"We need a great rebirth of the heroic in our world.Every sector of human society, wherever that may be on the planet,seems to be slipping into an unconscious chaos.Only the heroic consciousness, exerting all its might,will be able to stop this slide toward oblivion.Only a massive rebirth of courage in both men and womenwill rescue the world.Against enormous odds, the Hero picks up his swordand charges into the heart of the abyss,into the mouth of the dragon,into the castle under the power of an evil spell."Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette
The kids are not alright. Neither are
the adults.
It's endemic, and if you don't have it,
it's hunting you down, mercilessly,
Boredom means the soul, the deepest part
of ourselves, is bleeding.
We're not supposed to be bored, and
because we live in sedated states (drugged on caffeine, toxins,
refined foods, artificial landscapes of media and banal pop culture,
and more miasmas of the matrix), we're not even aware of how
revolting, how anathema it is to be bored in a world that is
beautiful, majestically intriguing and a wonderland of evolving
creativity by its very nature.
As I wrote once, love perishes in the
city.
It does if no resistance is offered, if
we simply give in and acquiesce to the slow downward spiral of
livelihood afforded by our cultural propagations:
get job, acquire goods, consume, alcohol and tobacco good, expanding and liberating plant medicines restricted, terrorists are constant threat, and, well, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley have done probably the greatest work rendering the dystopian modern world. It's a quagmire.
It's quicksand, and it's taking us down.
What to do?
Our own lives are hard enough to right,
but when we consider the world beyond us with its horrendous issues,
it's just too much to bear. We hovel. We get depressed, diligently.
We take 'drugs' to 'heal' but they only steal what bearings we had
to navigate a potential natural resiliency and regeneration. We are
wasted in and on wasteland…
OK. Enough of that. It's a cynical view
and one that's only true on ONE dimension of reality.
Luckily, there are many dimensions and
planes/worlds to choose to live in. For instance, we can exist in a
paranoid, conspiratorial world that constantly assures us of
victimhood (and the strange morbid fascination with suffering that
comes with addiction to shirking self-reliance).
We can exist in a fanatically religious
world of good and evil absolutism that cleaves us to rigidity and
inevitable disastrous psychology, as we attempt to cage the human
spirit that inevitably melts every lasso; burns every wall of
control. We can also exist in a world that we revere as something
sacred; gestating with infinite possibilities of goodness and
integral living that transcends divisiveness.
A world that we can embrace as
co-creators, co-sustainers, and co-players, reveling in the fun of
trusting through direct knowing that truth and beauty are at its
essence, that, as
Rob Brezsny famously
considered,
"the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings."
It's up to you. Did you know that? YOU!
"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles."
However, most of us are not taking the
reins.
It seems too difficult, too much of a
commitment. Or perhaps it's just sheer ignorance - we had no idea we
had the choice to choose what world we live in AND the choice to
actually partake in its creation, sustenance and celebration.
This is a very different picture of the
human animal than what social norms depict, namely being a sedentary
citizenry whose only real democratic action is a vote cast every
couple years, guided philosophically by ambiguous quotas of
nationalism and commercialism which offers terrifying vacuity of
intrigue… Oh, we've already been over this.
On the other hand, we can choose to wake
each morn to a whole new self-anointing as hyper-dynamic,
multidimensional players in a cosmic game (called Lila in Sanskrit)
where we are seated as the heroes of our lives, constantly defying
odds, charging days with passion and romanticism that leaps over
mere interpersonal connectivity to rub against the blessing of Earth
and the nimbus of the sky; capitulate with the moonlight and orgy
with the stars.
We can even choose to
recreate ourselves each day, dance
our prayers, dare our truths to hatch and actually befriend death
constantly as the ever-vigilant ally daunting time into an ecstatic
womb that bemoans we seize each day as our last.
The ancient Gnostics (luminaries of the
Pagan or indigenous European culture) went through incredibly
complex and harrowing training and initiations, culminating in a
once-per-lifetime imbibing of a psychedelic brew called
kykeon (made from fermented barley,
we're told) that would melt the last ramparts of their already
soul-evaporating ego (or separate sense identity) so that they could
have a life-changing experience of communing their consciousness
with the great consciousness of the Godhead, which was not some
heavenly father skyward but the Earth itself, kissing their very
feet, holding them in atmosphere; Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom; the
planetary being that the Earth is!
We are told by the Gnostics that we
actually live within Her soul!
And when these neophytes journeyed
through such ecstatic excursions they were dubbed 'telestai'
- those who are aimed - because from that experience they would gain
the deepest understanding of what they are, what life is, without a
shade of a doubt.
For the rest of their lives they would
be driven from the stability of such a foundation toward noble
purposes of sharing such wisdom with others, training the young
generations to foment as well into wild wisdom, and to revere and be
a frequent field of playful respect to the essential dharma or
eco-spiritual laws that assured empowered lives of infinite
happiness.
Just like plants, they were: only when
properly rooted in the Earth below can we grow and reach up to the
Light of true knowledge.
We've come a long way since those Pagan
times of indigenous rapport and how much we've lost, of course, but
with the opportunity of so much to gain. We stand aimless compared
to such lofty ideals of our ancient ancestors.
Our civilization affords us the vaguest
of inner-structuring toward something ennobling for our lives.
There's a maelstrom of ambiguities that only seem to grow in the
great cease-pool of disinformation
spewed forth from the infected orifices of the corporate mass media.
Our children show the boredom worst. And
even worse, we listen to the social mechanisms and drug them to make
them more alert, somehow, believing the BS that it's some internal
wronging of chemistry; some cerebral misstep that is somehow
affecting the masses. But it's not that at all.
The real reason is why millions upon
millions of kids love Harry Potter: they long for a world of magic
and to be so learned in a place like Hogwarts that raises wizards
not consumers; heroes not cowards and infantilized beings; initiates
co-creative magicians suffuse with wonder, not glazed-over,
programmed subjects.
Life is meant to be an adventure,
something that ceaselessly arrests us into passionate purpose.
So it was with the romantic knights of
King Arthur's Round Table: life was a quest of the highest degree
whose perpetual tests catalyzed more revealing of the splendors of
the human spirit within each of us; rousing us to new strengths, new
dimensions of beingness and motivating us to constantly train
ourselves to creatively evolve and cherish this emblazoning
inner-soul.
With the Native Americans it was much
the same in their own vision quests and with indigenous initiations
the world over:
the young were put through profound challenges of mind-body-soul to steward them from the Eden of childish innocence to reckoning with the greater truths of the world we engage with as adults, taking on reins of responsibility to family, culture and the Earth at large.
We were initiated into a great mythology
or world story that varied in depictions the world over though
finding common strands of mythic values, archetypal consolidations
and virtuous aims (Joseph
Campbell's works are great expositions of the grand synthesis of
world mythologies).
Myths were not mere stories but prime
movers for the being.
They threw us into a great stream of
purpose, heroism and duty to which our life was owed but not by
thrusting us by the barrel of a gun or the levy of financial
doldrums as inspiration but the truth-beauty of heroic elders and
ancestors and the magical mysteries of the grand life journeys of
romantic partnership, death, familial generation and all the wealth
of experiences, codified as educational stages for the soul to grow
and evolve to ever-newer and robust heights of loving power.
As many of our great contemporary
mythological explorers such as Campbell and
John Lamb Lash have alluded, what our civilizations are
starving for more are new stories to rouse us into heroic life.
For what our modern commercial cultures
afford are anorexic elixirs at best, vacuous stories of corrupt
politicians and malevolent industrialisms, and the nightmare of
materialism that has terrorized any talk of world soul. This is a
pioneering we can and must take on. It is nothing short of
enchantment of a disenchanted world.
And we need not have to plume the depths
of history to tousle ourselves to mythological relics from the past
persay.
We are, in fact, right in the midst of
one of the grandest adventures possible and to situate oneself in
the present context as someone participating actively in what is
nothing short of myriad revolutions toward alignment and harmony on
our planet.
We are rectifying the detrimental
passage of our civilization from a wayward path that some have
traced back to the Dark Ages and beyond. As a species, we have never
been more connected and aware of ourselves and the cosmos.
This is no easy journey, and we would
wish for nothing less. The heroic personality faces all adversity as
the buffalo do whenever a storm washes furiously over the land: they
turn directly towards it and face it in all its fury.
When we choose to hunt what has been
hunting us all along, namely our apparent imperfections and
weaknesses, our shadowy selves that hide from the glory of our
potential shining, and all the cunning doubts that would question
our every motive to rise above.
Popular culture is wickedly a culture of
mediocrity: we are made passive before the pantheon of so-called
celebrities and worldly leaders, and further belittled by our
impotent democratic rights that seem to be endangered progressively
by neo-conservatist government policy.
When we choose to turn every fear upside
down the instant it appears, tickling them to truth with an
indomitable love that says it will leave no part of our personality
in sickening schism, we begin to hoist ourselves into a luminous
centering. We gain strength as fears show themselves as the great
revealers of our natural power that we'd forgotten or were never
taught about.
Each day is a microcosm of the story of
our lives.
Today is page one of your creative
mythology, your heroic story and your time to take part in the
great, grand cosmic adventure.
Write long, freely, messily, clumsily,
fervently, and relentlessly, with all the bastion of your being; all
its pain, all its beauty, trysting into wisdom. We are what we've
been searching for.
The only question now is, what is there
to be done when the seeking is over?
"At this critical time, we are called into action to preserve our environment after modern industry's catastrophic impact.Habitat collapse and extinction caused by our willful, greedy, consumptive species is out of control and on a suicidal course. The human unconscious shares tremendous grief and guilt over this destruction, leading to an epidemic of depression medicated with legal and illegal drugs.Humankind must acknowledge its errors, actively grieve and beg forgiveness from Mother Earth. Loving our planet, we realize the miracle of the interdependent Net of Beings, from the tiniest microorganisms to giant whales singing in the deep.Conscious of World-spirit, we hear the cry of nature and compassionately, wisely, and creatively act to awaken one another to heal what remains of God's gift to us."Alex Grey from Net of Being
