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The truth would be a start to setting us free.

March 18, 2006 admin 72 Comments

As you'll read in Stop Bush's War, “Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim Russert that things were going 'very, very well' in Iraq.” I've been preoccupied of late with some family matters, so when I heard that March 5th, while I was listening to Meet the Press, as only one statement the General made in a long upbeat report about Iraq, I wondered if there was some chance, somehow, some way, very very strange but true, that I had slipped away from a realistic understanding of what is going on. I mean, how could General Pace have been speaking so positively and Russert not be appalled at what he was saying if things were as I thought they were? But, no such luck. The inmates still are running the asylum.

I can barely read any more run-downs by eloquent writers who tell essentially the same depressing tales about Iraq. However, Stop Bush's War got me. For my sensibilities, Bob Herbert caught it just right. After you are thoroughly radicalized, which many of us have been for a long time, then what? How do we move out of our dualistic perspective in which we are so oppositional to where we appreciate our mutuality and start thinking as a planet? For a place to start, I'd get every person of influence to sign onto being in agreement with Herbert. You've got to acknowledge a problem in order to go to work on it; to get us out of this war conundrum, the first step is for the Administration to admit we are in it. This piece calls for that so compellingly that I wonder if a chorus of every thinking person harmonized in support of it — a doable exercise, given the Net — might force the Administration to change its crazed tune.

Stop Bush's War

By BOB HERBERT

NY Times Op-Ed: March 16, 2006

“By some estimates,” according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, “the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has reached six figures – vastly more than have been killed by all international terrorists in all of history. Sanctions on Iraq probably were a necessary cause of death for an even greater number of Iraqis, most of them children.”

Not everyone agrees that Iraqi deaths have reached six figures. President Bush gave an estimate of 30,000 not too long ago. That's probably low, but horrendous nevertheless. In any event, there is broad agreement that the number of Iraqis slaughtered has reached into the tens of thousands. An ocean of blood has been shed in Mr. Bush's mindless war, and there is no end to this tragic flow in sight. Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times gave us the following chilling paragraphs in Tuesday's paper:

“In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.

“They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that.”

Everyone who thought this war was a good idea was wrong and ought to admit it. Those who still think it's a good idea should get therapy.

Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled “Vietnam and the Presidency” was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.

Some of the lessons seemed embarrassingly basic. Jack Valenti, who served as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, reminded us how difficult it is to “impress democracy” on other countries. And he noted something that the public and the politicians seem to forget each time the glow of a brand-new war is upon us: that wars are “inhumane, brutal, callous and full of depravity.”

Think Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Think suicide bombers and death squads and roadside bombs. Think of the formerly healthy men and women who have come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed, or without their arms or legs or eyes, or the full use of their minds. Think of the many thousands dead.

Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that the best way to fight it was with other people's children. That in itself is a form of depravity.

Among those who played a key role in the conference was David Halberstam, the author of “The Best and the Brightest,” which is not just the best book about America's involvement in Vietnam, but a book that grows more essential with each passing year. If you read it in the 70's or 80's, read it again. We can all use a refresher course on the link between folly and madness at the highest levels of government, and the all-but-unimaginable suffering it can unleash.

In the book's epilogue, Mr. Halberstam wrote that, among other things, President Johnson “and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk.”

That latter kind of toughness is what's needed now. Invading Iraq was a disastrous move by the Bush administration, and there is no satisfactory solution forthcoming. The White House should be working cooperatively with members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring the curtain down on U.S. involvement.

Before that can begin to happen, the administration will have to rid itself of the delusion that things are somehow going well in Iraq. The democracy that was supposed to flower in the Iraqi desert and then spread throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush continues to assert that our goal in Iraq is “victory.” Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim Russert that things were going “very, very well” in Iraq.

They are still crawling toward the mirage. It's time to give reality a chance.

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Crop Circles

What influences led to the loss of the world soul?

February 17, 2006 admin 74 Comments

A documentary film I'm making looks at how it can be that crop circles have been so substantially ignored. Even as installation art they should be considered phenomenal; it's been suggested that story could be called, “The Greatest Thing Humanity Has Ever Done.” You'd have to appreciate the geometric brilliance of the designer(s), and be aware of other facts — like there having been thousands of occurrences with no perpetrator ever being caught and no leaks ever having gotten out about the source — to see how astonishing the phenomenon being made by people would be.

The film will try to make clear what went into the design of what was perhaps the most awesome formation ever. It arrived in England in 2002, the day before the field was harvested. A photographer flew over it or we never would have known of this geometric wonder. Now really, who would apply such genius to something that very likely no one even would see? (A little book, CROOKED SOLEY — the name of the village where the circle landed — has been written about this wonder. Do yourself a favor and click on this link to a picture of the Crooked Soley formation and a wonderful essay about it: http://www.roundhillpress.com/?page=bookintroduction&id=1.)

So, in my film I'm dealing with the zeitgeist — the cultural consensus about the way life is — that would have us pay such short shrift to what is so incredible. And a couple of recent posts have dealt with what got us here from what we were up to before this: Science and Spirit Smarts is about a pre-science educational model made up of subjective and objective considerations,

and More Science and Spirit Smarts is about alchemy. Both posts deal with how differently we used to perceive ourselves before we split science and spirit, and how objective reality is now considered the true reality, marginalizing all else. The all else is where crop circles live.

The Loss of the World Soul and its Return, an essay by Anne Baring, is another piece to help us locate ourselves in an evolving ideation. With the author's help I've excerpted it to give the main points, but it is so intelligent and so well written that the whole thing is worth reading: http://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm#elixir.

Anne is a distinguished Jungian, who lives in crop circle country in southern England. It's where I've done my filming, so, having admired her work, I was able to connect with her personally. We are very simpatico. Her site —

http://www.annebaring.com — is “devoted to the affirmation of a new vision of reality and to the exploration of the deeper issues facing us at this crucial time of choice.” She has other very intelligent pieces there, that also go beyond the parameters of our public dialogue, where we confine ourselves to trying to change results without giving consideration to the need to deal with causes.

Excerpted from THE LOSS OF THE WORLD SOUL AND ITS RETURN

The belief system of scientific reductionism which so powerfully influences modern secular culture may be understood as the end-result of the long-standing dissociation between spirit and nature, mind and matter but, above all, the sundering within us of thinking and feeling, rational mind and instinctive soul – the conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature. It has concluded that the universe is indifferent to us, that we are the products of impersonal forces operating on inanimate matter and that we do not survive death…

Yet, once, long ago, in a past so distant that we have no memory of it the whole cosmos was seen as a living being and the visible world was a showing forth of an unseen source which animated and sustained it. Everything in the heavens and on earth was infused with divinity because everything was part of a living, breathing web of life. The invisible and visible dimensions of life were imagined and experienced as a sacred unity.

Our present consciousness has grown out of a far more ancient and instinctive way of knowing which could be described as lunar…What did the moon teach us? The emergence of the crescent moon from the three days of darkness that preceded it gave us the image of the visible world emerging from an invisible one, the time-bound world from an eternal one. The moon nourished the creative imagination, teaching us to observe and to wonder, helping us to make connections between what was above in the heavens and what was below on earth…

From this lunar pattern constantly speaking to the mythic imagination, birth and death became a rite of passage for the soul as it journeyed between the visible and invisible dimensions of life, a journey that was symbolised by the path through a labyrinth. The ancestors were not lost to the living but were close by, available to counsel and guide. There was, therefore, no final demarcation line between life and death.

The constant rhythm of the moon waxing and waning held both light and darkness in relation to each other – held them in balance – because the totality of the moon’s cycle embraced both light and dark phases and therefore symbolically included both life and death. Light and darkness were not polarised as they were later to become in a solar culture, but were phases of the total cycle, so that there was always an image of a unifying whole which included both polarities.

Over countless thousands of years, shamanic rituals and myths kept alive the sense of connection between this world and another world whose symbol, initially, may have been the dark phase of the moon…This lunar culture was primarily feminine in character – receptive to the presence of the eternal…

Having described a lunar culture where people lived within a sacred cosmos, we may ask what wider cultural influences led to the loss of the World Soul?…From about 2000 bce, we begin to see developing a new phase in the evolution of human consciousness – a phase whose focus is the sun rather than the moon. As this process develops, solar mythology begins to displace lunar mythology: linear time begins to replace lunar cyclical time, and a linear, literal and objective way of thinking slowly replaces the older imaginal and participatory way of knowing. Concurrently, the human psyche draws away from nature and as it does so, the predominant image of spirit changes from Great Mother to Great Father. The greater the withdrawal from nature, the more transcendent and disengaged from nature becomes the image of the deity: divine immanence is lost. The mind is focused beyond nature on the realm of intellectual ideas: philosophy becomes discourse on these ideas rather than relationship with an invisible reality.

A second major influence was the impact of literacy on our way of thinking. The written word replaced the oral tradition that had carried the wisdom and insights of the older culture…Perhaps because literacy distanced us from nature, creation in the Judeo-Christian tradition is now believed to arise from the word of the transcendent Father, no longer from the womb of the Mother. This is a crucially important distinction because the unity of life is again broken: invisible spirit no longer animates and inhabits nature. The earth is desacralised. Religious belief replaces shamanic experience. Ancient ways of connection are forbidden. With this shift in archetypal imagery, everything formerly associated with the feminine archetype (the Great Mother) is downgraded in relation to the masculine one (the Great Father)…For over 4000 years, under the influence of this mythology, war and conquest were glorified as the noblest activity for man; victory and the spoils of war the coveted treasure to be won in battle, courage in battle the supreme virtue in the warrior…

Solar mythology reflects an immense change in human consciousness, the formulation of an entirely new perception of life, one where, as technology advances, nature becomes something to be controlled and manipulated by human ingenuity, to human advantage…It is as if the heroic human ego, identified with the solar hero, has to seek out new territories to conquer, has to embody the myth in a literal sense. The terminology of conquest and dominance still influences our own modern culture with its focus on the conquest of nature, of space, of our enemies. It is as if we have been conditioned by this powerful mythology to think only in oppositional terms – victory or defeat – never in terms of dialogue and reconciliation.

Solar mythology is, above all, the story of the heroic individual. Its theme is the Promethean quest for freedom, justice, knowledge and power. It carries with it the human longing to reach higher, progress further, discover more. It is overwhelmingly male because the male psyche has been the dominant influence in many cultures over some 4000 years and it is the achievements and discoveries of exceptional men which have inspired other men. A strong sense of individuality and a focused ego can be acknowledged as the supreme achievement of the male psyche during this solar era. But the voice of women who were denied access to education, the priesthood and political power was silenced.

The danger of this solar phase is that the human mind, breaking away from its instinctive ground, and its relationship with nature and cosmos, begins to assimilate a god-like power to itself, seeing itself engaged in a great struggle to gain mastery of nature. The solar achievement of establishing a strong conscious ego was won at the expense of repressing whatever it perceived as threatening to it. The inner conflict was projected into the world as the drive for power and control over others, whether in the religious or political field.

The influence of solar mythology was to divide life into two halves: spirit and nature, light and dark, good and evil, mind and body, subject and object. These oppositions became fixed in our consciousness as an actual belief system…As time went on religions took on the mantle of solar mythology in a struggle for supremacy and are tragically engaged in it to this day.

From this long historical process, it is possible to see that the belief system of scientific reductionism which has so powerfully influenced modern secular culture may be understood as the end-result of the long-standing dissociation between spirit and nature, mind and matter but, above all, the sundering within us of thinking and feeling, rational mind and instinctive soul – the conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature. It has concluded that the universe is indifferent to us, that we are the products of impersonal forces operating on inanimate matter. Consciousness arises from the physical brain. When we die, that is the end of us.

To sum up: over the four millennia that solar mythology became the dominant influence on world culture, we have achieved an extraordinary advance in scientific and technological skills and their application to improving the conditions of human life on this planet and a phenomenal expansion of the ability to express ourselves as individuals in myriad different fields of Endeavour. But at the same time, we have suffered a catastrophic loss of soul, a loss of the ancient instinctive awareness of the sacred interweaving of all aspects of life, a loss of the sense of participation in the life of nature and the invisible dimension of the cosmos, a loss of instinct and imagination…

This leaves the human heart lonely and afraid and the neglected territory of the soul a barren wasteland. The rage and despair of denied needs confront us as the enemies who seek to destroy us and whom we seek to destroy. We struggle to contain the effects of a dysfunctional way of thinking – believing that ever greater power and control will enable us to eradicate the evils we bring into being…

Beyond the present limits of our sight an immense field of consciousness interacts with our own, asking to be recognised by us, embraced by us. As this deep soul-impulse to recover what has been lost gathers momentum, the “marriage” of the emerging lunar values with the ruling solar ones is changing our perception of reality. If we can recover the ancient way of knowing in a modern context, without losing the priceless evolutionary attainment of a strong and focused ego, we could heal the fissure in our psyche and bring together many aspects of life that have been fragmented. In the words of D.H. Lawrence, “The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again.”

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This and That

What influences led to the loss of the world soul?

February 17, 2006 admin 59 Comments

Excerpted from THE LOSS OF THE WORLD SOUL AND ITS RETURN

The belief system of scientific reductionism which so powerfully influences modern secular culture may be understood as the end-result of the long-standing dissociation between spirit and nature, mind and matter but, above all, the sundering within us of thinking and feeling, rational mind and instinctive soul – the conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature. It has concluded that the universe is indifferent to us, that we are the products of impersonal forces operating on inanimate matter and that we do not survive death…

Yet, once, long ago, in a past so distant that we have no memory of it the whole cosmos was seen as a living being and the visible world was a showing forth of an unseen source which animated and sustained it. Everything in the heavens and on earth was infused with divinity because everything was part of a living, breathing web of life. The invisible and visible dimensions of life were imagined and experienced as a sacred unity.

Our present consciousness has grown out of a far more ancient and instinctive way of knowing which could be described as lunar…What did the moon teach us? The emergence of the crescent moon from the three days of darkness that preceded it gave us the image of the visible world emerging from an invisible one, the time-bound world from an eternal one. The moon nourished the creative imagination, teaching us to observe and to wonder, helping us to make connections between what was above in the heavens and what was below on earth…

From this lunar pattern constantly speaking to the mythic imagination, birth and death became a rite of passage for the soul as it journeyed between the visible and invisible dimensions of life, a journey that was symbolised by the path through a labyrinth. The ancestors were not lost to the living but were close by, available to counsel and guide. There was, therefore, no final demarcation line between life and death.

The constant rhythm of the moon waxing and waning held both light and darkness in relation to each other – held them in balance – because the totality of the moon’s cycle embraced both light and dark phases and therefore symbolically included both life and death. Light and darkness were not polarised as they were later to become in a solar culture, but were phases of the total cycle, so that there was always an image of a unifying whole which included both polarities.

Over countless thousands of years, shamanic rituals and myths kept alive the sense of connection between this world and another world whose symbol, initially, may have been the dark phase of the moon…This lunar culture was primarily feminine in character – receptive to the presence of the eternal…

Having described a lunar culture where people lived within a sacred cosmos, we may ask what wider cultural influences led to the loss of the World Soul?…From about 2000 bce, we begin to see developing a new phase in the evolution of human consciousness – a phase whose focus is the sun rather than the moon. As this process develops, solar mythology begins to displace lunar mythology: linear time begins to replace lunar cyclical time, and a linear, literal and objective way of thinking slowly replaces the older imaginal and participatory way of knowing. Concurrently, the human psyche draws away from nature and as it does so, the predominant image of spirit changes from Great Mother to Great Father. The greater the withdrawal from nature, the more transcendent and disengaged from nature becomes the image of the deity: divine immanence is lost. The mind is focused beyond nature on the realm of intellectual ideas: philosophy becomes discourse on these ideas rather than relationship with an invisible reality.

A second major influence was the impact of literacy on our way of thinking. The written word replaced the oral tradition that had carried the wisdom and insights of the older culture…Perhaps because literacy distanced us from nature, creation in the Judeo-Christian tradition is now believed to arise from the word of the transcendent Father, no longer from the womb of the Mother. This is a crucially important distinction because the unity of life is again broken: invisible spirit no longer animates and inhabits nature. The earth is desacralised. Religious belief replaces shamanic experience. Ancient ways of connection are forbidden. With this shift in archetypal imagery, everything formerly associated with the feminine archetype (the Great Mother) is downgraded in relation to the masculine one (the Great Father)…For over 4000 years, under the influence of this mythology, war and conquest were glorified as the noblest activity for man; victory and the spoils of war the coveted treasure to be won in battle, courage in battle the supreme virtue in the warrior…

Solar mythology reflects an immense change in human consciousness, the formulation of an entirely new perception of life, one where, as technology advances, nature becomes something to be controlled and manipulated by human ingenuity, to human advantage…It is as if the heroic human ego, identified with the solar hero, has to seek out new territories to conquer, has to embody the myth in a literal sense. The terminology of conquest and dominance still influences our own modern culture with its focus on the conquest of nature, of space, of our enemies. It is as if we have been conditioned by this powerful mythology to think only in oppositional terms – victory or defeat – never in terms of dialogue and reconciliation.

Solar mythology is, above all, the story of the heroic individual. Its theme is the Promethean quest for freedom, justice, knowledge and power. It carries with it the human longing to reach higher, progress further, discover more. It is overwhelmingly male because the male psyche has been the dominant influence in many cultures over some 4000 years and it is the achievements and discoveries of exceptional men which have inspired other men. A strong sense of individuality and a focused ego can be acknowledged as the supreme achievement of the male psyche during this solar era. But the voice of women who were denied access to education, the priesthood and political power was silenced.

The danger of this solar phase is that the human mind, breaking away from its instinctive ground, and its relationship with nature and cosmos, begins to assimilate a god-like power to itself, seeing itself engaged in a great struggle to gain mastery of nature. The solar achievement of establishing a strong conscious ego was won at the expense of repressing whatever it perceived as threatening to it. The inner conflict was projected into the world as the drive for power and control over others, whether in the religious or political field.

The influence of solar mythology was to divide life into two halves: spirit and nature, light and dark, good and evil, mind and body, subject and object. These oppositions became fixed in our consciousness as an actual belief system…As time went on religions took on the mantle of solar mythology in a struggle for supremacy and are tragically engaged in it to this day.

From this long historical process, it is possible to see that the belief system of scientific reductionism which has so powerfully influenced modern secular culture may be understood as the end-result of the long-standing dissociation between spirit and nature, mind and matter but, above all, the sundering within us of thinking and feeling, rational mind and instinctive soul – the conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature. It has concluded that the universe is indifferent to us, that we are the products of impersonal forces operating on inanimate matter. Consciousness arises from the physical brain. When we die, that is the end of us.

To sum up: over the four millennia that solar mythology became the dominant influence on world culture, we have achieved an extraordinary advance in scientific and technological skills and their application to improving the conditions of human life on this planet and a phenomenal expansion of the ability to express ourselves as individuals in myriad different fields of Endeavour. But at the same time, we have suffered a catastrophic loss of soul, a loss of the ancient instinctive awareness of the sacred interweaving of all aspects of life, a loss of the sense of participation in the life of nature and the invisible dimension of the cosmos, a loss of instinct and imagination…

This leaves the human heart lonely and afraid and the neglected territory of the soul a barren wasteland. The rage and despair of denied needs confront us as the enemies who seek to destroy us and whom we seek to destroy. We struggle to contain the effects of a dysfunctional way of thinking – believing that ever greater power and control will enable us to eradicate the evils we bring into being…

Beyond the present limits of our sight an immense field of consciousness interacts with our own, asking to be recognised by us, embraced by us. As this deep soul-impulse to recover what has been lost gathers momentum, the “marriage” of the emerging lunar values with the ruling solar ones is changing our perception of reality. If we can recover the ancient way of knowing in a modern context, without losing the priceless evolutionary attainment of a strong and focused ego, we could heal the fissure in our psyche and bring together many aspects of life that have been fragmented. In the words of D.H. Lawrence, “The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again.”

Continue reading →