“Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect”

(Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918)

He goes on to describe the ‘’soul of old Gothic” which he sees as necessarily returning in “knightly orders overpower(ing) plunderous vikingism”. And describes the task before us beautifully as the“unwearying care of this world as it is”, to wit, “the very opposite of the interestedness of the money-power age” demanding “high honour and conscientiousness”. He concludes his prophesying with a final battle ‘between democracy and Caesarism, between the leading forces of dictatorial money economics and the purely political will-to-order of the Caesars’

(Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918)


“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”

Hunter S Thompson


By way of moving these thoughts towards a conclusion, another quote

“Oh Civilisation

I can fit into your puzzle, but it’s hardly, hardly ever a hold

And I’ll tell you the trouble

The habits I’ve got are more than ten thousand years old

And we cannot sell our souls to learning morals

Big brother is no place for us to slide

We cannot live by numbers or on laurels

And hardly on how far from death we hide

And it’s not a case of rampant paranoia

But just an age I’d love to see unborn

Not that I’d be missing playing Goya

But more like I feel awkward passing on civilisation

Civilisation down to my children

Without a question”

Roy Harper ‘The Game’ (1975, ‘HQ’)

Buddhism speaks of the ‘twelve links of interdependent origination’ as a way of parsing reality – so that, despite an awareness practice such as Mahamudra, which penetrates the essence of mind as shunyata (emptiness) and, it is said touches ‘the way things are’, we must also attend in parallel to ‘the way things appear’. Ultimately, all is emptiness resting in undifferentiated pure nature, but relatively speaking things manifest because of one another. To create the causes for this moment requires the existence of the universe and all it contains in space and time. So the twelve links are a modelling of the connections and dynamics between all phenomena. To name just a few of the links, we find in primary position Ignorance, fundamentally the ignorance that creates an experience of a solid separate self. In a sense all that follows down the chain of interbeing is collapsible back into the original root ignorance. Other links, to illustrate this, include ‘Contact’ (“the five senses and the faculty of the mind” according to Thrangu Rinpoche) ‘Involvement’ (Freudian level pleasure principle operations, identification with feeling states) and ‘Ageing & Death’ (inevitable consequences of birth). Each link typically has a visual image to express it also – so Ignorance is usually a blind old woman, Contact is a man and woman embracing, Involvement is a drunken man, Ageing & Death is a corpse being carried to the cremation ground. Teaching examples are used to illustrate the subtle elements of interdependence, a teacher and student, a flint and its sparks, a fruit and its taste, a sound and its echo – always a certain cause gives rise to a specific result.

The point of these teachings, and their potency, lies in their bearing upon behaviour and action. To perceive interdependence

“means that we can begin to understand the ultimate truth. This happens because by studying the way things appear through the play of interdependence, we begin to realize that nothing is as solid, as real, as concrete, as it seems to be. In fact, things manifest as what they really are, which is empty”

(Ven Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Geshe Lharampa, ‘The Twelve Links of Interdependent Origination’)

On other levels interdependence has traction too, from the way geographers describe complex systems of ecological, human, geological and climatic interaction, through to economic modelling, even computer game design and the contemporary spate of ‘gamification’ of life.



‘No man is an island

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.”

as John Donne put it in Meditation XVII, from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623).

Life does not care for our ideas about life, rather, life is entirely embedded and thoroughly interdependent at every scale and in all the ten directions – earth is life, life is earth, without separation – the earth is as it is because of life, life created the conditions for life by being life, earth lives because it is life living itself – life isn’t happening on it or to it, life is it – we are life in view of recognising this at apparently higher scales of abstraction, reason, understanding. Life is mineral, vegetable, animal, mental, emotional, it is transcendent-immanent, individual and collective, uniquely commonplace in and upon this blue-white diamond, this impossible green nut orbiting its magical everyday sun, magnificently generous from the fire in consciousness to the Self in all.

Someone else calculated (and physicist David Suzuki in the documentary ‘Force of Nature’ spread the word) that each of us has millions of atoms in our bodies right now that once existed in the flesh of dinosaurs, or passed through the lungs of Joan of Arc, or Hitler or Moses. Atoms that even existed in breaths we took ourselves years ago in distant places and times. From such penetrating illustrations it is abundantly, even materially, clear, that distance and separation are primarily illusory states. Reality is way more intimate, time ever so much closer, distance strangely attracted back upon itself – there is nowhere to go to hide or be other than, or separate from – we are much more radically than we know, all in this together. And ‘this’ is life, happening as it is, only now, no place and no time else. It isn’t personal! The final word, from our friend Abbey, from beyond the dark:

“Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelop the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas – the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, the water will form and warmth shall be upon the land, and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass – already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox”

(Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968)

*Astronaut means ‘star sailor’, cosmonaut translates as ‘universe sailor’, and taikonaut as ‘space navigating sailor.’ In the space age a total of two dozen men visited the moon between July 20th 1969 and 14th December 1972, giving us just 41 months of close encounters with earth’s solitary satellite. Just twelve walked on the lunar surface. At the time of writing around 530 humans from 38 countries have been in space for a total of 77 person-years, performing 100 days of spacewalks. Human activity off-world, then, is a tiny REM-sleep flicker on the eyelids of eternity, a single breath in the aeons-long dream of the earth. It happened. No more.

When you think of the god Apollo, the words first springing to mind probably include harmony, order, reason, music, light, intellect, perhaps healing, maybe, at a push prophecy. Psychologically we might infer the Apollonic as a daytime realm of conscious awareness, a dyadic polarity to the Dionyisian frenzy of chaos and debauch – a constellation of perfected intellectual order versus creative chaos, one might say. It all sounds very nice, doesn’t it? Even Nietzsche spoke up for an ideal fusion of the two brotherly god-forms, Apollo and Dionysus; and Jung nailed a whole archetype to the Apollo brand (personified desire for mastery in skill, surface brilliance, the abstract and reified thinking function, the objective distance and cold eye of rationality). Even Hillman observed that Apollo, as we moderns know him, is disastrous and destructive to psychological life, especially as experienced in the feminine mode “so that you have the feeling that Apollo simply doesn’t belong where there is psyche”.

Unsurprisingly, for a god who has come down to us in this rather neat and narrow prevailing form, Apollo has become de facto ‘patron saint’ of science, technology and medicine – so we name our best rockets after him as we rise, tumescent, for the moon; or we use his name for our cinemas and theatres – ‘The Apollo’, the place of spectacle, maybe even unconsciously, of Oracle?

But it isn’t this objective Apollo I am interested in here, rather the lost (murdered?) sense of oracular Apollo ‘oulis’, Apollo the sometime lover of Persephone, Apollo the incubator, the deadly healer, the Orphic paradox who dies to heal, heals through apparent death.

Peter Kinglsey speaks of parricide as the ultimate crime of the ancient world, and shouts ‘J’accuse!’ at unimpeachable Plato – arraigning him for the psychic dispatching of Parmenides, and by implication, the deepest core of our lost Apollo. The deed is done, the temenos taped off, a chalk outline on the floor, the primary scene is set, who you gonna call? It is best we ask the fallen god directly, incubatorially, like the ardent young Keats:

“Where – where slept thine ire,

When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,

Thy laurel, thy glory,

The light of thy story,

Or was I a worm – too low crawling for death?

O Delphic Apollo!”

(John Keats, ‘Hymn to Apollo’, 1815)

‘Syphilization’ & its Discontents

It has been well documented, in a variety of ways, that a crisis besets our age – whether ecologically writ, economically sketched, socially, politically, morally, judicially denominated – however we wish to express it today. I like Sharif Abdullah’s model (Creating A World That Works For All, 1999)– he calls the ‘crisis with many names’ The Mess, and traces a neat trinity of interwoven processes, or stories, within its maelstrom. These three he identifies as living narratives, worldviews, belief systems, ideologies – and they are those of the Keeper, the Breaker and the Mender. Keeper forms are oral, indigenous, unmediated, unitive, still in relationship with the wild; Breaker forms are all the things we know so intimately, marked by separation, extractive domination, zero-sum games; Mender reality is an emerging property of the Mess, the crisis, and the ecstasy of collapse, the moment of verticality. It is implied but not yet quite immanent. We are, in Sharif’s terms, at a point of ‘living between the stories’. Breaker culture is clearly dying it could take the biosphere with it; Keeper culture ceased to be available to us a long time back and persists now in pockets of grace, hints of deeper time, so we are new, we wannabe Menders – marked as former Breakers breaking out and into an impossible, inevitable new now.

At such a time, a god like the Apollo I’m looking for might well be of some assistance – and it seems pretty clear that he was ‘murdered’ back at the moment when eternalised Keepers began to yield to nascent Breakers (Parmenides spoke out of Keeperdom, Plato, Aristotle and the rest, from the arousal of a new concretised time – in fact, even time changed in that process, from oral to textual, ancestral to commodified… the Breaker world first breathed in that passing). Origins pass into Dominance, which ruptures open into Emergence. And now we stand in a broken world at the emergent threshold, godless.

There’s another aspect to this, not to be overlooked; call it the Solzhenitsyn defence (from the Gulag Archipelago) – that survival imperative of Breaker-essence:

‘May you die today, so that I can die tomorrow’

An acknowledgment of futility – since in the long run, we’re all dead – but seeded with that separatist desperation, that clear-eyed cannibal cynicism, ‘make no bones about it, this separate self will consume you if it keeps me going another day, brother.’ This is our moment, all around us we see it – divide and rule, resource wars and their proxies, selling out the future survivability of the biosphere for another day in Disneyland. We are traumatised, for sure – and our trauma is individuated out of our object-world, our things, our event matrices… trauma is “whatever we cannot entertain as a fiction because we have turned it into a religion”. Progress, techno-bio-psychological or eco-politico-social, or spiritual-temporal, it is always Progress we kneel before and that exacts upon us the taxation of traumata.

And yet, falling into grace, it turns out that we have homeopathic imagination, in Greg Mogensen’s salty phrase:

“The smell of today’s rose calls into play the absent roses, the roses of yesterday. The rose constructs their smell by an act of deconstruction. I smell my sensations by comparing them with my repressed sensations, the subtext, the latent homoerotic brotherhood of resembling sensations in memory. I smell the nuanced difference of these sames. But this natural bent of the mind, this play of resonance and resemblance, is short-circuited by trauma”; and

“trauma polarizes consciousness into opposites… an overwhelming event, an event which cannot be contained for lack of analogies, traumatizes and polarizes the mind”; and

“To break out of the heterogeneous trauma cycle we need to enter the homeopathic mind. Like cures like… we can only turn an overwhelming event into an absorbable experience by comparing it with other resembling events. Together we can compare notes and read the larger story in terms of which we can locate ourselves uniquely, particularly, discretely”

(Greg Mogensen, A Most Accursed Religion – When Trauma Becomes a God, 2005)

The point being, life between the stories is born out of Breaker trauma into an extended traumatic-unknown, and requires, perhaps, a homeopathic dose of imaginal origin – a reconnection, a religio in fact, to bring about a matrix in which we can consciously comprehend our part in the new, emerging story. The homeopathic dose, for Western Civilization anyway, might properly be called Apollo.

Fracking the Unconscious

What is it, dear tenacious Breaker, that allows us to think something as self-evidently base as ‘hydrofracturing’ tight shale rocks for a meagre gruel of third division hydrocarbons is not only a good, right and proper idea – but is also practical evidence of our mastery, dominion and cleverness? The answer is in two parts – the first part, our old friend Progress; the second, what is often referred to as the‘problematique’. Progress, of course, refers to ‘movement toward’ a goal, place, person or thing – a directional spatial movement, making sense only relative to other motion – like the other ‘gress’ words: regress (movement in reverse), digress (movement away from, or turning aside), aggress (to initiate movement, especially in attack), congress (to move together), ingress (the movement into, entering) or egress (motion out of, exiting). Progress then, if it means anything, describes the imperative of ‘forward motion’ in a linear sequence – hence, lends itself to rational, horizontal, orderly, predictable, correct movement approved by our friend Historic Apollo.

The problematique, on the other hand, is ‘a structural model for enhancing human understanding and facilitating the development of action plans for correcting undesirable situations’ a sort of map of relationships between sub-problems within a holistic system of scalable problems; at its largest scale ‘all the things wrong in the world’ from war planning to philosophy via exponential growth, poverty, hunger and disease. It is a summation of all the territories we occupy by reason and logic, and an insurance policy against ‘acts of god’, wrapped in a hubristic self-anointed vision of human efficacy – we can anticipate, engage with and solve any and all problems.

It also functions as an imperative, since any technological ‘wins’ increase notional demand and efficiencies, victories are pyrrhic and brief (think 1950’s sci-fi visions of the future, then look out of your window – see any flying cars? Or open an energy bill – is there free fusion power? Are you and your loved ones disease-free, happiness-filled? You get the idea) and we’re quickly back into the exponential function, the laws of thermodynamics apply, the ‘law of the minimum’ butts in (my money is on available fresh water as the most effective limiting minimum), and it becomes apparent that entropy never sleeps. So we all go round again, but tighter this time, and then it occurs to us to start fracking the hell out of our bedrock, best idea we’ve had all day – proof of our innovative brilliance, but also of our fundamental limitation and capacity to sweet talk ourselves into filthy bubbles of oblivion. Besides, we love drilling stuff, we probably even call our drilling rigs and wells ‘Apollo’, in a nice phallic retooling of our rocketry phase (OK, in curiosity I just Googled ‘Apollo Drilling’ – there’s one in Victoria, Australia offering ‘diamond coring’, another in Colarado, USA engaged in ‘aggressive oil and gas development in the Rocky Mountain region’, one in Ontario, Canada drilling water wells… you can’t make this stuff up – in fact, you don’t have to!)

Even so, inwardly we frack the psyche as much as we could ever frack the Marcellus shale pockets for a squeezed in sweet spot or the Bakken bowl for tight oil, all the while pumping in a secret bespoke blend of propants and gels, surfactants and biocides, acidizers and casing cements in a manner that makes their ‘external’ analogues look marvellously clean and sane. Remember, we are the environment, the inner and outer are one, the flaring and venting aren’t only at the drill head, and the deployment of military-spec psy-ops personnel and methods is not accidental – we made them, trained them and invited them into our minds in a million choices and gasps of ‘progress’.

To whit, does it not strike you, as it does me, that the Scientistic world presided over by Tech-Apollo, in essence actually betrays itself from the very outset as a reductionist fake, not even believing its own plays? This goes to the root, behind the behaviours and technical displays, down into the subset of the worldview, the operating system itself. As Neuropsychiatrist and entheogen researcher Ede Frecska puts it“the most permissive, dispassionate scientific approach accepts universality as sufficient to establish phenomenological reality, but leaves the question open as to its ontological source”. So far, so fair. And yet, what we see in action in the play of Scientism is rather a different praxis, more in the nature of a cognitive schema. Hence materialist-scientism begins to look a lot like a depressed patient, its holy trinity of beliefs rather too-good a fit for the Beck triad. And so,

‘Man is a by-product of mere chance’ becomes ‘I am a worthless person’

‘We live in an alien universe ignorant of our destiny’ becomes ‘the world is an inhospitable place’

‘We come from nothingness and return there at death’ becomes ‘my past is a tragedy, my future is hopeless’

From this comparison Frecksa goes on to ask if Official Scientism is actually locked into a depressive micromanic delusion, manifesting as an extreme psychosis – fracking is now a symptom of despair, not grandiosity, of cynical delusion rather than super-narcissistic ‘right’.

“Can the negative thinking of Western rationalism lead to a pathologically flawed underestimation of the human potential in a manner akin to a psychotic depressive delusion?”

(Ede Freckska, ‘The Shaman’s Journey – Natural or Unnatural?’ In ‘Inner Paths to Outer Space’ Strassman et al, 2008)

Critic and writer John Horgan makes a similar point, speaking of Francis ‘DNA’ Crick:

“In a sense Crick is right. We are nothing but a pack of neurons. At the same time, neuroscience has so far proved to be oddly unsatisfactory. Explaining the mind in terms of neurons has not yielded much more insight or benefit than explaining the mind in terms of quarks and electrons. There are many alternative reductionisms. We are nothing but a pack of idiosyncratic genes. We are nothing but a pack of adaptations sculpted by natural selection. We are nothing but a pack of computational devices dedicated to different tasks. We are nothing but a pack of sexual neuroses. These proclamations, like Crick’s, are all defensible, and they are all inadequate”

(John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication and Explanation, 2000)

So it would seem our collective propitiating of the great god (algorithm?) Progress and his priestly caste of Official Scientists, Doctors and Technologists, is at best a late-flowering Venus flytrap of Breaker design. It will not translate into the ‘in-between’ stories of our time, it is guaranteed only to dish up the same unsatisfactory narratives we already know by hear. It will not help us, and it may very well kill us before we hear a better tale unfold. How much more interesting, then, to ingress, to go within-beyond, to follow not the white coats but the dreamers – the iatromantic pioneers of the deep past, incubating their consciousness into a different ground, in complementarity and service:

“In essence they manipulate non-local correlations and their conversion into local information, which may involve the transfer of direct-intuitive-nonlocal experience pertinent for healing to the level of cognitive symbolic processing”

(Frecska)

Which is, in effect, nuerobabble for shamanism.

Reductio ad Absurdum

A final stir of our stew, thrice-times three widdershins with a wink to our shade, Apollo. There is a process observed in neuroscience often called ‘the law of neural pruning’. It shows how at critical points in ontogenesis and immediately prior to developmental leaps, the brain experiences marked reductions in ever smaller scales of information processing systems. More dramatically, this process is sometimes referred to as ‘neuron death’ – so, for example, by the time of our birth we are already denuded by an order of magnitude of our neural potential whilst in the womb. By age two we experience axonal arborisation, hence the peaking of our capacity to lay down new nerve fibre (just as we deepen into socialization, communication, sharpened perception). At puberty we undergo synaptic pruning (linked to onset conditions for Piaget-like concrete formal operations, the basis of abstract thought). How shall we construe this? For the human brain, at least, via the evolutionary mechanism, it would seem pretty clear that less is more. Like a peasant with his pear tree, judicious pruning yields more fruit – reductions in overall complexity create abundant expressions in particular areas. According to Frecska there is no reason to believe that the ‘law of pruning’ ever ceases within a human life-cycle – intimating a possibility that wisdom states, higher states of consciousness, involve a pruning at the ‘microtubular’ level, privileging unitive states and nonlocal transpersonal compassion. Then of course, there is the small matter of death – the ‘egress’ – an ultimate reduction in neurocomplexity as the space-time organ of the brain functionally melts, or absorbs, as the tantras would have it. Open minded science theorists, like Stuart Hameroff give it form such as this:

“When the metabolism… is lost, the quantum information leaks out to the space-time geometry in the Universe at large. Being holographic and entangled, it doesn’t dissipate. Hence consciousness (or dream-like sub consciousness) can persist”

(Stuart Hameroff, ‘Quantum Consciousness’, 2007)

Returning then, to our entry point – musing on Apollo, his murder, his partial reconstruction, the god-shaped whole in our collective wisdom-wound – what exactly are we whispering?

Peter Kingsley gets explicit, speaking of the healing cults of Apollo, and the extensive Greek interaction with the East, at that time of the dimming of the Keeper story, the rise of the proto-Breakers :

“What would soon be covered over and rationalized in Greece was preserved and developed in India. What in the West had been an aspect of mystery, of initiation, became classified and formalized in the East. And there the state glimpsed by experienced Greeks – the state that could be called a dream but isn’t an ordinary dream, that’s like being awake but isn’t being awake, that’s like being asleep but isn’t – had its own names. Sometimes it was referred to as the ‘fourth’ turîya. It became better known by the title of samadhî.”

(Peter Kinglsey, ‘In the Dark Places of Wisdom’, 1999)

The missing shamanic god of the Greek founders, those who kept truth and seeded the West as we know it, is of course, Apollo. And how is he to be rehabilitated through us (it is we who need the god, after all, not the other way around)? Not through a wholesale co-opting of the remaining orient, for sure – nor through the commodification of the spirit, the ‘blank idiot’ hawking of McMindfulness on every corporate street-corner; no, my sense is that the way back to this Apollo, the Oulis, healer, who may be our best chance at bringing about the time of Menders, is subtle. It lies in the incubation, if you like – being the seed in the dark soil, breaking apart, keeping the shape, pruning away for the dream of a new fruit. And as we gestate our full term, incubating in the loam, remember Keats’s low-crawling worm daring to wear the laurel crown, the underground goer in the midnight court of the Sun King. Dawn, when it comes, may yet see the green Plutonic shoot stabbing its impossible thrust up through the concrete shield.

Flirtations Behind The Masks of Modernity

‘Forests precede us, deserts dog our heels’

Variously attributed (Franḉois-René de Chateaubriand/Derrick Jensen/Stanley Diamond)

Die before you die

The quote above, contested as it is in origin (or perhaps simply spontaneously arising to different mind at different times, like a rediscovered melody) poetically points at the most material and literal level of the human condition. How, through our agency, like so many hominid-locusts, our living arrangements and ways of being on the earth come to denude the Edenic primordial forest and leave behind us a newly minted desert. Blind to our effects we use and abuse, use up resources, and then virus-like move on (or, like bacteria in a petri dish, unable to grow beyond the glass, suffocate in our own toxic stew). It is hard, in this moment of the early twenty-first century, to ignore the message. Call it Fukushima, or exponential polar warming, or proxy resource war, despotic corporatism – its names are legion. All is yeast in – as the physicist Albert A Bartlett puts it

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”

(‘Arithmetic, Population & Energy’, 2004)

But surely, the old saw goes, we must object – humans are smarter than yeast? This is the very essence of a moot point.

To develop the theme, let’s hear from Chateaubriand again (definitely him, this time) from his journal April/September 1822:

“One does not learn how to die by killing others.”

(Mémoires d’outre-tombe Book IX: Ch. 4: Danton – Camille Desmoulins – Fabre d’Églantine)

A quickening insight, no? Could it be that this observation, especially harnessed to our initial quote of forests made deserts, begins to crack open this dilemma, letting us play Lear’s Fool and ‘cut the egg i’ th’ middle and eat up the meat’? In other words, does the collective human behaviour known as civilization, with its inevitable symptomatic destruction, actually have something to do with our relationship to death? And if so, what is the nature of this relationship, and what might it tell us about life? What is the agony, and the ecstasy? The rest of this piece is a beginning attempt to explore this territory.

To set out on the spoor of this idea we will do well to go equipped – the words of a guide may yet assist us. Stephen Jenkinson knows life and death, civilization and its actors – his Orphan Wisdom School offers us the following aid:

“Knowledge, in an information-drunk, competence addicted culture like our own, must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life live without killing life in the gathering.

Wisdom is the place where knowledge is fired, forged and annealed to become something of great beauty, useful to the world.

Human culture is made when that beauty swells into life and dies to nourish a time we won’t live to see.

Knowledge gathers wood and flint and gut. Wisdom conjures a cranky playable fiddle from the gatherings. People who have been bathed in grief and a love for life play some small magnificence on those fiddles together, and sing their unknown songs, and make human culture”

(Stephen Jenkinson, Orphan Wisdom, How It Could All Be, 2009)

Wilderness

So we should ask about those forests that precede us. What are they? What is their name? Wilderness.

“Wilderness. The word itself is music.

Wilderness, wilderness… we scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination”

(Edward Abbey, ‘Desert Solitaire’ 1968)

Wilderness, according to those directly experiencing it, consists of a tremendously potent cultural medicine – a sort of ayahuasca of the heart, if you will – distilled from abrupt and sublime direct sensory experience filtered through the admixture of nostalgia, the suggestion of deep origins, the womb of species-emergence, the remote, intimate, lost but present blood-song of loyalty to the living earth; beneath the tool-maker’s artefact, the muddy hand of Terra, Gaea, Cel, Pachamama, Mahimata, Tuuwaqatsi, Ninsun. Romantic? Yes, of course –and necessarily a part of our truth.

The point is that from the earliest moments our fire-monkey ancestors knew wilderness as home, indeed as mother. Consciousness-in-wilderness, or ‘wild mind’ for brevity’s sake, is our millennial inheritance; it continues to flow with this truth, underneath the cloacal anomalies of our multi-distorting modernity. Abbey, again;

“If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvellous, more than enough to console him for the loss of ancient dreams”

(Edward Abbey, ‘Desert Solitaire’, 1968)

So ‘Man the Abstractor’ divides in order to rule, but, with the elegant precision of the pathological symptom, even in the act of splitting he reveals himself to be rather less adept than his Abstractor vision suggests. Grandiose and doomed to misread the exponential function, we Fall. We fall into Aleph Null, the Guantanamo ‘feeding chair’ of transfinite cardinality. Whatever else we are, we are certainly not algorithmic, even (especially?) our torture routines impart a sensitivity to their own grammar, an exquisitely observed, post-conscious flicker of knowing . Almost immediately we reject our nature, identify with something other-than natural for

“Civilization is not natural, sustaining it entails a continuous input of matter, energy and morale without which it would necessarily decline or collapse”

(William Ophuls, ‘Immoderate Greatness – Why Civilizations Fall’, 2012)

Where can this go? Abbey, retro-pioneer of the ingrowing wild observes

“Men come and men go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear – the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break. Turning Plato and Hegel on their heads I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”

(Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968)

But we should also remember, as Peter Kingsley reminds us, that Civilisations never ‘just happen’, rather

“They are brought into existence quite consciously, with unbelievable compassion and determination, from another world. Then the job of people experienced in ecstasy is to prepare the soil for them, ; care for them; watch them grow. And each culture is like a tree whose essence and whole potential are already contained in the seed. Nothing during the course of a civilization is ever discovered, or invented, or created, which was not already present inside that seed.”

(Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting To Pierce You – Mongolia, Tibet & The Destiny of the Western World, 2010)

Suicide Is Painful

It would seem obvious at this point to notice, as others have done (notably Arnold Toynbee), that when it comes to the death of Civilizations, the cause is almost invariably suicide. It might look like barbarians, or a War on Terror, or a calamitous series of pernicious natural events, but these are usually only ‘precipitating factors’, the final push knocking over an already mouldering edifice. So are we culturally suicidal? I’m reminded of a nice soundbite, familiar to anyone who has undertaken the globally franchised Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST). This two-day training models itself on the practical ‘first aid’ approach, and certainly has a thoroughness and potency to it – but the phrase that sticks in my mind, in the context of the suicidal individual, is that ‘the part of you that wants to live is at risk from a part of you that wants to die’. There is a crisis of identification, indeed of the processes of identity itself. What if that were true at greater scales of magnitude, true of communities, cultures, Civilization itself? Wouldn’t that splitting of parts within a whole self, at any scale, indicate the trauma of the original wounding? Wouldn’t it also point us at the raw and red gateway into its very own possibility of healing? An open gate, bound by a red thread.

Thomas Berry, the Earth Scholar, frequently spoke of the need to ‘reinvent the human’ – could this have been a part of his meaning, a remembrance of that which has been split off, such that its reintegration is also a renewal? Psychologist and writer Bill Plotkin explores this edge in practical terms:

“We must reclaim and embody our original wholeness, our indigenous human nature granted to us by nature itself. And the key to reclaiming our original wholeness is not merely to suppress psychological symptoms, recover from addictions and trauma, manage stress, or refurbish dysfunctional relationships, but rather to fully flesh out our multifaceted, wild psyches, committing ourselves to the largest story we’re capable of living, serving something bigger than ourselves.”

(Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind – A Field Guide for the Human Psyche, 2012)

Another perspective on the same vista comes from the Buddhist teacher and poet, Thich Nhat Hanh:

“Maybe in 100 years there will be no more humans on the planet, in just 100 years.”

“Mass extinction has already happened five times and this one is the sixth. According to the Buddhist tradition there is no birth and no death. After extinction things will reappear in other forms, so you have to breathe very deeply in order to acknowledge the fact that we humans may disappear in just 100 years on earth.”

“You have to learn how to accept that hard fact. You should not be overwhelmed by despair. The solution is to learn how to touch eternity in the present moment. We have been talking about the environment as if it is something different from us, but we are the environment. The non-human elements are our environment, but we are the environment of non-human elements, so we are one with the environment. We are the environment. We are the earth and the earth has the capacity to restore balance and sometimes many species have to disappear for the balance restored. Maybe the flood, maybe the heat, maybe the air.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, Interviewed in The Ecologist, March 2012

It is at this point that we may benefit from a precise enquiry into the nature of ‘eternity in the present moment’ and ‘serving something bigger than ourselves’. A question that arises, out of Psychosynthesis, also out of the Field – ‘with what are you identified?’If we can answer this question in this moment, then we must also recognise the split we have been talking about – for who is asking the question, and of whom? This mapping of identification allows also for a sympathetic process of disidentification, a relaxing of previously brittle, brutal reductionist identifications, at first localised and intra-psychic, but increasingly, with practice, interpersonally and even transpersonally.

“Identification Means that Your Mind Takes a Certain State for Identity. What is disidentification really? To understand disidentification, you need to understand identification. To identify with anything, any state, means simply that your mind takes a certain state for identity. Your mind holds on to an expression, or a feeling, or a state, and uses it to define you. The mind then contracts around the state in the activity of holding onto it. This very contraction of the mind creates what we call “identity.” “

(AH Almaas, Diamond Heart Book III, p. 170,)

That contraction Almaas speaks of, so familiar and tight, but also subtle and diaphanous – is the very essence of what Buddhism refers to as dukkha, or suffering. It is the basic mode of identified, conditioned existence, inherently unsatisfactory, like a bent axle turning a misshapen wheel – it makes for a very bumpy ride. Nevertheless, as we will see, however much this mode of travel creates motion sickness in our psyches, we are generally loath to get off and walk – loyal to the last, we humans remain steeped in a preference for what we know, never more than in identity:

“Disidentifying With Ego Structures Often Exposes Deficiency

As we have seen in our case histories, disidentifying with an ego structure often exposes a sense of deficiency, lack or weakness, which is sometimes experienced as an emptiness, or more specifically, an empty hole. Allowing an understanding the deficient emptiness precipitates the emergence of the Personal Essence in consciousness.”

(AH Almaas Pearl Beyond Price, p. 134)

By ceasing identification, and by entering disidentification, we open ourselves to the experience of voidness – the ‘empty hole’, the very thing Civilization (in Freudian sense) is desperately intended to fill. How could a person, let alone a group or collective, let alone a whole Civilization, cultivate this disidentification, embrace the voidness at the core of the display, allow itself to feel the ‘deficient emptiness’ thoroughly enough that it affects being and creates an aperture for Personal Essence? There are, to be sure, no votes to be had from that ticket, no profit in truth. And yet, it is even harder than that – for disidentification even denies us what our Civilizing genes take as axiomatic – that we must ‘do something’:

“Disidentification Means the Cessation of Identification

So we can see why disidentification can’t be an activity; if it were an activity, it would not be disidentification, but identification with something else. It would be just a substitution. If there is someone who is moving away from something else, that someone must be identified with something, or at least with the desire to move away from something. Disidentification means the cessation of identification, the cessation of taking something to be you, or to belong to you, or to define you.”

(AH Almaas Diamond Heart Book III, p. 172)

The medicine is strong, the patient is critical, death is near – but Civilization can only see the cure as worse than the disease (i.e. itself) – better to embrace denial, follow the white rabbit down the rabbit-hole of consumerist display – keep putting lipstick on the spectacular pig, even as the pig putrefies in the evening heat, swart with flies. But this is wise medicine from which there is no escape -

“For here the lover and killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart”

(Keith Douglas, Vergissmeinnicht, 1944)

WB Yeats spoke of this edge in his profound tract, A Vision:

“A civilisation is a struggle to keep self-control, and in this it is like some great tragic person, some Niobe who must display an almost superhuman will, or the cry will not touch our sympathy. The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation – the scream of Juno’s peacock”

(WB Yeats, A Vision, 1925/1937)

And put in the heightened cadence of the lyric form:


The Gyres

The gyres! The gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;

Things thought too long can be no longer thought,

For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,

And ancient lineaments are blotted out.

Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;

Empedocles has thrown all things about;

Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy;

We that look on but laugh in tragic joy”

(WB Yeats, VP 564)


How then might we move from stuckness, through ‘tragic joy’ and despair, our own and that we were born into? Is this even possible to imagine, never mind achieve? The process of answering is itself a dying journey – we have to strike for the root:

“The future of humanity depends on psychology. I”ll give a very present instance, the problem of aggressive drives and averting war. History has proved that all other means, all legal means, treaties and agreements did not work, and do not work. We have to go at the root. And the root is the existence of aggressive drives, of self-assertion and the consequent conflicts which arise in all groups. Therefore, there is in psychology, and particularly in Psychosynthesis, the principle of transmutation of energies. Thus instinctive psychological energies can be transmuted and utilized, directed, and channelled to other constructive purposes.”

(Roberto Assagioli, from ‘An Interview with Roberto Assagioli’ , Conducted by Beverly Besmer, Source: Interpersonal Development 1973/4)

Put another way, with the precision of a pre-eminent spiritual technology and with reference to the rigours of object relations, Almaas gives us this clue:

“Two Ways to Develop the Capacity for Disidentification

The capacity for disidentification can develop in two ways: The first is by increasing the capacity to tolerate greater distance from certain self-representations, which allows us to experience Being more easily… The second way … is that our overall self-representation becomes so much more complete that our identity becomes very flexible. This ultimately leads to a strong general capacity for disidentification such that we can actually be disidentified from the overall self-representation while still maintaining our identity. This capacity requires thorough clarification, that is, objective understanding and seeing through delusions regarding the various segments of our self-representation. It also requires a measure of balance in our spiritual development: balance in relation to mind, heart and body for example; balance in relation to stillness and movement, knowledge and expression, and so on.”

(AH Almaas The Point of Existence, p. 128)

It is Being that sustains life, and our human ‘beingness’ that effortlessly holds the paradox of Civilization, directly, dare we say it, wildly. However, ‘what can be explained’ of course, ‘is not poetry’ to paraphrase Yeats once more; and yet it is to poetry, that ecstatic bastard child of culture and civilization at once despised and abandoned, occasionally feted, always suspect, eternally new-sprung from the horns of the moon, a wild demigod, sired out of earth and her imaginings, to Poetry indeed that we must turn, and climb up – a poetry that can be a hueco for us to press our loosening grip into.


Postscript from the Caucasus

An ancestral tale from a little used mirror.

“The Narts were courageous, energetic, bold, and good-hearted. Thus they lived until God sent down a small swallow.

“Do you want to be few and live a short life but have great fame and have your courage be an example for others forevermore?” asked the swallow. “or perhaps you would prefer that there will be many of you, that your numbers will be great, that you will have whatever you wish to eat and drink, that you will all live long lives but without ever knowing battle or glory?”

Then without calling a council, but with a reply as quick as thought itself, the Narts said “We do not want to be like cattle.

We do not want to reproduce in great numbers. We want to live with human dignity.

If our lives are to be short,

Then let our fame be great!

Let us not depart from truth!

Let fairness be our path!

Let us not know grief!

Let us live in freedom!”

In this way they chose to be small in numbers but to perform deeds of courage and boldness. This was the answer they gave to that small swallow to take back to God.”

(John Colarusso, Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs, 2002)

We are channels for the impossible, needing impossibility to pierce us all over again:

“A new civilization, any civilization including ours, is not only a miraculous gift. It always comes into existence out of the impossible.

And the impossible is impossible: is absolutely non-negotiable. But however simple that may sound, nothing can be more essential for us to understand.

The world we now live in is a world of infinite possibilities – which is why it has no future. The problem is that possibilities are nothing but finely modified, recalibrated versions of the old: the same recycling the same. And they swallow whatever energy we have left, devour our intelligence, gobble our hopes and aspirations, cheat us of time until we no longer remember what life is about”

(Peter Kinglsey, A Story Waiting to Pierce You, 2010)

Here’s to remembering, the wilderness that is the mind’s eternal frontier:

Sous le pave: la plage

“Are persons possible?”
R.D. Laing, ‘The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise’, 1967

In thinking and reflecting on human transformation and the healing work of psychotherapy (in the broadest terms), at least as I have come to know it over the past fourteen years or so, there is no question more pressing or more pertinent than this one, posed rhetorically in the Summer of Love, by the freshly lysergised anti-psychiatric prophet and ontologically unstable heretic, RD Laing.

I have had much cause to consider this fault-line of late, making changes in my own approach to therapeutic practice and the working arrangements that give form to that endeavour*; also in the avid micro-challenges of fathering a rapidly evolving being-of-his-own; or in contemplating the ravening forces of fear and desire as they perplex human activity, collective and individual, seemingly compelling an ever more desperate using up of the World, the Soul, the very Being of being human itself. The multi-fractal mirror of the ten thousand things throws up some alarming shadow play, to be sure – from the internecine divide-and-rule at play in mainstream therapies and the endless debates around their regulation (think of Laing on the early Behaviourist project, speaking of the guys who put the B in CBT – he noted, presciently, that such an approach is “a technique of non-meeting, of manipulation and control” whilst going on to argue, profoundly by today’s standards, that psychotherapy, if it is to mean anything “must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover he wholeness of being human through the relationship between them”), to the almost complete and exponential loss of arctic sea ice, or the collapsing arc of the narrative of endless and universal human progress. The snapshot of the moment reveals a collective humanity hunched over in the foetal position, whether through the pathos of its fearful regression, the rising nausea of complicity and shame, or perhaps a recently delivered sharp kick to the groin, otherwise known as hard resource limits.
These are times beyond interesting, perhaps better approached in the manner of Jean Cocteau, who wrote:

“the creative breath comes from a zone of man where man cannot descend, even if Virgil himself were to lead him, for Virgil would not go down there”

He is right about creativity, I attest, that crucible of irrational urgency contradistinct from what Laing named “the hell of frenetic passivity”. We have no idea where comes that animating breath, we respond and create because we must, because not to do so becomes impossible. Laing again:

“From the point of view of a man alienated from his source creation arises from despair and ends in failure. But such a man has not trodden the path to the end of time, to the end of space, the end of darkness and the end of light. He does not know that where it all ends, there it all begins.”

Apart from anything else this is a deft and sanguine response to the suicidal impulse. But it points further, over here, with no Virgil holding our hand, beyond and behind the rational light of Science (and its corpulent stepchild, Scientism) in between turns in the oldest game of all, where Heidegger noticed that ‘The Dreadful has already happened’, here, where we are on our own with what is, is the unrespected grace that deigns to destroy our normality, annihilating, be it only for a second, our piece of the lie. Here in the Zen-time of All-space, where Bankei’s(1) black Tuberculotic phlegm still slowly dribbles down the wall, ‘all things are resolved in the Unborn’. All is very well. We see with all three eyes, in shocking superchromonic precision, that all we took to be data before was merely ‘capta’ (a ‘toxic mimic’ of data, in the ‘language older than words’ as Derrick Jensen shows us) – it told us nothing of nature, but everything about our own processes as performed upon nature – revealing the Maya of our veiled seeing, the ‘protection racket’ of the alienated self, the fundamental repression of Eros – the insight goes by many names. So we come to see how it is true that we are all ‘murderers and prostitutes’ (Laing), and yet who is this ‘I’ or ‘We’ that appears to perceive the insight at all? It can’t be found, but it is profoundly there nonetheless. Are persons possible?

Back in the illusory play of solid appearances known as ‘normal life’, Laing’s operative conclusion for Psychology (and the therapeutics she nurtures) was this:

“The true field of Psychology is ‘inter-experience’ “

Or put another way

“Personal relationship is not only transactional, it is transexperiential and herein is its specific human quality”
Or more poetically

“We are not able even to think adequately about behaviour that is at the annihilating edge.
But what we think is less than what we know:
What we know is less than what we love:
What we love is so much less that what there is.
And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are”.

Synthesisers

These are a lot of words, to which I will add a few more, before silence prevails – silence from which all sound arises, hence the hallmark of the creative in-between. It will come as no surprise to you to state the obvious, we face a crisis, I in my own life and work, you in yours, all of us together in this matrix of light and protein, this amazing balance of life-supporting gases, liquids and solids, energised in loving electro-bio-chemical form. As with all crises, there appears to be a blank and bold choice between polarities – live or die, extinction or prosperity. But this is not true, or is true only within very narrow terms. Roberto Assagioli, founder of Psychosynthesis, in the tradition of Keyserling(2), speaks of polarities or opposites as ‘tensions’ and, critically, goes beyond the Jungian conception of duality as ‘horizontal’ to the’vertical’ axis, the ‘dimension of intensity’. Pursuing his realisation towards a method useful to Psychology, Assagioli sketched a threefold process for ‘resolving polar tensions’ – namely:
i. Fusion of the two poles, involving the neutralization of their charges of energy
ii. Creation of a new being, a new reality
iii. Adjustment of the (originally) opposite poles (by an intermediary centre or principle higher than both)
To flesh this out, one feels the polarities as they exist initially, then evokes a ’middle way’, a point between wherein the amplitude of felt oscillation flattens out. Next emerges a form to that midpoint, a new expression or synthesis, and finally, from this establishing synthetic principle a regulation flows back into the dynamic of the original polarity. Hence, optimism polarises pessimism and is mediated by, on the horizontal axis, practical realism, but on the vertical plane, a sense of enhanced vision of reality, for example. Assagioli represented these triads in diagrams using triangle forms, the opposing polarities in the two bottom corners split by the horizontal midpoint, the point of the triangle representing the higher synthetic element. He gave many examples, such as the polarity of excitement versus depression, horizontally mediated by apathy (or calmness) and synthesised via Serenity. He wrote extensively of the need for individual work, for the shaping of the synthesis to the person, the embedding of resistance and the clear identification of this process as genuinely transformative not an agency of suppression/repression or denial. His is an experiential insight, available to felt experience – and, going back to Laing again for a moment “my psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche”.

I would like to suggest that Assagioli’s insight is actually an emergent phenomenon of life processes themselves. Since, as a Psychosynthesis therapist I, like others, often meet with blank eyed indifference to Assagioli’s little known work, and since more than one colleague has referred to me in the past as a ‘photosynthesist’, indulge me while I take that literally a moment.
Imagine the moment around 3.9 billion years ago, the Earth’s rich movement toward life is producing complex chemical development but is slowing down, threatening the abundant population of prokaryotic cells (bacteria, algae etc) that derived life-energy by consuming the chemical compounds. A major polarity crisis manifested – threatening an extinction level die-off of these (and all subsequent) forms. Yet, from the Unborn, the Unmanifest, the Creative place – whatever we call it, what actually arose was a defining paradigmatic shift the nature of which effects life as we know it to this moment – you and me very much included. Instead of carrying on with business as usual, or dying off, a few prokaryotes somehow evolved the capacity to capture photons from the abundant sunlight and to metabolise them into food (glucose)(3). Photosynthesis was born. Life continued and diversified unimaginably, and plant life gave rise to an atmosphere populated with enough oxygen to support animal respiration and, eventually, human bodies and their strange little minds. A crisis became a supremely creative junction, a truly incredible leap in life’s capacity for life. And the photosynthesis process gave rise to chlorophyll – the greening of the Earth. Apparently, this fluid derived from seawater, just as our own blood did, indeed just one ion’s difference (from magnesium to iron) separates the chlorophyll in your favourite tree or houseplant from the blood in your very own veins. We really are that close, life is that intimate.
All of which, to me at least, points at the need to remember what the poet David Whyte calls ‘the Conversation’(4), to rejoin with our presence the ongoing flow of awareness. The writer and teacher Stephen Jenksinosn refers to the same conversation with explicit reference to death and dying when he notes ‘good conversation can change a lot of things. Like valleys full of reasons to live, good conversations between people can give you your life. Like all things worth the trouble, good conversations are part intuition part labour; the lion’s share perspiration, the grace note inspiration. In that way they have a proper architecture.’(5) How interesting that all these conversations tend towards the Earth, the land herself. Underneath the artefacts of human culture and even the human contact of relationship, so central and beautiful, there is yet further to deepen. Language brings us metaphors of place, the soil, that individual tree, the connecting tissue of heart to rock to wing, red blood to green chlorophyll. And how much grief have we then to taste, orphaned as we are from our own rootedness, split off from our true indigenous inheritance, divorced by ‘progress’ and our millennial collusions in the traumatic processes of history. In the last analysis, it is loss of our relationship to, our conversation with our land that completes our multi-layered alienation. For example, after contact with white Europeans, native peoples throughout the Americas felt this cycle at first hand – the loss of sovereignty, religion, trade leverage, distinct identity and finally, the land itself – resistance, be it Tecumseh and Prophetstown, Pontiac, King Philip or Pine Ridge (and many celebrated others), inevitably leads back to grieving for the lost land:
“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land and they took it. It was not hard to see that the white people coveted every inch of land on which we lived. Greed. Humans wanted the last bit of ground which supported Indian feet. It was land – it has ever been land – for which the White man oppresses the Indian and to gain possession of which he commits any crime. Treaties that have been made are vain attempts to save a little of the fatherland, treaties holy to us by the smoke of the pipe – but nothing is holy to the white man. Little by little, with greed and cruelty unsurpassed by the animal, he has taken all. The loaf is gone and now the white man wants the crumbs.” –Luther Standing Bear(6)

“I feel the leaf’s connection to the story of photosynthesis, thus to the relationship of Earth and Sun, and back through time to the birth of stars. My stillness is now linked to some greater equanimity that began with the first flicker of earlier suns, to some embrace from beyond that my mind will never fully grasp.”
Echoing Walt Whitman, the American Blake
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”

Notes

*I am referring to my decision to quit my role as a University counsellor, something I have done for the past nine years. This is the time to give full efforts and attention to my psychotherapy work in private contexts outside of institutional settings, working with individuals, couples and groups; also to develop my teaching of Mindfulness and related phenomenological/spiritual approaches, and to give more time to my writing

1 Bankei was a Japanese Rinzai Zen master 1622-1693, who famously attained the awakened state when near death through the TB that was symptomatic of his ascetic striving. According to Adyashanti, Bankei’s exemplar teaching around the Unborn arose out of the exhaustion of his own driven and striving nature. He concluded that “By detaching from those illusions and fixations, neither trying to prevent them nor trying to encourage further thought [...] they will certainly stop of themselves.”

2 Hermann Graf Keyserling, 1880-1946, aristocratic German philosopher of Spirit and founder of the School of Wisdom, he counted CG Jung, Rabindranath Tagore and Herman Hesse, as well as Assagioli, among his friends and supporters

3 Photosynthesis is represented by the generic equation water + carbon dioxide + energy from the sun = glucose + oxygen or H2O + CO2 + energy = C6H12O6 + O2. Chlorophyll appears in a variety of forms, for example, C55H72O5N4Mg whereas blood can be represented generically as C738H1166N812O203S2Fe. Donald Culross Peattie, botanist and author of Flowering Earth, noted in comparing chlorophyll with blood that ‘The one significant difference in the two structural formulas is this: that the hub of every hemoglobin molecule is one atom of iron, while in chlorophyll it is one atom of magnesium. Just as chlorophyll is green because magnesium absorbs all but the green light spectrum, blood is red because iron absorbs all but the red. Chlorophyll is green blood. It is designed to capture light; blood is designed to capture oxygen.’
Astronomer and mathematician Fred Hoyle conjectured that chlorophyll was likely to be an interstellar molecule, pointing out the similarities of its light absorbing properties to interstellar dust.

4 As, for example in his 2003 poem ‘Everything is Waiting for You’ – a hymn to the oneness of the ten thousand things:

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice

You must note the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink,

the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last.

All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you

David Whyte, Many Rivers Press

5 Stephen Jenkinson, from ‘How it could all be’, part of his Orphan Wisdom teachings; see also the documentary film ‘Griefwalker’, an exploration beyond the ‘death trade’ towards a new culture of intimacy with our mortal edge

6 Luther Standing Bear 1868-1939, (AKA Ota Kte “Plenty Kill” ) Oglala Lakota Chief notable in American history as one of the first Native American authors, educators, philosophers and actors of the 20th century