Unity Consciousness Vs. Duality
A lesson based on the work of Joanna Macy
We have this patriarchal legacy of Duality, which forces us to think in oppositions, and which ranks in hierarchical form, according to made-up (not real) values. For example, Matter and Time are seen as less than Spirit and Eternity. Matter and time, which are HERE, which are Immanent; spirit and eternity, which are NOT HERE, which are Transcendent. We seek to escape from the first pair into what we imagine to be more worthy of our attention. Our nuclear missiles may be the logical unfolding of our desire to escape from time. And, as we destroy the future, we refuse to even imagine other possibilities. This is what our culture does to us. Dualism is an illusion—Good vs. Evil. Male vs. Female. Body vs. Mind. It’s all about thinking in oppositional pairs.
Time and Speed— Both the destruction of our world and our capacity to slow down and stop that destruction, can be understood as a function of our experience of time. Our sped-up sense of time cuts us off from the other rhythms of life, from nature, and from the past and future as well. We have more time-saving devices than ever before. We are always in a hurry, like never before. This is a paradox and an irony.
Look at the ways our attention is constantly hijacked. We are pulled away from everything into a matrix of speed. To re-inhabit time must be the goal for us now, before we end time.
Our experience of time reveals a blindness, a pathologically-shrunken sense of time that denies the very on-goingness of time. It's like we cancelled the future, so we can exhaust, destroy and poison the land, air and water. Time as a commodity and time as an experience are both becoming scarcities. We have hurry-sickness, and hectic fever- heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, and depression of our immune function.
Friendships and the love of nature take time— these are not time-efficient or time-predictable.
Speed and haste are inherently violent. We kill the moment, we kill nature, and our appetite for time-saving devices—pampers, coffee pods, unrecyclable plastic cups inflict a constant violence on our environment. We are blind to the effects our lifestyle has on nature.
We become devoured by what we consume, and we increasingly view time as the enemy. Our mission isn't to escape from this world, or to fix things by pushing buttons and pulling levers, but to fall in love with our world. We are made for that. Our daily adventure is to realize that.
The Kali Yuga, the dregs of time, dense and gritty. We search for a cessation of time through aloof spiritual practices. We need to inhabit time to understand radioactivity, extinction, toxic waste, all the sublime anxieties.
We have the ability, through our moral imagination, to break out of our temporal prison and challenge speed. Unlike other animals, we can deliberately CHOOSE to slow down, to change the story. This is why humans are special. Not because some god favors us over all of creation, but because we can envision the future and change the path of our evolution. We can choose to re-orient to an ecological vision of life, to empathic rhythms rather than power rhythms.
We can choose our practices and slow down, garden instead of shop, the slow food movement, or bicycle transport, choose shutting off our gadgets, or walking in silence, choose being alone in nature, exercising or resting our bodies, our minds, or practicing daily meditation.
We've gone from worshipping nature to mastering nature, and to controlling life. Our technologies have disastrously amplified the delusional story of capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy. We’ve fallen for the societal lie that the world is made of stuff to be extracted and sold. Because short-term profit is everything to this culture, because it tells us that corporations really want the best for us, because it tells us that somewhere else is really our home. Because all this started with our ancestors' worshipping of transcendent male gods.
To reclaim time, we need a Good Story. “KNOW THYSELF" was an early command of the Goddess, the divine feminine look-within, and start of a really good story. Know thyself was one driving message behind the religion that worshipped women, nature, and inter-relationship. It was inscribed above the entrances of her temples. It was the goal of many of the mystery rituals of the Bronze Age, of Crete and Ancient Greece. But we got all transcendent and mental with the rise of patriarchal religions, as the male drive to logic and rationality achieved supremacy over the feminine, so the values of instinct and feeling and connection became despised values, seen as weak and emotional. Separation triumphed over Unity Consciousness, the most ancient of human stories in our evolving consciousness. The new story must include the whole world and all beings.
Systems Theory —Descartes and Bacon hijacked our minds—minds which the ancient Greeks split off from creation thousands of years ago. Minds were ranked higher than senses, mind triumphed over the body. The scientific method of measuring and counting, of constant separation and ranking hijacked our evolutionary consciousness away from an organic, holistic view of the world and into an analytical, mechanical one. In the 15th century, Descartes announced that he didn't trust his senses—he was kind of delusional like that, it was just His personal story, but he universalized it—and it changed the world forever—until now. The machines we made to extend our "untrustworthy" senses became our model for the universe— until now. Everything could be described objectively and controlled externally. We no longer were allowed to participate in creation, but just to push buttons and keys. Until now.
This story fueled the engines of industrial progress, but, as 20th C biologists realized—echoing our ancient knowing-of-unity—this story cannot explain the self-renewing processes of life. The lunar Great Goddess cyclical religion was expert in that depth of understanding, with its observation and celebration of Nature and the cosmos. Eventually, science caught us, and evolutionary biologists started to look at wholes, not parts, and at processes instead of substances. The wholes—cells, bodies, ecosystems, the moon’s journey, seasons, migrations, the cyclic laws of the planet itself— are not just an assemblage of discrete pieces of things, but they are SYSTEMS, and those systems INCLUDE US. These systems are dynamically organized and intricately balanced. Each is a part of a greater pattern that connects and evolves according to General Systems Theory. It's a whole new way of seeing—"The biggest bite out of the tree of knowledge that people have taken for 2,000 years." (Gregory Bateson)
Life Self-Organizes — We can become aware of relationships, rather than separate entities. Life-forms arise from interactive currents of matter and energy and information. How this works, in terms of a women’s studies class, is that we are FEELING INTO new possibilities—we are challenging what we thought of as natural, as permanent, as the only story.
In fact, all life processes here on Earth are determined by flow and feedback. We are all flow-throughs of relationships—matter, energy, and information. The systems self-generate because of cooperation between their parts, and for mutual benefit. For the benefit of ALL. This is a brand new concept to many of us. Even as we repeat the words ‘with liberty and justice for all’, we can feel in our experience, in our very bodies, that these terms have been reduced, under imperialist patriarchal institutions, to meaningless shells. Nothing is guaranteed for all in this culture, except for all of us working to keep the rich satisfied. That image, the pyramid fueled by the labor of the masses at the bottom for the wealth of the few—of domination, separation, and power-over is the basis for our current hierarchy.
There is no flow through in this system, no interrelationship, and no true sharing. Certainly there is very little feedback. Our system is more like a funnel sucking all energy upwards and away from those who’s energy creates the basis for the whole machine to keep moving. But this normalized vision of greed and exploitation that drives culture and our daily lives needs to end because the mechanistic view of self/other, mind/matter—this warring duality—no longer holds. Modern science, religions, and capitalism began with Descartes and Bacon ‘torturing nature's secrets,’ also torturing women in the Inquisition, Native people who were conquered in colonialism’s ‘Age of Exploration’, wild nature and wild animals everywhere there was Euro/human settlement. What appeared to be separate, what we were told is disconnected, or less-than, are now seen to be interrelated, interwoven, interdependent sensate, and profoundly important to life.
When life forms evolve in complexity and intelligence , they shed their armor in order to grow sensitive, vulnerable protuberances‚ lips, tongues, ears, eyeballs, fingertips, to better respond and sense, to better connect to the web of life and weave it further. What we had been taught to dismiss as mere feelings—sensations, instincts, the invalidated feminine in a misogynistic, dualistic system—are valid responses to our world, and much better ways of perception and participation for actually understanding the relationships that make up our world, and our place in that world.
When we think of the old story of power, we think of domination, of exerting force over others and limiting their options. Power correlates to invulnerability. To keep from being pushed around, we need armor and fortresses and weapons. But from a Systems Theory perspective, this notion is dysfunctional. If you were a nerve in a neural net in the brain, and you were convinced that power worked in a power-over way, and so you made DEFENSES because of this belief, that would eventually sabotage the whole system. You would die, and the rest would weaken, and then die. It would be a suicidal act. These systems are organized to FLOW THRU. They are open systems because of how they interact. The capacity to integrate with and through each other is our True Nature. We function through relationship. We have to let the signals come through— we have to be free to respond creatively. All life works this way. Through constant interaction, we get more connections, and more strategies for survival.
Look at how governments that call themselves "democracies" suppress information if it will go against corporate interests. Think of cancer, chemicals, climate change and war. They jail whistle blowers and lie to the rest of us, and because they constantly suppress feedback, and so, they are committing suicide, and taking ‘civilization’ down with them. Those who seem to be doing so well with the power-over model appear to get what they want, but they do so at a cost to the larger system. Power-over is dysfunctional because it inhibits both diversity and feedback. It creates entropy and systemic disintegration. None of this is sustainable.
Look at what war does to the whole system of life on earth. Look at what huge concentrations of wealth do. And, to the powerholders themselves—it's like wearing a suit of armor—it restricts their vision and movement. It narrows their choices and cuts them off from the world and from free participation in life. All they can do is grab more power. Again, not a sustainable model.
But the story of change and the change of story is upon us. Gaia Theory showed that earth is not a dead rock. Deep ecology questions the fundamental assumptions of the Industrial Growth Society and the basis of all patriarchal religions. This species’ arrogance threatens all complex life forms. We need to see through our anthropomorphic self-cherishing. The human is no longer a stranger, or a master, no longer separate to the world. The fog of amnesia begins to disperse as we begin to recall our true nature. To paraphrase ecologist John Seed —“I am not a person trying to protect the rainforest. I am the rainforest, most recently grown to full human consciousness, protecting myself.”
Feelings free us from the need for having solutions. We need to learn to be present with the situation. First, we need to be with it, to dare to take it in. If we think we can't look at it until we have a solution, we'll never look. But we can let the response come before the solution. We need to Learn to Feel. To let the authentic truth of our senses in. To hold it, to love it, to Be with it. How can we be with suffering? How do we live with despair? How do we learn to love it? You don't need to have the right answer, just a Boundless Heart.
Our grief for the world isn't a neurosis, but a deep caring for our own selves. We're told to believe if we feel sad, scared, or angry about war, about misogyny, about the death of animals and nature itself all around us, that we're neurotic, that we're really mad at our dad, or stuck in some childhood trauma, that it's an individual problem or a private personal conflict, but it's really 4,000 years of PTSD and 500 years of the lies of science's story, and empire’s story. Capitalism’s story. Misogyny’s story. Patriarchy’s story. We are the world, and can act on behalf of life on earth, act on behalf of the whole, and of the future.
Hope is something you DO, not something you HAVE. Empathy is feeling another’s suffering. Apathy is the refusal or inability to suffer with. What's happening in the world today that breaks your heart? Gratitude for the world is a great practice for elevating your sense of Aliveness. We may not be capable at this point of seeing all the answers to the urgent sublime anxieties of this modern world, but we can help each other feel our love for the creation that surrounds us. Non-hierarchy and emergent properties happen when we begin to work together. The whole story of evolution is things appearing that weren't here before.
If you knew that everything would be ok, or that nothing you could do would make it be ok, would that bring out our greatest courage and creativity? It's not so effective to scare people with information, or to fight to win an argument. It’s compelling, because of the way the system rewards us for being right, or for winning, but that alone is not going save the world. That’s just fuels more fierce individuality and competition. What we can do is help each other to FEEL. Because, at some level of consciousness, we all feel this loss, these losses, and this is the pivotal psychological reality of our time.
Questions for students to follow this lecture—
When i think of the world we are leaving to the future unborn beings, it looks like_________.
Feelings that i carry around about all this are____________.
Ways i avoid feeling these feelings are____________.
Some ways i can use these feelings in service to the world are_________.
Get in dyads and write—If you knew that failure was impossible, what would you do to help shift the world back to sustainable, respectful, co-creative unity consciousness?
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