About the author: Lorna Green, is the author of Foundations of an Earth Age: A New Vision of God, The Human, and the Earth, forthcoming 1994. She lives part of each year in a small cabin in the forest.
The true world order is very strange.Jung was walking through a wooded area with one of his patients, and as she was telling him of her night's dream about a fox, a fox appeared from out of the woods and trotted along the path before them. That was a turning point in her healing.
Another patient was narrating her dream about a scarab beetle to Jung, and as she was speaking, the nearest Swiss equivalent of a scarab beetle came tapping at the window. At that moment, her resistance to therapy dissolved.
These incidents tell us that there is some profound openness between our psyches and the natural world, and some harmony binding both, which we do not understand. We are part of the Earth, the Earth is part of us. So Sappho recognized Aphrodite in the presence of a flock of birds, and wrote one of her immortal poems.
We are used to living in a world of facts. We are all familiar with mechanical causality, F=ma. You drop a rock, it falls; you put your foot on the accelerator, the car starts and gets you to work on time. Mechanical causality underpins the routine of our lives, it is simply, pushes and pulls, at various levels of magnitude. For the past 300 years, the scientific mind has taken the entire universe to be a function of such.
But Jung called these strange coincidences, "synchronicity," and recognized them to be some other type of causality, whose meaning and significance he did not know.
Indeed, crossing the geometric and mechanical order of our lives, cutting through it, is another order, the order of surprise, of magic. Your life goes along geometrically for awhile, and then some man or woman crosses your path and geometry ceases. You come alive.
Eastern tradition speaks of two orders. There is the order of ordinary life, taken for granted, and then there is the Tao, at which, when the sage speaks of it, others laugh.
Similarly, Western scriptures speak of "the ways of the world" and "the ways of God." "So high above your ways are my ways." And Jesus counsels: "Be in the world, but not of it." The person born of the Spirit is compared to the wind: "The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou canst not tell whence it comes nor wither it goes, thus is everyone born of the Spirit." Not entirely mechanical causality, or predictable behavior!
Modern science is bent on explaining things mechanistically, but how would it deal with Jung's examples? Science does not yet recognize the kind of causality I have been hinting at, but assumes all processes are a function of mechanical events, events simply too complex for us to fathom. So, the flapping of a butterfly's wing in China can affect the weather patterns in North America, but in mechanical ways. Some other kind of causality is foreign to the scientific mind, and to most of us, although there are creeping into modern languages strange expressions such as, "Oh, this was meant to be!"
Our ordinary world is geometric. But three-dimensional geometry, which seems quite suitable to our ordinary world and the perceptual scale of reality, is now deemed to be merely a special case of non-Eucidean geometry. So I would suggest that our familiar "mechanics" is a special case of another, larger, more pervasive and more ultimate, kind of causality. This familiar order in which we put our faith - "pistis" Plato called it, is derivative of something more ultimately real and fundamental.
The order we take for reality may be a function, simply, of the "habits" of matter, as Whitehead suggested. What preceded these habits? No one knows. Even Newton did not think the forces the mere "facts" that they have become today, but took them to be derivative of an animating principle of bodies. Can we say anything about the larger Order?
Brian Swimme has recently called attention to the significance of certain large coincidental numbers in cosmology. Briefly, if one compares the electro-magnetic with the gravitational force, it turns out to be 10 to the fortieth power times as strong. But then, the number of particles in the universe (this can be calculated!) turns out to be 10 to the fortieth power squared. And if this weren't enough, the time taken for the evolution of the universe from the beginning until now (time measured as the interval taken for light to pass through an elementary particle), is 10 to the fortieth power.
What is the meaning of these coincidences? Two of these numbers are fixed, the third - the age of the universe - could only be said now, in the present. As Swimme put it: It looks as though the universe has been expecting us, throwing a big surprise party for us, keeping its best secrets until we were ready for them. Such a causality is far from being mechanical.
We live in a very strange world order. What is the meaning of these coincidences? What kind of a universe is it?
I have been living with God a long time, first in my teenage years, then as a convert to Catholicism at the age of 36. I am 54.
Let me tell you something about how God works with me.
For the best times of my life, I live in a small cabin in the woods, just down the hill from the main house, a life of prayer, writing, and simple practical tasks. From this, I return to the city from time to time to find out where civilization is at, and to write about the Earth.
In my life of prayer, I have come to know my own symbols, words of power, names with special meaning for me.
When I come to the city, I live as any ordinary person does, in the mechanical order, though now, not in the fullest depths of prayer. I keep myself inwardly quiet, praying scripture as I ride the buses, and I attune myself to what I have come to call The Order. It is made up of all the little touches of God, which are not mechanical, which lace the mechanical and which come to me out of the day.
When I get up in the morning, I give my day to the Holy Spirit, ask Her to put it together for me, then I go to meet God coming to me in every event, speaking words to me through others, affirming my being with sudden smiles, kindnesses, shafts of love, life, light, power, peace, beauty or joy. That is to live the day quite differently than just going out to meet the world. I go, not to meet things and people, but for touches, glances, little winks that tell me I am deeply loved and treasured here. I am in a strange place, my glance is drawn to something, and there is one of my symbols, or special words. The native peoples knew well that their symbols mediated to them the powers of the universe. And when I suddenly catch a glimpse of one, I am filled with joy.
When I go out in the ordinary way, I try to fit in, to look like everyone else; when I go simply to meet God, I don't care what I look like, I stride along oblivious to any disapproving glances there may be, and when I do see something, it is a sudden affirming glance, a kindred spirit, my own symbols, whatever. On those days, everything goes right. Christians call it "walking in the Spirit". The trick is walking by faith, knowing what not to pay attention to, and seeking, instead, for the loving, affirming glances for your own true being everywhere. My experience is that this only happens to me when I am being truly myself.
And then, God speaks to me everywhere. Words overheard on a street corner address some problem I have brought with me from the morning, a bill board punctuates a train of thought and answers it, and so on. I think everyone must have had some experience of this, it just happens to be especially strong in my case, for my unease in cities.
What I have come to sense, over the years, is that there is an order in Spirit which is the basis of all things, behind all and in all, the primary Reality, deeply, One. It is time to wed the theological and religious traditions with modern scientific thinking.
What is it to say, "Spirit?" At the very least, Spirit is not mechanical. It is something else altogether.
The intellectual deconstruction of previous tradition is almost over. Descartes, who cleaved all of Reality into Mind and Matter - human beings and God are Mind, Earth and all her inhabitants are Matter - is the stumbling block, but no one knows what to do about him.
Dualism. The Piscean Age has been about dualisms, ultimate cleavages between two kinds of things, which interacted in the pineal gland. This Age has given rise to a distinction between science and religion.
I want to suggest that modern science is a special case of religion, and that the mechanical world order is a special case of Spirit.
It has been suggested that the faith of science in a natural order owes much to the prior religious faith in the goodness, the reliability, the trustworthiness of God. I want to suggest now, that scientific conceptions of the universe are really a very limited case of broader religious ones.
It is an assumption of science that all comes to be out of Matter, or energy. I suggest that this is a dogma of the scientific religion. The crisis in the Earth calls this assumption into question. The truth is that all energy has consciousness as its inner side, and that this is primarily a universe, formed not out of mechanics, but out of consciousness. All its major laws and principles are principles of consciousness, and of a love-consciousness at that. We live in a universe with purpose, meaning and intelligence, congenial to every creature who inhabits it, with whom we can fully identify ourselves, in which we are meant to play some vital role, in which some plan we do not yet understand is unfolding, a universe in which we are not the masters, but a sentient part, a child of the whole, being tutored by the whole.
Consciousness is the distinctly modern contribution to the great Argument of the Ages.
For science, the world is inert, just "facts". On a religious view, the world speaks. So St. Augustine was praying in a garden, and heard children singing next door, what seemed to him to be "take and read, take and read". He took this to be a message from God telling him to read scripture, he opened the scriptures randomly, and what he read there changed his life.
So, in Spirit, the world speaks. God's speech is often ordinary. People complain that God is silent, but God is always speaking to us through the words of others, addressing dilemmas and difficulties which those others could not have known.
But God's favorite speech is symbolic.
Most of us are not at ease with symbols, we attack them with our minds. The meaning of symbols is given to the heart and imagination. Dreams are in symbols, and how often, in scripture, does God guide through dreams. The whole book of Daniel is a treatise on the interpretation of dreams, and a recent book by Sanford was entitled Dreams: God's Forgotten Language. Jung has restored us to our heritage of symbolism, but few have yet appropriated his work.
We live in a magical universe. The universe is always addressing us, and the universe speaks symbolically. For Heidegger, "Being calls, we respond". There is more than that. Through all the little coincidences of the day, God tells you how much you are loved, delighted in.
You live through yours days, something in the day, in the flow of life, catches your attention. All of us know these moments, when we suddenly turn and focus on something, without wavering, as if we were being drawn to that spot. Ask yourself what the significance for you is, and you will know what the universe is saying to you. Don't ask in fear, ask in the trust that you are deeply cared for here, and you will find your essential being confirmed. That is how I find my way with God in the city.
We live in a universe which is essentially consciousness, not matter and mechanics. All energy has consciousness, all consciousness is energy. We know the functions of consciousness with its ideas, in our own lives, almost everything we do follows from the purposes we have in mind. We have the idea of meeting a friend in a restaurant, that sets in motion all the mechanical causality to get us there. Well, the universe is like that, and functions under choice, intelligence, final causalities and teleological necessities just as we do. Ourselves and the universe are just like each other.
Modern science has given us a mechanical account of the universe from which we are radially distinct. On the scientific account of Being, human beings are the only beings who can act through purposes, ideas. I propose a principle of continuity. This facility would not be in use if it were not in the universe as a whole. Those purposes and the ways of realizing them may be very complex, but they are real, and we are the offspring of the greater order, as Aristotle and other ancient philosophers knew.
If consciousness comes first, if consciousness is the basis of all Reality, we can rewrite Cartesian premises to say: No Matter without Mind; all Matter is Mind. The meaning of situating God at the beginning of all creation stories is that this signifies that consciousness, intelligence, guides the process.
In such a universe, many ancient and modern practices are intelligible. Jesus taught, of prayer: Pray, believing that you have what you ask for, and it shall be granted. The New Age technique of visualization is the same thing. We live in a universe full of magic, as interested in us as we are in it, affected by our consciousness as we are affected by its consciousness.
So, when you want something, like a native drum, send out in your consciousness for it. So, when you have purposes - writing a book perhaps - state your purpose to the universe, and you will find all that you need falling into your hands. For when you clarify the deepest desires of your heart - that is where the will of God for you is given - and give them to the universe, the whole universe gets behind you to help you realize them.
We are well beyond dualism here. Dualism was the way of the Piscean Age; consciousness is the basis of the unities which will emerge in the Aquarian era.
It is all a question of what to neglect, what to leave out, as it is a question for an artist when to stop. Trust your Intuition, go by feel, if you ask for the symbolic meaning of every detail you are drawn to in a day, your mind will go berserk. Get the wave patterns. Walking in faith is looking for the nodes of experience, the high points, for the signs the universe delights in you.
In a wilderness life, there is time to observe your own thoughts, and to attune to the surroundings. I have learned to listen. I am at-one with the processes happening in the Earth, and events in my own mind. My most significant realizations are inevitably punctuated by the calls of crows, even to significant numbers. These things are well known to native traditions, we have to recover them. With the Spirit, it is all a question of timing.
The spiritual world precedes the physical. The physical is a special case of the spiritual, consciousness in a highly condensed form.
Since we arrived on the Earth plane, we have been busy mastering the physical. The modern devastation of the Earth attests to the fact that we have learned at least some of those lessons well. Now it is time to remember our spiritual roots. We dwell in a moment of grace for the planet and for ourselves, when we have to change over from the dualistic consciousness of Being to the unity consciousness, when we must once again focus on the true meanings of the spiritual rather than the material.
We are beginning to know, in this mysterious universe of ours, which is lifting its veils not just for physicists at the frontiers of science, but for each one of us, that there is nothing but Spirit. God is Infinite Consciousness, and each of us, and the whole vibrant, vital reality of the Earth, are projections of that consciousness.
One of the major New Age discoveries is that our beliefs determine our experience. If you want different experiences in your life, examine your beliefs and change them.
Our most important belief is about happiness. Human beings have never really believed they are meant to be happy here. Life on Earth has been an exile, a "vale of tears", and our task was to belabour the Earth to win merit for getting into Heaven.
Now it is time to realize Heaven on Earth, to bring the spiritual into the physical, to realize that this is a good and benevolent universe, that we are meant to be happy here, that we are meant to enjoy the Earth plane of existence, that God is in the Earth, that we need to fully incarnate here, and that our rituals should help us do that. Indeed, if reincarnation is the way the universe works, we have all chosen to come to the Earth plane. Knowledge of the spiritual nature of the universe may help us find our proper function on a planet which is a living, conscious, spiritual and divine being. The physical is upheld and supported by deep forces within the spiritual world, and its primary Reality is spiritual. We need to bring the Joy, the Love and the Wisdom of the spiritual domains from whence we come, here.
What may this mean for the Earth? How great are her powers to heal? She is not merely a physical reality, but spiritual as well. We can assist those powers with our own consciousness, our own attitudes to her, our appreciation, our love.
The universe we live in, the Order we inhabit, is primarily spiritual, in all the rich connotations of that word. The task before us now is to recover our spiritual sense of ourselves and our universe, to bring the spiritual into the physical, to help the Earth heal herself by every possible means.
And to enjoy, and play along with, our loving and playful universe. To encounter the spiritual in the lived-in dimensions of our lives.
What is Being? A marvelous mixture of magic, surprise, guidance, mechanism and necessity. The native peoples called it simply: The Great Mystery.
We live in a fabulous universe, intelligent, meaningful, creative, self-creating, just like us. The science of the past 300 years turned this universe into a vast mechanism, in which human beings were the only ones with consciousness. On this view, human beings have felt separated, alienated from creation.
Now it is time to rejoin the Order, the creative Order of the universe, the greater Order of the Earth who is a living, conscious, spiritual and divine being in her own right. Let the fears of what is different, alien, "unlike", keep us apart no longer. Creation yearns for our friendship. The trees want to be touched, the mountains want to be climbed, the wolves are waiting for us to run with them.
The universe I have outlined here is simply an elaboration of that of Catholicism, for which the coincidences of our lives are touches of the Holy Spirit, the very sign that one is going in the right direction, that one is in the will of God, a kind of "pat on the back" from the universe to say that you are doing well. Pray and coincidence will increase, and you will be increasingly led into that niche in the greater Order you are meant to fill, and to the role you are meant to play.
I am exhilarated by the truth of our situation on Earth, this Order of magic, surprise, guidance, mechanism and necessity. We are increasingly beginning to know that we are not the accidental results of mechanical processes, but the universe wants us here.
Now it is time to ask more deeply about the Order. What Plan is unfolding? What are human beings meant to be doing here? What vital role are we supposed to be playing on the planet?
It is time for each of us to quest more deeply for our reasons for being here, in this incarnation, at this time, that we may come "To serve that purpose which the Masters know and serve".
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