I Really Want To Know. Who Are You? Who...Who...Who...Who

This blog is about change, not the kind that rattles in your pocket, but the kind that creates a new view of reality. It is the change of focus that will turn the spotlight of our attention inward. Who we are is vastly greater than what we have chosen to believe, and what we are doing here is intimately related to who we are. We are not here to learn, nor are we here as a stepping-stone to some loftier spiritual existence as many have suggested. We are also not here, as science suggests, through some mindless cosmic coincidence.

We exist within the dying throes of an old mythology that, through our own choice, has robbed our world of its magic. We are through with it and are now experiencing the beginning struggle as the old tries to plug the dike against the onrush of the new. The new mythology is in the process of being formed.

The magic of childhood ebbed slowly through the pores of both a religious (premodern) and a scientific (modern) mythology. Through the scientific paradigm Earth evolved into a planet, which, through some immense cosmic coincidence was able to generate and sustain a vast array of life. We became an accident, as the central idea of our age would have us believe and consciousness became nothing more than a product of brain chemistry. The wonder that we felt as small children was painted-over by a destitute artist in need of a canvas, a modern-day Mordred, intent on erasing every trace of Camelot. Rembrandt disappeared under a layer of cheap oils, waiting the day when we would rediscover its existence under the weathered cracks of the paints that obscured it.

At the dawn of the twentieth century the veil of forgetfulness began to lift. We struggled to free ourselves from the beliefs and myopia of the mass-mind in which we had been submerged. C.G. Jung referred to collective thinking as the mass-man, an individual so conditioned by his culture that he is unable to see himself. In many ways we are all CG Jung’s mass-man; individuals trapped by mass cultural beliefs that has us constantly comparing ourselves to others, which in turn shapes our behaviour. None of us escape their effect and even fewer recognize the beliefs through which they conduct their daily lives.

The old mythology, both scientific and religious, tells us the earth is nothing more than external matter that our five senses are able to perceive. A stone is hard and potentially dangerous; water is wet and cannot be breathed; winter is cold, summer is hot; plants and animals are food to sustain our bodies and all meaning is contained in the utility of an object. As the new postmodern mythology struggled to form its own story at the beginning of the twentieth century we began to understand Joseph Campbell's question; are we the light or are we the vehicle through which the light is emitted?

The new world mythology sees matter as metaphor, an outer projection of an equally real inner world where consciousness is so much more than a chemical reaction in the brain. The old mythology screamed of goals and ignored the moment, but the new whispers of something called ‘Now’ and non-attachment to goals.

We begin to see a joint venture of the strong and the weak, a play of opposites that is an integral part of our reality. Destroy one and both disappear, indeed, without one the other could not be discerned. How can we recognize weakness without having experienced strength? How can we feel love without having known hatred? Is there a point where cold becomes hot or low becomes high? We’re told that the hottest hot and the coldest cold feels the same. If we leave our front door and walk straight for 54 thousand kilometres we complete a circle. Cycles and circles. Nature is full of them. We are full of them.

Although it was not his intent, it was ultimately Isaac Newton who robbed nature of its symbolic value, but when Copernicus flicked the earth from its central position in the solar system we began the slide down the slippery slope toward a loss of meaning in our lives. Sir Isaac Newton fertilized Copernicus' seed with science, told us the universe was nothing more than a well-oiled machine, and placed meaning, soul and Consciousness in a cryogenic deep freeze.

It has been our more recent belief that we are a product of chance and machine-like forces and that we are no more significant than a G14 popping up in a Bingo game. This primary scientific belief butts up against an infinitely older and more powerful belief; that we are a part of an intelligent design. The two keep us in conflict with ourselves, creating our own Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

It is the taboo against knowing who or what we really are, creators of a universe that only appears to be indifferent to our well-being that keeps us from being well. Like the ancient mariner it takes courage to sail toward a horizon that seems to drop off into oblivion. With courage and trust we will find that the horizon continues in a never-ending circle of creation. The challenge to us was well put several hundred years ago by Meister Eckhart. "The ultimate riddance and the most difficult is the getting rid of your own god to God."
Bill Marshall