Discuss: Sunrise on the Medicine Wheel

Hello, Elizabeth,

Thank you for the excellent, thoughtful article. I will have to read it several more times, I think, in order to get the full benefit of your perceptions and efforts.

In the meantime, I’d like to mention several points that struck me as unusually important.

(1)  “. . . there may be an additional truth here, IN THE SHADOWS OF OUR UNDERSTANDING.”

This is a crucial insight at a time when we are still apparently so bedazzled by the bright light of our knowledge that we think WE can “solve” the very problems WE created. You rightly suggest that we have to explore the “shadows of our understanding” to find what we seek. In other words, we have to consult a different dimension of our being if we are to “unwind” the fate we are spinning for ourselves.

I recently had what was to me a stunning dream that touches on this. The dream simply said: “New Age = The Coming Birth of the Unconscious.” I take it that the “ coming birth” refers to the advent into consciousness of new awarenesses, which can only come from the “shadows of our understanding,” i.e., the unconscious. Paradoxically, these awarenesses are both “new” and “old” at the same time. You hint at this in your comment regarding the world “in which our bodies and brains evolved.” We have to re-connect with the deepest “genetic-coding” of our evolutionary past, in order to meet the evolutionary demands of our future. In other words, we have to attend consciously to the Birth of the Unconsious.

(2)  “But speculation, possibility, those are the rays along which we can train our gaze, to see whether they connect us with anything greater than ourselves.”

To see speculatively and imaginatively, and thereby to discern the future possibilities that are embedded in the present, is one of our greatest tasks. Without it, how can we possibly hope to fashion a vision adequate to the challenges we face?

One could almost say, without doing injustice to your fine article, that our biggest challenge is to return to the deep imagination, which is, after all, the well-spring of creativity.

Thanks again for the article.

Paco Mitchell
http-//heronnotebook.blogspot.com

Elizabeth, Thank you for reminding me of what is in my back yard so to speak. I’ll offer a little prayer for you as I watch the sun rise over the medicine wheel at the summer solstice.

Elizabeth -  I enjoyed being with you at the site of the Medicine Wheel and the awareness it brings of the limitless universe being intimately connected to our individual personae.  Of course the knowledge and discussion you develop from your starting point deepen this realization of the interconnectedness of everything.
So interesting that our bodies record forever atmospheric conditions!

Just staying out all night star gazing helps us transcend limitations we place on self.

There is always change:  catastrophic or almost unnoticeable.  Humans have been able to adapt. But will an immense change in a short time period cause another mass extinction of many life forms including us?
The resilience available in the past in the form of uninhabited lands and much less population is no longer there.

We don’t know.  Although perhaps our human awareness is unique in the universe (could that be?), we of course know very little universe wise.  You are right.  New things have developed out of tragic circumstances. 

So I shall continue to look out at the Milky Way and like the indians feel that it is a path to greater things.

I’ll still work to try to stop the build-up of green house gases that WE ARE CAUSING in the hopes that it can lessen the effects of a global warming. 

Thanks for the excursion.  Marge Streckfus, Salina.

Dear Paco, Richard, and Marjorie,

I thank you for the care and enthusiasm with which you read my piece!  Marge, it’s very true, that “resilience” of diverse, intact habitats is degraded at best, gone at worst.  That’s simply a fact, a deeply sobering one. I don’t mean at all to imply that simply changing our attitude or outlook can rectify the physical damage we’ve done.  But I think, with Paco, that the “deep imagination” allows us access to aspects of our humanity that precede the settled life of agriculture city-building, and we’ll need to draw on responses—emotional, creative, intellectual—that are different from the ones we relied upon to cause this mess.  Even then, there’s no guarantee.  But there is possibility.
—Elizabeth

Hi Elizabeth,

Thanks for the reply. Curiously, I’ve just been reading a 30-year-old book by Theodore Roszak called Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (1978). Apparently, he was way ahead of his time, since collectively we still haven’t “gotten” the message. But all we can do is keep trying and, above all, working on ourselves.

I want to offer an extended excerpt from his book, because I find it so cogent today and still eloquent:

“Can a few generations of urbanization and a century or two of scientific skepticism really be enough to cut us off forever from the sense of vital reciprocity between ourselves and the planet that was once the universal knowledge of our race? I think none of us who have experienced even a glimmer of that living continuity should find it hard to accept that our destiny is tied to the need and the will of the Earth. Perhaps what we lack is only the courage to speak what we know.

“How, then, could we now pass into an era of acute ecological emergency, as terrible an emergency as the planetary biosphere has ever known, and not feel the tug of that recip0rocity upon us—a deep organic remembrance, a warning, an instruction? But how would we expect the Earth to issue such an instruction? Would we expect it to roll down from the skies—or be proclaimed to us by a goddess who rose from the sea? Surely, we know that the web of nature is spun more subtly than that. The instruction would come to us in the one language most capable of transforming our conduct: not as a command from above or beyond, but as a moral idea realized from within. Just at the planet thinks through us, so we, in our thinking, may draw upon themes and images as ancient as the planet’s own star-burst birth.”

I think his perspective follows yours closely and, as it turns out, mine as well.  I’m sure there are many others working in their own way along similar lines, all over the world.

Will it be enough? And soon enough? I myself don’t know. I try to follow my (nighttime) dreams. From them I glean certain flashes of insight and sparks of hope. But on a planetary scale the outcome remains very much in the air.

Your work, however, gives me hope.

Paco
.

Dear Elizabeth and Paco,

The many different kinds of Oriental yoga have for centuries sought the transcendence of self and oneness with the universe by discipline and meditation culminating with the great compassion of Gautama Buddha who wanted all to be able to achieve this.

Their path requires preparation of soul and body before entering into the ultimate path of transcendance and unity.  The Hindu concept of oneness with all being and Ahimsa - harmlessness - is a big step in showing us how to partake of the earth’s bounty frugally in relationship to what we need versus what we want.

Jesus of Nazareth taught this also, reportedly saying that if we follow his path, He and the Father would abide in you. (Similar to the Hindu concept of soul in relation to ultimate being -  “Thou Art That.” The Sermon on the Mount stressing compassion to others and humbly opening the soul to awareness and mindfulness of what is around us is to me most sublime -  stressing justice on earth!!

Marge S.

May I inlcude the URL to your article at unleashingthewench.com/The_Mystic.htm along with the 2007 live webcast of Newgrange?

Wonderful aritlce!

Yes, Sarah, of course you may.  I’m glad you enjoyed this piece.