SOUL-LOSS, DEATH AND THE DREAMING

Maybe there are many different planets we could have been born on. They are probably not the discrete places we think. The Earth is the dreaming that we live in for now. This resistant material reality, that appears so fixed and external to ourselves, is fluid, it is dreamed. It is a flux of overlapping dreamings. It is mysterious and unknowable. Science can only ever give us a very thin slice of reality, on a 'let's pretend' principle that the universe is real and external to ourselves.

Maybe there are different planets according to the different dreamings that they are expressions of. This planet is not an easy one. It seems to me that we are here not so much to be happy, as to learn stuff and transform. Otherwise why do so many of us seem to spend our lives recovering from our childhoods, like something went wrong and, so it can seem, our real life will begin once we have sorted it all out?

I'm not saying that things don't actually go wrong in childhood, it is horrendous for some people. But it can also give us something to struggle with, that may take most of our lives, and it makes us who we are. It is a warrior thing. We are here to struggle to become who we are, and life will present the discomforts that can push us to do that, if we choose. Or we can self-medicate, as it's called nowadays.

Whether people make that choice, and to what degree, is a mysterious thing. Our job can be to help people make that choice more deeply, but we can't do it for them. So you're ill? Do you really want to get well? Why? What is it that gives your life meaning?

'Soul retrieval', as we have come to call it, is something that people usually do for themselves. It is not just about bringing back bits that went missing in childhood. A load of other stuff comes with it. It is about the next stage in our overall unfoldment too. From this point of view, soul loss can serve a purpose, it can be a necessary thing, giving us something much greater than we would have had when it eventually returns, and giving us something to struggle with along the way.

I'd much rather spend time getting to know people and in some way help facilitate them finding their own bits of soul, than engage in what I reckon can sometimes be a fantasy that we, or the spirits, are doing it for them. Sure, we can nudge things along, it's a beautiful and mysterious thing when we do, it's part of our job description. But I think our bigger job is being part of, and witnessing, their lives over a longer period, and providing that reminder of, and connection to Spirit, when needed.

 

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Maybe the most important part of the service we provide is like an initiation, it is energetic. Something of who we are rubs off on the other person, our connection to Spirit opens up a deeper connection in them, just by them being around us and paying attention. It changes us, too.

I think it can sometimes feel like we've bitten off more than we can chew in this lifetime. Maybe some of us have. I think there has to have been an element of choice, conscious or unconscious, in the lives we were born into. Maybe we just went with what felt familiar, which is often how life itself gets lived. Whether it was that New Age 'contract', where you almost sign on the dotted line with your spirit guides, is another matter. But there is a point in that, it can give a perspective on our difficulties and struggles as something we signed up to, in order to learn from.

Death. We are only here for a short period. As we approach death – in the sense that we may only have 20 or 30 years left – I think the dream-like nature of this existence starts to become clearer. Those things that seemed so important to us when we were younger no longer have the same hold over us. Death can need to be unreal when we are younger, for the living of our naïve dreams is often predicated on that.

What happens when those youthful dreams have been lived, what gives our life meaning now? That is almost a definition of the mid-life crisis, which can begin at any age, and go on for the rest of our lives. Maybe we will just get ill and die. Or maybe our values slowly shift. The sense of being alive is itself meaningful, and maybe that is how it ends up. There is nothing to be deliberately achieved, just life to be a part of.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t still be struggles. In a sense, more can be demanded of us as we age. We are hopefully more aligned, more in balance with life itself, which is a deep thing that flows through us. Life can therefore do more with us. There can be deep renewals as we age, a sense of youthfulness that we didn’t have to the same degree when we were physically youthful. We are a part of life, we do not own our lives: realising that makes things so much easier.

We still may not always be happy. But that isn’t the point. The point as we age is to stay at that coal-face of ourselves, the difficult places, that we learn from. There is a deep sense of meaning in that, beside which the pursuit of ‘happiness’ pales. And it’s not for that much longer, either. We know how quickly 20 years passes.

This earth-dreaming is a special place, where we have the opportunity to learn deeply, to transform. Maybe not all dreamings are like that, maybe some are easier, and maybe we will have earned a break for the next lifetime. But make the most of this one while you are here: stay at that meaningful, life-giving coal-face.

Evolution vs The Perennial Philosophy

I don't believe that consciousness 'evolves'. Evolution is a 19th century abstraction that we impose on our experience. And I'm suspicious, because the primary mechanism for evolution is 'survival of the fittest', a harsh and unforgiving ethos that merely reflects the capitalism of the day. A Creation Myth (for that is what it is) that justifies the worst in human nature.

A few months ago I had a dream in which I saw a speckled moth, beautifully part of and belonging to its surroundings, and at the same time I understood that evolution as we know it told us virtually nothing about how this moth came to be.

I'm not a creationist. You could say I'm a metaphysical agnostic: I just don't know how these things come to be, and I don't think they can be understood in any simple 'rational' way.

I think that Evolution is generally understood mythologically rather than scientifically. This is because most of us haven't seriously studied the evidence, yet so many accept it as a fact that you don't seriously question. It is therefore mostly a belief. We accept it because it tells a story about how we came to be, that is more acceptable nowadays than the Biblical creation myth. We accept it more for emotional than intellectual reasons.

There is nothing wrong with this. We need stories about the world that are emotionally appealing. It has always been this way. These stories contain truths about existence, and ideally you need some of them to contradict each other, just so we don't think we are in possession of the 'one truth'.

The problem with evolution as a story is that it twists life into a brutal struggle, and reduces the scope of existence to the visible, material world. (As quantum physicists have asserted, it is consciousness, not matter, that is primary.) Evolution is a story posing as an unassailable fact, that continues in an inverted form the brutal creation myth of the Old Testament.

It is this resonance with what came before that contributes to the emotional appeal of evolution. Intellectually we are satisfied because evolution opposes the religion we have left, emotionally we are satisfied because it resembles that religion, with the added bonus that humans are now at the top of the Great Chain of Being instead of somewhere in the middle.

It is because of this emotional appeal that Evolution is firmly accepted as a theory on the basis of evidence that would be laughed out of court in most other scientific disciplines. There is more direct evidence, for example, of homeopathy working, but again for emotional reasons, that evidence is frequently rejected.

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No-one has seen evolution occur, the most we have directly seen is a bit of adaption to circumstances, which is not the same thing. The evidence is partial and circumstantial. Something has gone on, we know that from the fossil record. And DNA studies show that all forms of life on earth are closely related to one another, which is a wonderful result.

But how a whole new species arises is not understood. Assuming it is consciousness, not matter, that is primary (though that statement itself suggests a divide between matter and consciousness that I don't think exists), I think new species are dreamed into being by consciousness, as much as they are generated by physical processes.

Though to what purpose they are dreamed into being is a mystery, part of the Great Mystery, the unknowability of existence.

This piece was prompted by an article by astrologer Glenn Perry, in which he sets the development of astrology in the context of a purported 'evolution' of human consciousness, in which he (wrong-headedly) declares "It must be emphasized that human awareness at this stage (4000 B.C.-1500 B.C.) was still quite dim, more like a toddler’s consciousness than a modern adult human."

Evolution has become central to the way we think about life, and it is natural to take the step of thinking of evolution as not just a physical process but as a mental/emotional process.

Evolution implies progress from an inferior stage to a superior stage of life. It is not just saying that change occurs - which would be fair enough - but that there is a value to it that makes the later stage in some way 'better' than the earlier stage.

It is one way of making sense of human history, but I think it is hard to get away from the implication that we are more 'advanced' than our forebears. I don't think this is justified, and if you junk that idea, then I think you have to junk the whole idea that human consciousness 'evolves'.

I used to have a Canadian Indian friend visit (yes, they call themselves Indians, not native this or that) and he was brought up speaking the language of the Chippewa Cree and immersed in their stories and philosophy. One thing that impressed me was their subtle understanding, through the stories of Wisahitsa, of the human ego and the tricks it gets up to: one of those tricks would surely be the self-important idea that we are 'superior' to our ancestors! Philosophically the tradition is keenly aware of how unknowable the universe is, refusing, for example, to take a position on what happens after death. And their philosophy and psychology is set in the richly imaginative context of the traditional stories, which my friend was able not just to tell but to expound on their meanings.

The usual patronising evolutionary story is that early people had their wonderful participation mystique with nature, which we have lost, but that is the price we have had to pay for the development of self-awareness, individuality, a strong ego and rationality.

In "The Passion of the Western Mind", astrologer Richard Tarnas says that it has been the task of masculine consciousness to forge its own autonomy and then come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, and thus recover its connection with the whole. This will constitute "the fulfillment of the underlying goal of Western intellectual and spiritual evolution." (p442)

In "The Philosopher's Secret Fire" (pp 263-6), Patrick Harpur takes issue with this position: "Evolution is a spirit notion which soul does not recognise. Traditional societies do not evolve. They live within a mythology which contains all imaginative possibilities, Earth Goddesses no less than Heraclean egos... Because we are changing, we think of ourselves as evolving. We are not. We are literalising the old myths...  If the rational ego is to disappear it is more likely to be destroyed by the ricochets of ideologies made in its own image."

My experience with my Indian friend suggested to me that early peoples are NOT lacking in rational egos - if you think about it, they needed to be a lot more creative and thoughtful than we need to be just to survive, apart from any philosophical sophistication they may have had - but rather, that ego has not become divorced from a sense of participation in nature.

As the poet Ted Hughes said: "The story of mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man."

I think that is the real story.

I think there are perennial truths about existence that have always been available to people from the earliest times, along with elements in our nature that can take us away from those truths. And the big truth we have lost is a felt sense of our participation in nature. What has gradually developed over the last few thousand years - ever since Plato and his separation of 'ideal forms' from nature - has been a massive loss of soul.

For a great exposition of this theme, see Anne Baring's book The Dream of the Cosmos. She explores this idea in the context of a well-researched account of the shift from lunar to solar mythologies.

There has been dazzling technological progress, and in a way it is natural to assume that makes us more 'advanced' than people who do not have that technology - as if we personally invented it! But I don't think it has made us more whole as humans.

What has developed has not been the rational ego - that has always been there - but the rational ego divorced from nature. Nature as something we can separate ourselves from and look on dispassionately, out of which has come at least as much harm as good, as the environmental crisis testifies to.


I think it is possible to view much of the technological progress of recent times as a mad dream created by an out-of-control rational ego. We didn't need all this technology for tens of thousands of years. It has been produced by a crazed mind, crazed because it has lost its roots in who it is.

The world we live in needs re-dreaming. We need to recover the perennial truths of existence, in which we are participants in, rather than observers of, the cosmos, and use that as a point of balance.
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