**Note that this entry is affixed to the top of this journal. Please see the entries following, for my most current posts. Thanks!**

I would like to present an essay I wrote, setting forth Joanna Macy's concept of  "The Great Turning," which refers to the conscious, human choice of turning away from destructive empire and life-negating ways of being, towards Earth community and life-affirming ways of being in relation to Self and planet. 

After presenting Macy's concept, the next section addresses "A Turning More Personal," in which I attempt to articulate my own social and political organizing activities within the framework of The Great Turning, with a view to illuminating the interconnections between the three "different" dimensions of activity or intention represented by the concept. 

I then explore the theme of "The Personal Is the Political," and delve into how my own personal exploration and re-discovery (or perhaps recovery) might be reflected within the collective.  Since my primary interests fall within the realm of cosmology (aka poetry), I explore Richard Tarnas' thesis of "the double bind of modern consciousness," which he uses to illustrate the psychological ramifications of the modern, disenchanted worldview of alienation and separation.  I also ponder the curious fact that, in a Universe such as ours, which is characterized by acausality, the means are the ends, and ask what might that mean for the evolutionary potential of our species and its social organization?

I conclude that the old organizing mythology of the industrialized world will collapse, indeed it is collapsing as its failures mount up in the form of crises all around the planet.  What will fill the vacuum of power and meaning, left in the wake of the collapse of the modern, industrialized worldview?  Towards this endeavor, I explore the theme of "History As A Metaphysical Problem" in the final section.


The chambers of my heart echo the French poet Paul Valéry's lament that, for an artist, no piece is ever really completed, only abandoned.  And so I abandon this unfinished piece of writing on my blog, in the hopes that someone might take inspiration. . . .or perhaps offense (this might be an even better augur!)

Your comments are welcome. (If you do not have a LiveJournal account, you may still leave an Anonymous comment, or use the OpenID feature.  If you go the Anonymous route, your name and e-mail contact info are welcome and appreciated, for I see great value in dialogue.  All Anonymous comments will be screened, so if you do not want your email address to be in public view, just let me know, and I will leave your comment and contact info hidden from public view.)

 

There’s No Salvation from the Myth of Salvation

Foundations of the Great Turning, Antioch University Seattle

February 26, 2008

The Great Turning

The Great Turning is a concept which Joanna Macy helped to develop over her thirty years of social and environmental activism, which seeks to describe the conscious human choice to “choose life [which] means to build a life-sustaining society,” defined as “’one that satisfies its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations.’” (Macy & Brown, 1998).  The need to develop a life-sustaining society emerges from the modern, industrialized way of life, which Norwegian ecophilosopher Sigmund Kwaloy named the Industrial Growth Society.  While acknowledging the positive aspects of the unprecedented powers wrought by our highly technologized culture, Macy and Brown (1998) highlight the fact that

…[W]e witness destruction of life in dimensions that confronted no previous generation in recorded history.  Certainly our ancestors knew wars, plagues, and famine; entire civilizations, such as Phoenicia and Imperial Rome, foundered when they cut down their trees for warships and turned their lands to desert.  But today it is not just a forest here and some farmlands and fisheries there; today entire species are dying—and whole cultures, and ecosystems on a global scale, even to the oxygen-producing plankton of our seas (p. 15). 

The Industrial Growth Society hinges on an “economy [that] depends on ever-increasing consumption of resources.  To maintain its engines of progress, Earth is both supply-house and sewer” (p. 16).

           

"...the greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone.

Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter."

  --Bill Mollison, the "father of permaculture"

"Experience is irrelevant to ideology."
  --Hannah Arendt

"Terror as the counterpart of propaganda played a greater role in Nazism than in Communism.  The Nazis did not strike at prominent figures as had been done in the earlier wave of political crimes in Germany (the murder of Rathenau and Erzberger); instead, by killing small socialist functionaries or influential members of opposing parties, they attempted to prove to the population the dangers involved in mere membership.  This kind of mass terror, which still operated on a comparatively small scale, increased steadily because neither the police nor the courts seriously prosecuted political offenders on the so-called Right.  It was valuable as what a Nazi publicist has aptly called "power propaganda": it made clear to the population at large that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities and that it was safer to be a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization than a loyal Republican.  This impression was greatly strengthened by the specific use the Nazis made of their political crimes.  They always admitted publicly, never apologized for "excesses of the lower ranks"--such apologies were only used by Nazi sympathizers--and impressed the population as being very different from the "idle talkers" of other parties.

The similarities between this kind of terror and plain gangsterism are too obvious to be pointed out.  This does not mean that Nazism was gangsterism, as has sometimes been concluded, but only that the Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations, as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity."

  --Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 42-3

They never apologized for the excesses of the lower ranks, eh??  Some stuff here looks familiar in the current American political landscape....  Kdo nepracuje, nejí. 

Reading this book on the psychology of totalitarianism (using the specific cases of Nazi Germany and Bolshevism after 1930) during the current Saturn-Uranus-Pluto T-square is heavy, especially with the Saturn-Pluto so tight right now.  Ugh

And yet I've changed.... reading the United States' Declaration of Independence as an assignment in a class with Susan Griffin, called "The Inner Life of Democracy," as mentioned in the preceding post, I can tell I have a slightly different reaction to injustice, than I used to have.

Reading the Declaration of Independence in light of the recent ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States (Citizens United vs. FEC) to finally seal the deal for corporate control over these United States--even though a de facto situation, its legitimation sends the chilling recognition of fascism along my spine.

But also seeing it perhaps a death knell to the concept of the nation-state, a glaring pronouncement that things have indeed changed, that this system doesn't even serve the aspirations of freedom, justice and liberty for all anymore, as I would never declare those to have been fully realized, but only imagined possible, and wrought into being through ceaseless struggle.  Perhaps this U.S. Supreme Court ruling is a harbinger of the evolution of a new iteration of government, of union and communion of people and Earth, by and for people who are acknowledged as being not merely human alone--a biocracy?  Bioregionalism?

Where lives this new revolution? I would rather say evolution, because a key recognition is that we are not separate from each other, nor from the Earth, the cosmos.  Is it in the hearts of people, the deep imagination of the Earth herself??--please seduce me, Lover, I want to know your truest designs, for there be Beauty....

What is the aesthetic response to all this ugliness?

Poverty is ugly.  Heterosexism is ugly.  Warfare is most definitely hideous, not to mention juvenile. 

I see the injustice and my anger is there, but more as a fuel to be something different.  I don't want to react to things so much anymore as correct for them.  Maybe this is the growth of compassion, which must needs turn to action, action of a different sort.  No more tilting at windmills, as Barbara Deming sagely observed in 1940:

I know the first king to be inside of me, my own "inner imperialist" if you will....my inner bigot, my inner coward.  All those psychic, mythic, very real figures reside within me....today in class we will explore the intersection of courage and independence. Who amongst these figures will come forward, and show herself and himself?

I am most fortunate to be taking a class with the poet and author Susan Griffin, called "The Inner Life of Democracy," and I'm very excited by her great ideas, especially on the origins of democracy being within the individual, our own response to "authority" and "freedom."  Democracy and freedom has its origins in the individual, as does acquiescence to tyranny and injustice.  I've long pondered the paradox that, in order to have a democracy, each individual is required to actually show up and participate.  There is no collective without the individual, and in a crucial sense, there is no individual without the collective, either.  

The following is the response I had to reading the United States' Declaration of Independence, one of our assignments.  Susan asked us to trace our inner feeling response to reading this, or some part of it, back to childhood if we could.  We could also respond in the moment, and I came out with both....but here is the poetic response, more a reminisce.

I remember simmering rage at the injustices all around me
           as a child
             a pre-pubescent
               an adolescent
        and finally my acquiescence to
               "that's just the way things are"
And the ensuing years-long depression
   Because it's not
                         inevitable
                               that inequity be instated and indoctrinated in youth
                     and against their will

I remember the burning shame of post-segregation segregation
               as a society made me realize that
                    there are certain alienating differences
              between me and my black friends and male friends all
                      My innocent assumption that we are all created equal
                in fact and not in lip service to ideals
                           dashed against the rocks of slyly hidden and living, breathing
                                                       bigotry
                  Not merely personal, but permeating the society
               that was supposed to hold us ALL together
                       not render me asunder from thee

Burning shame - indignation, violation, usurpation of my own humanity
              I know this is wrong, I know that damage to another
                           damages me
      And I feel the separation
               How can I explain to my friend Tammy
                              my family is racist

          . . . Powerless to make my own choice . . .

  And a part of me died that night - the part that would assent
            to defilement and the part that would never back down
Never relinquish the solidarity and kinship I feel with all people
        Where else might come the strength to challenge my notions of
                   difference meaning "separate but equal"
        Where else might come the courage to discover my hidden
                    places, the things that keep me from becoming fully human
  Fully free
              Finally beyond the confinement of an ego
                           untempered by the strangely impersonal, personal Love
                   that binds you to me
                       that infinite embrace of gravity

Hello LJ-land!  I'm sorry to have been away for so long....I hope to make it up to you all, even with such a busy schedule. 

I think I have made a lot of progress on moving away from being so dependent on a car, and decent public transit is really what has made all the difference.  It turns out that I have driven my car only 184 miles in the course of 23 days.  (I would say in the last 30 days, but 7 of those were spent in Seattle.)  I still have over a quarter of a tank of gas left.  That comes out to 8 miles per day, or roughly 61 miles per week. It has been monsoonal for over a week in California, even by Pacific Northwest standards, which would be good except for the fact that so much rain at once tends to run off more than soak into and replenish the water table, which is rather parched by the severe drought.  I'm surprised that I haven't driven more, because biking in this mess would have been very aggravating to the creeping crud I picked up on my trip to Seattle....finally over that crap and I did bike in the not-so-freezing rain today.

Thanks to the physical impairment, I've been unable to get all the funk out related to transiting Saturn squaring my natal Mars.  (And retrograding Mars is conjunct my natal Saturn 'til May.  You think the Universe is trying to send me a message?)  This has been "good" and "bad."  The bad is that I'd rather not deal with it without the benefit of strenuous physical exercise.  Among other things, Mars represents the athlete, the muscles, the energetic force that is needed to simply move out of the house and into the world, and it also represents the ego, the separate sense of "I," hence Mars' association with war.  Saturn is the cosmic principle of time, some say the workings of karma, but basically it's the workings of necessity, the physical world and all boundaries (we live in Saturn's "material" world), and also fear, judgment, and the endings of things, hence Saturn's association with death.  Well, this transit DOES correlate to accidents and broken bones specifically, but it can also put the screws on one's ego.  "Ego conflicts with others," and let me tell you, conflicts with others in authority are the best!!! for "pleasing the gods" of this transit. 

A little bit of meditation can go a long way in this department, and I have been forced to see parts of my Martian personality that I would rather not.  Mars is just plain irascible, let's be honest.  I have that sucker in the 12th House (hidden things! the unconscious) and conjoining my Ascendant (the eastern (left) horizon line of a natal horoscope chart).  I haven't noticed a lot of the characteristics of that aspect (Mars conjunct Ascendant)--which is NOT to say they haven't been present, but I have had to claim my Mars in so many ways, at Saturn's urging, too, by way of my Saturn return a few years ago.  

Without the ability to discharge the negative energies through hard physical labor, pushing against physical boundaries and meeting resistance, I have witnessed the fact that there really is no psychological inner and outer that one can absolutely separate.  Neptune's illusion of boundaries and boundarylessness came jolting through, as I can only describe from my perspective how it would appear that there is some sort of energy seething inside of me, which is attracting complementary energy out there (wanna' have a go?)  I am not always consciously looking for a fight, but it seems that some part of me is.

The Saturn square Pluto world transit is hardcore and heavy in the collective mind right now, so there is plenty of free-floating funk out there to have a go with.  The potential for conflict is everywhere, and so it is my attitude and orientation to that field which will determine whether or not I will create some drama, some ego-based conflict, in order to be crushed or suffer frustration of my efforts.  That sort of humiliation reflects a Saturn square Mars transit  through and through. 

While I can be blind-sided by another's aggression toward me, it is also easy as hell for me to actively manifest a conflict.   And how it happens!!  It is incredible. It is so easy for me to believe that the threat is absolutely real, and outside of me.  I was in the anxious throes of this delusion a couple of nights ago, and finally snapped out of it, hearing the inner narrative that matched the flavors this transit.  Exactly as James Hillman points out, "One thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance" (Re-Visioning Psychology).

Meditate...step back...have another look.  And yes, the potential in the situation is there, red-hot and ready to go.  But am I?  There is another way to go, a Wu Wei ;-)   The manifestation of an ego conflict or struggle with authority would only co-arise in my personal field, through my own actions, and not because it was inevitable.  Sure, I can walk gently and sweetly, and someone may still give me static, and my actions may be frustrated or inhibited, but I can choose to be nonviolent, and persistent, like the drops of water which carve canyons from mountainsides.  

Ha!  Take THAT, Saturn....    

"I shall go away grateful--if not satisfied.  Satisfied! What a beggarly state!  Who would be satisfied with being satisfied?"
  --Edith Wharton

"Where are the keys that give birth to subtle understanding?
Each day we open our eyes having been called by the light of a familiar every day morning. It is at that moment that our eyes open to an entry of poetry which without question brings newness of life we cannot continue to take for granted.

At this finite point, reflection becomes attainable. If we so choose to ponder, we are provided with time to contemplate choices that present us the opportunities to further the well being of the other.

We are then truly liberated, as through the constantly repeating cycle of rebirth, sleeping and waking from it, being reminded daily of our life cycle, we are gently introduced to enter a deeper layer of sensibility and an awareness of the miracle of life: complex and profound. It seems that at these moments God becomes visible and although still abstract, truly a friend, as in this moment the choices we make are based on those things that in good conscience and free will, we choose to become the caretakers of this beautiful planet.

Let us bring our attention to those fragile life forms that we are not privileged to converse with in ways that come without deep reverence, contemplation and respect to our earth, our womb, the placenta given to us on loan while we learn to accept the beauty of our impermanence. So much so and so softly that we are able to step back from the destruction of any life form that has been invited to take up residency here for purposes unknown to us.

Shall we show reverence? shall we find humility?

Potentially yes; because we know love, and know that through love all things are nourished automatically."

  --Lisa Gerrard, March 2007

"During the disintegration of a civilization, two separate plays with different plots are being performed simultaneously side by side.  While an unchanging dominant minority is perpetually rehearsing its own defeat, fresh challenges are perpetually evoking fresh creative responses from newly recruited minorities, which proclaim their own creative power by rising, each time, to the occasion.  The drama of challenge-and-response continues to be performed, but in new circumstances and with new actors."
  --Alfred Toynbee

It's been ages since I've posted anything of substance, beyond the random quote.  My free time has been absorbed by organizing the campus group at my university, Coniunctio, and I admit to a bit of goofing off on Facebook.  (As _sister_madly_  noted on FB, it's been awfully quiet on LiveJournal lately!)

Here is one product of the campus group, a video of Richard Tarnas addressing Coniunctio on the concept of rigor in archetypal astrology.  The sound begins when he starts speaking, at 2:32.  (If the embed doesn't work, a direct link is here)

And then there is always the obsessing over papers.  I've written two now that I don't particularly care for, although I am being a bit harsh.  There is yet another to produce before I have a real break....

Today I got the bike fixed and wandered into the danger zone of Half Price Books.  Score!!!  Ego and Archetype and The Creation of Consciousness, by Edward Edinger, in great shape for only $12.  I am really looking forward to Edinger's genius, as evidenced by a sample quote from the book:

"What is a crime at one stage of development is lawful at another and one cannot reach a new stage of psychological development without daring to challenge the code of the old stage. Hence, every new step is experienced as a crime and is accompanied by guilt, because the old standards, the old ways of being, have not yet been transcended" (p. 21).

I also picked up Malidoma Somé's autobiography Of Water and the Spirit.  There was more, but as much as I live by Artemus Ward's exhortation "Let us all be happy, and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the money to do it with," I was a bad consumer today, and practiced restraint.   

I have, however, purchased a recording device for my classes, which is probably a good idea since I am going to be stupid and attempt Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Rudolf Steiner (one class) and Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser on the evolution of consciousness (another class) in one semester. bwaaahahahaa  I should probably look to my dreams for help with those, as well.   And oh yeah, auditing "Archetypal Cosmology"  which

I hope to come back to this blog a bit more, perhaps to help me formulate some of the ideas from those incredibly dense classes.  Ufff.  And how about some tortured-artist-self-reflection, eh? 

"Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that normalcy is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid."

"The word 'normal' comes from the Greek norma, which was a carpenter's square, that right-angled tool for establishing straightness."

--James Hillman, founder of archetypal psychology

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of truth.”
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn to Matter

"There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the 'I,' but it is just the feeling of being an isolated 'I' which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want."

--Alan Watts, from The Wisdom of Insecurity

"There can be only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering and thus create that form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture, until the reconciling third takes shape. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you and let whatever may happen, happen. The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without intercontradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the beyond which is destined only for angels. But god loves human beings more than angels."
--C.G. Jung, in a letter to Frau Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

A tertium non datur emerging from a coniunctio oppositorum, the (re)union of the solar and the lunar....but to have the courage and the compassion to hold those two heavenly bodies equally and with love......

"Trying to create the future without knowing the past is like trying to plant cut flowers."
--Daniel Boorstin, historian and librarian of Congress

How could I run into that magnificent mirror of relationship
by running away from it?
It's not time....time....yet....says Saturn
his boundaries and limitations having their way
with my heart
that knows no bounds

How could I trust that this is what must
be
and not rail against what is
with sheer force of feeling
and shame for the body - pity
not me

How to rub up against the emptiness of the night
the time, the time of no time
and feel its fullness
as drops of water, laughing, caress my face
on the way to the drain, to the
briny sea
saying: you are loved. you are not alone,
child

How to not contrive the story
the sentences of my life
and surrender to autopoiesis
The living web in which
Saturn's hands so deftly spin

And though I long for that discovery
of a mirror so deep it's cataclysmic
I recall: the jewel in the lotus is within

Some nights, the humility of this being human becomes too much
And I have to laugh
to laugh at my frustration with the stupidest thing
Why do I get so upset?
What is the significance of the inconvenience done to me
when the chain
pops off the chain ring of my bike
And I have the gall to swear, and show my prissy ingratitude to the Universe
for the air I breathe,
and the pumping of my heart, involuntarily
lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub

then I stop to listen, to notice
the sheer ridiculousness of my frustration
in the face of the humility
of this being human

some nights, it happens in the parking lot of an East Bay BART station
that I must laugh
only at myself

"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
 --Charlie Chaplin

...or: I bow to Saturn.  And all the teachers who wander (or barge) through my life.