World, created by the Great Turning team at Findhorn, Scotland, seeded by Mattie Porte. Our global group pours our intelligence and heart into examining deep questions about the evolution of our species.. Andrew Harvey, our guide last week, catalyzed us by describing our global dark night of the soul. A quote he offered from 20^th century mystic, priest and unique human, Bede Griffiths, captured my attention “We’ve come as a human race to the moment (when) we will have to choose between adoration of the divine – within and without – or suicide.”

For me, Griffith’s statement rings deeply true!

For me this is my life! 

I’ve understood, to one level of development or another, that truth for the last 30 years. My life has been made easier and more difficult but certainly more congruent with my soul because I have chosen to adore the miracle of life.

One of the pivotal watermark moments for me happened in the summer of 1994 at the Cuyamungue Institute founded by anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, PhD. She discovered a grounded spiritual practice based on art-ifacts from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I call the practice Ecstatic Wisdom Postures and you can learn more about it when you click HERE.

 After each pose is experienced, we write in our journals. Like dreams, experiences in expanded states of awareness can quickly evaporate. Writing in my journal after holding a posture from the category of poses called: Spirit Journeys, I described a Kachina from a southwestern tribe of the North American continent. A black and white striped Kachina danced in my vision, turning his head from side to side and repeating, repeating, “You Choose, You Choose.” Do we choose the debacle of pillaging Earth for profit or do we choose the magnificence of loving life, nurturing life, all life because it is OUR life, for as long as our planet spins in her galaxy?

But it wasn’t needing to choose between loving life or loving death that illuminated my being with the force of an electric shock. It was the words that flowed out of my pen spontaneously
as I wrote the last few sentences describing my experience.

…I see that the green river has opened the heart so I can see the texture of its interior.  I am shocked to see it is the same texture as that of the molten “holy” rocks
 I saw yesterday in the Jemez Mountains.  
I wonder if our heart’s interior simply mirrors the earth outside our bodies,
if all our bodies’ parts and functions reflect the earth outside us.

    Can that be right?

    Is the earth really outside us?
    Maybe, instead,
the earth is ourselves turned inside out.

My own answer to my own question shocked me!
And it has taken me years to understand the ramifications more fully.
But even in 1994, I knew, without really knowing,
that I had stumbled on a truth that we humans living today have forgotten.
For the last 1600 years at least, we have been taught by our cultures and religions to
ignore our deep interconnectedness with all life, to deny the divinity of the great, breathing Mystery
that birthed us and everything else,
literally, 
from mycelia here on this wee fecund and struggling planet to the zillion stars,
to the phantasmagorical behavior of our own sun
to the billion galaxies a billion light years away.
Inextricable divine miracles
and we behave as if we don’t belong to that,
totally beholden!

Moving as spirit moves,
knowing it’s right.
Led by interiority
hinged to cosmic reckoning,
entangled with the other
in all ways timed and timeless.

May we choose to join life’s dance.

 We are sand castles. Let’s celebrate that together – so said Sophie Strand on Facebook today.

I’m getting old. My stories are dissolving – so said a friend who was visiting me last evening.

I had dreams of sailing the world, but I knew I had to wait for your Mother to die before I could leave home. Now, I am dying before she is – so said my Father as he wrestled with his fatal surprise.

Waking from a comatose state, she blurted, I just had a dream. Ants were crawling all over my underwear drawer. She paused, then said with wonder, Oh my! They are all the fears that kept me from living when I could have – so said my Mother two days before she died, two years AFTER my Father.

My paddle crew mutinied. The raft jack-knifed in between walls of water. Thrown into the rapid’s maelstrom, I plunged beneath and was held under long enough to know I was about to die. My experience, though, was of being fully immersed in living, right there, right then, aware, awake, alive, embedded, included, conscious of being. Glorious.

May we all come to our senses. We are sand castles, ephemeral bits cohering only while the tide is out, only before a dog blunders through, or the sun dries the sand and breezes create structures of slip-sliding powder.

Gaia, the Great Mother, birthed us. Gestation has been a billion-year process and we have only a short time to experience our unique embodiment.

May we re-imagine how we want to be.

May we celebrate life – rather than miss the experience completely.

I feel like an infant opening her eyes to the vast world beyond the arms of her parent.
Wow, there is so much to see, to touch, to learn about, to experience.

But here I am, an elder, feeling like an infant more and more often. It’s a huge world out there, and our globe is tiny, tiny, tiny spinning in the vastness of VASTNESSES.  The more I learn, the more I see, the more I hang out with our local Battle Point Astronomy Association, the more I experience Earth’s vulnerability.

Holy crap…that awareness must lie just under the surface of most humans’ consciousness. Living on planet Earth is precarious! No wonder anxiety runs rampant among so many humans.

In our climate discussions we argue over whether or not humans are the cause and therefore the solution. We don’t look beyond our own motivations, the storylines we live by. A friend just forwarded a pithy article by Michael Lerner, a man I respect.
Titled: Navigating the Polycrisis – Life in Turbulent Times, I paraphrase his top ten list for what drives the polycrisis:
climate,
covid,
Ukraine war,
diminishing American world dominance,
resurgence of autocratic regimes,
explosion of AI,
global financial system chaos,
the migration crisis,
risk of nuclear accidents,
world deficits in food, water, work, safety.

Quite the list, right?? But I noticed immediately, there are more drivers to name, and they have nothing to do with our human behaviors. It’s possible those un-named drivers represent the heart ‘n’ soul of our crisis:

We continue to be self-centered, myopic, even arrogant as a species. We act as if we are in charge.
We forget that our planet is vulnerable to forces beyond human agency.

Science affirms that our wee globe has endured multiple cataclysms over the billions of years our planet has existed. According to geology and other earth sciences, we’re due for cataclysmic shifts of one kind or another. It could be the weakening of the electromagnetic forces, or the movement of our magnetic poles. It could be the sweltering heat we worry about, but I just learned that historically heat ages may flip to ice ages. We really don’t know how the slowing down of the ocean currents will affect everything. We don’t know how the drying up of fresh water impacts everything. We forget that as the sun changes, so do we.

We forget that planetary life is susceptible to galactic forces whose behavior we can’t reliably predict.

In our mad dash for immediate solutions for our warring cultures and the loss of life’s vitality, we forget to focus on our common fragility. When I was young and still in school, I learned a principle in sociology that still seems valid: when warring clans perceive a greater threat, they no longer battle each other, but ban together for communal support. It’s time for us humans to activate that instinctive behavior. Lerner calls for us to do just that. He simply calls it by another name. He calls for us to build resilient communities, “islands of coherence that could shift the whole chaotic system toward a higher level of functioning.”

As a species we need to nurture our local systems on which the cycles of living, dying, rebirthing depend. In each of our bioregions, let’s nourish planetary resilience. Let’s act locally to support life globally. What a concept! And not a new one!!! As David Korten says toward the end of his new film: For the Love of Life, “Let’s learn to BE more, not HAVE more.”

If I had known we were going on a 7 mile hike, I might not have gone. But I didn’t know and so I did it without thinking about it.

Kind of like how we sang together on a global scale because we didn’t know we couldn’t. ( See most recent prior post: #18 )

Our hike’s destination was the site of the former Glines Canyon Dam on the Elwha river in Olympic National Park. Both the construction of the dam and its removal were thought to be impossible tasks, and yet each was accomplished.

There seems to be a pattern here, a lesson just out-of-sight. And it makes me think of the goodness of humans, our willingness to move into uncharted territory when we know it’s the right thing to do. Even when we think we can’t do it.

And how do we know what’s right?
Our bellies and bones tell us so.

Embedded as we are in the entirety of time that it’s taken for trillions of galaxies to exist, thousands upon thousands of planets to form along with the pivotal stars round which they spin, embedded as we are in this massive evolutionary journey, we humans learn by doing, by experimenting, by experiencing what works and what doesn’t. Though it’s taken a few thousand years for our species to develop the technology that allows us to “prove” the existence of trillions of galaxies, our ancestors 10,000 years and more ago may have known this truth, but they knew it intuitively, with intelligence beyond our limited array of modern senses.

Physiologically we haven’t changed that much since paleolithic times, so our cells remember, just as the land remembers its experience and holds it just out of sight…unless we tune in, open the doors of perception to non-ordinary reality and re-member, in the large sense of that word, bringing back to life all our members, our capacities that have been diminished by modernity.

So human goodness???

 I feel in my bones that humans yearn to belong to the world and to each other. We will do what it takes to bring beauty back, to bring harmony and resilience back. For me that’s one definition of “human goodness.” Once the decision was made to restore the Elwha River to its natural state, humans responded with generous support. Imagine how many of us it took to plant 400,000 native shrubs and trees to restore the decimated banks of the river, silted over by the lake behind the dam. Imagine the tolerance of the Forest Service when their compound, composed of many buildings, was suddenly inaccessible to vehicular traffic because the force of the freed water washed out the road, despite all the engineers attempts to prevent that. Imagine all the campers who obligingly changed plans when the campground was no longer accessible by car.

Humans are motivated by loving life experiences, sharing hard work, victories and losses, potlucks and singing and storytelling and laughter…
May we focus on our goodness and move toward the new era coming, moving toward that which we don’t know we can’t do, trusting the Universe has our backs!

As I explore the meaning of us humans becoming whole in this time of floating in caterpillar-culture soup, this time of being called upon to become an imaginal “self”,
I remember an old post from 2017. Here it is freshly edited, with a brand new image.
Originally titled: Singing Ourselves Home.
***************************

In February 1983 I experienced the vision of my lifetime. Ripped open to seeing, hearing, knowing, experiencing the true nature of reality – all that is usually hidden from normal awareness, I experienced vividly, undeniably… a bone deep knowing beyond all doubt that has sustained me ever since.

The truth I experienced is this: the universe is held together by vibration.
The vibration is sound and its “friction” creates light, everywhere sparking light sparkling while the music emanates from absolutely everything…all the music of all the worlds of all time were known to me and it was glorious. Unreportable and unrepeatable in this limited world of so-called matter but nonetheless REAL to my awareness.

My creative life has been devoted to trying to illustrate the vision I had in 1983. I always fall short because that is the nature of expressing something ephemeral in “concrete” form, of translating the spiritual into the material. Creative expression often suffers from that hard-to-bear truth. Most of our egos find it hard to handle such limitation, such imperfection, but bear it we must because we need to share in whatever ways we can that mysterious, miraculous web that sustains life on this planet

Which brings me to Monday this week, September 04, 2017.

I am midway through an online class with Chloe Goodchild from the UK, a mentor of mine whom I met about fifteen years ago when she came to Montana to offer a weekend workshop called the Naked Voice.  The course she’s offering now with the Shift Network is called Liberate the Voice of your Soul and each session includes optional break-out groups AFTER the session in which you are randomly placed with 2 or 3 others from around the globe to practice singing.

On Monday I decided to try an after-class break-out group for the first time. Untethered by time, this is what happened:

We sing together in real time, one man, three women, living in four countries.

Pregnant silence follows our singing. Goosebumps, a sure sign for me of being in the presence of spirit, rise on my arms. My nose tickles and eyes glisten. In fact, a few drops of water meander down my cheeks even before the singing stops.

What just happened?

I, maybe we, feel so richly blessed and deeply stirred.

But what is this? Really, what just happened?

Online, four strangers, I among them, have just bathed the planet with blessings.
We didn’t plan to do it. An Irish woman asks a Japanese man if he will offer his overtone chanting, his throat singing based on the Tuvan tradition. That if he’d offer us that gift, maybe this time we might sing along with him. He agrees. A polyphonic river streams from his mouth. Rivers carve valleys while song birds sing and screams of eagle echo off mountain walls and hot springs bubble and hiss. We three women close our eyes and swim with his strong current. Irish, English, Japanese and North American, our four voices weave and though we didn’t plan on doing it, we conjure a whole new universe.

My own throat releases as my song currents bobble, eddy and swirl with the three other singing rivers. Whistling even pours out of me but no one seems to mind. We sing for an hour,…or maybe a minute…, long enough to create a world where love is the ground, trust is our nature, compassion our heartbeat and co-creating the litany:

Alive, alive, alive, alive,
to be so alive together
we four,
separated by
continents, sixteen hours, genders and cultures
sing in real time
our voices meeting in that field
far, far beyond
 where the wisdom is.

And miracle upon more miracles, we later learn that zoom won’t allow you to do what we just did – harmonize live in the moment. Zoom doesn’t work that way.
We didn’t know that at the time, so WE DID IT!

That’s important to contemplate:
We didn’t know we couldn’t, so we did…

YES, YES
AND
THANK YOU.