A Renaissance of Love

From the primordial swirling void, the abyss of chaos, the dream of order begins to emerge.

Divisions occur. First the division of light and dark. Sea and sky. The upper world and the lower world. The first divisions lead to the second, then the third, on and on just as the sperm and egg divide to create the zygote, the fetus, the child. The great song is sung. The great dream is dreamed. The writhing void has become the infinite variety of form. The veil, the forgetting spell, has dropped between each perceived individual form, allowing the great drama of otherness to unfold upon the continuum of energy that is Oneness, vibrating at different frequencies to create and hold the polarities of form.

Time is born. The movement of divisions through the explosion of birth allows for the infinite mind to project itself into the enchantment of finiteness. The Oneness can experience itself from the perspective of a single celled organism, or a galaxy. The polarities are stretched further and further apart, creating the necessary tension for the third thing to emerge. Over and over this stretching, this tension, this birthing. With each new birthing, a new enchantment of forgetting.

The wholeness of the Void continues to weave itself into every fractal of division. The seed moment of that first division, the longing for reunion that was also birthed in that seminal bang, is a holographic imprint on every form, every event, every moment that emerges as a wave upon the waters of time. The light longs for the darkness. The sea evaporates into the sky and the oxygen dissolves into the sea. The taoist yin/yang symbol captures thish essential yearning, this longing for the estranged self that exists within every polarity. The whole of life is a longing, an ache that exists beneath our forgetting, beneath the enchantment of the veil. Our bones remember our wholeness. The saltwater in our blood knows it is the sea. Holding this finite perception, this singularity, is like holding our breath for a lifetime, knowing that we will again join the unboundaried, fluid, ecstatic pulsing of the Great Unfolding of Being.

I remember sitting with my spiritual director in 2009 and suddenly deeply understand that God is a verb. Everything we see is the great Godding. The unfolding of this intentional experiment of separateness. God is both the Truth, the static Oneness of all form united as the Energy of consciousness, and the active manifestation of division and uniqueness and diversity and finiteness. The paradox of being both everything and each individual thing opened a door in my mind, and I have been exploring the corridors behind that door for the past 12 years. Part of the enchantment of the forgetting, at least in humans, is the impulse to aggrandize the polarity of our finite consciousness. We seem to be tasked with the part of the experiment where we take the polarity of individuality to its most extreme conclusion, testing how far from the sea of Oneness we can stretch our illusory perception before the thread breaks.

The thread holding the vibration of human form to the ecosystem of life on Gaia is fraying. And along with it are the threads of many other beings and species. Our forgetting has become so great and so complete that we are testing the foundations of our life support system. Gaia herself is a closed system (maybe not as much as we think, but at our current level of understanding she is a closed system). Minerals cycle on the earth from death to life to death, across oceans and deserts, to feed and nourish the ecosystems of this planet. Human activity has drastically disrupting this nutrient cycling. We have disrupted the wise movement of water. We have disrupted the flow of decomposing organic matter to build soil for fecundity and life. We have largely stopped trying to see the inherent wisdom of Gaia and to cooperate with that wisdom, and instead we have terraformed the world as a servant to the interests of humans.

When there were many gods, and those gods vibrated with the multiplicty of human experience on Earth, tied intimately to the processes of nature and landscapes, we were careful to ensure that our activities did not anger or threaten or disrespect these gods. If we erred in our judgement, we would look for feedback from the earth herself, so that we could quickly correct our missteps. If weather patterns changed, if plague or famine came, if malaise fell upon our people, we would look to the gods manifest as nature herself for the answer. Then, One god came to rule them all. The god of the Hebrews. El. The descendants of Abraham gobbled up the gods of the mountains and the seas and the rivers. Systematically, the tribes of Jacob moved across the earth ingesting and digesting the stories that tied the people to throbbing aliveness of the Earth and her processes. The place-based, intimate, accountability of the indigenous worldview was replaced with the transcendent, empire-building of the children of El.

This one god of the descendants of Abraham was elevated in the image that man was developing of himself….all-seeing, all-knowing, perfect, holding dominion and power over all things. Jealous. Wrathful. Punishing. The mind’s obsession with its own individuality and grandeur was projected upon this great King of a god, and from this god-king man gave himself permission to enact great horrors and brutality upon other humans, creatures, and the landscape itself.

2000 years ago a man was born among the descendants of Abraham. He came to fulfill a prophecy, and to bend the story back to its origin, to the union of life and death and to the accountability of man to their brothers and sisters, and to all creatures upon the earth. He carried the energy of writhing void, the wholeness that existed before the great division, and he offered the flesh of his body to the spears of polarity to prove that our essence exists outside of form. That these bodies are manifestations of the Great Love that is pulsing and throbbing and ebbing and flowing within every atom of the universe. His story was taken up by the empire builders, and used to further eradicate and destroy the wild diversity of Gaia’s people. He was made into a savior. A single entry point to some far away heaven. He became a gatekeeper, a divider, a source of Othering. This is one of the great tragedies of the human story. A being so filled with the radiance of the Oneness behind all separateness, being used as an instrument of division. My heart breaks everytime I think of this cruel twist, and yet I know that it is an essential part of our story.

From this place, from this now moment in my finite human experience, perched on the cresting wave of time, I can feel the ache so strongly. The polarities are so extreme in the human experience right now that the only thing that can happen is a great birthing. From this incredible tension of the opposites existing so far from reconciliation, the Oneness is rushing in to infuse the story with emergence. When I look with deathless eyes, using the vision that the great Magician Jesus lends to me, I can see that a great diversity is emerging among the humans now. The texture and nuance and subtlety of our sexuality, our art, our love, our longing, is casting a new glow and a new radiance among the tapestry of human existence. Humans are changing the way we see the spectrum of color, sexuality and gender, learning ability, physical prowess. There is a renaissance of emotional depth and reverence for the unique complexity of human identity and experience. It is bubbling and gurgling and surfacing, straight from the gaping mouth of the writing void herself. From the apparent division and violence and bigotry, a potent fuel is being added to this fire of emergence. The friction feels to me like the friction of love making. The Great Mother, in her pain and in her ecstasy, is birthing a new consciousness upon the two legged children of the Earth. As with any developmental leap, it is awkward and clumsy and a bit gangly, but the growth is happening. It is all around us. We are becoming more whole, the polarity of difference is collapsing toward an ecstatic celebration of our diversity. The movement toward reverence and deep seeing of the beauty of the Other will require us to move through many layers of grief as we reconcile the impact of the brutality of so many generations of violent non-consentual violation by empire. I can see, though, that on the other side of our grief and our anger is a sense of homecoming. We will be welcomed back into the web of life, sharing in the complex and fertile diversity of all life here.

The old gods are waiting for us to remember them, and they are drawing near. Like us, they are diverse, imperfect, growing, striving, changing, creating, destroying. They are immanent and real and here. They are not withholding themselves from us until death when we are tested to see if we have earned their love or their aid. That old story is a weapon of Empire to ensure obedience by the smoke and mirrors of fear and control. The Earth is alive. Every atom is a mirror of the whole combustible magnificence of this existence. Every moment contains all moments. The door is everywhere and the only gatekeeper is our willingness to remember the truth of the longing beneath the enchantment of our forgetting.