Called by the depths

Reading C.G. Jung's Red Book and using it as a tool for digging deeper in my life, thought, and various practices.

I mentioned Jung at the end of the last post, but that was more than three months ago. I have since been drawn in by the vortex of his Liber Novus (The Red Book). The gigantic facsimile edition has graced our home for almost five years, ever since I read this tantalizing pre-publication article in the New York Times. I was able to read a little of the book, but I eventually found the size and weight too unwieldy to handle. Recently I discovered its more conveniently sized companion, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition, which arrived in the mail last Tuesday, along with Reading the Red Book by Sanford Drob.  I have a lot of momentum into reading The Red Book after listening to all of Lance Owens' lectures and starting to read C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books, which I bought on Owens' recommendation. It seems I am being called by the Spirit of the Depths to overcome the Spirit of This Time :-)

Also, last Tuesday my brother-in-law brought my 1976 Antioch degree portfolio back from [the first typist I hired to type it] along with my copy of Ira Progoff's At a Journal Workshop. Seeing all the above on the dining room table at the same time makes me hopeful that engaging with The Red Book might provide the energy to drive me deeper into my own writing projects.

In this moment I see two avenues opening. One is talking with [the new typist] about finally getting the Antioch portfolio into machine readable format, so I can work it into my memoir project. The Red Book will be my touchstone setting the tone for that project. (How's that for enhancing gravitas?). The second avenue is reconnecting with my Progoff Intensive Journal as I look for an outlet for the energy I access from the Red Book experience.

At the same time, I have several other projects that are percolating in the background. 

I am hoping that engaging with The Red Book might allow me to go deeper with many
of these too. I prioritized them by the intensity of my current engagement, selected the top four, and together with Jung, appointed them to the new version of my five-member imaginary internal Board of Advisors:

Current advisory committee

1. C.G. Jung - The Red Book

2. A.H. Almaas - Spacecruiser Inquiry

3. Tenzin Wangyal - Inner Refuge

4. Thomas Berry - The Dream of the Earth

5. John Cobb - Whitehead as the Philosopher of an Ecological Civilization

As you can see, participation in my Advisory Committee does not imply having ever met me in "real life".

My committee also has five "backup" members:

Dogen - Whitehead, ecology, identity

Joanna Macy - Active Hope

David Abram - Earth in Eclipse

Matt Segall - Dissertation (Whitehead, Schelling, Steiner)

David McMahan - Buddhist Modernism

I am hoping that working with all of them on their interconnected visions will eventually help with the global consciousness koan that initiated this blog and remains it's primary focus.  In any event, I wanted to share what's churning as I try to process the difficult question of what is the consciousness shift necessary for healing the Earth.

Seeing the Ox

In his 1990 book of essays The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder says, "Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat--and the old, old habitat of humans--falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down." 

I so wanted to be that lad! Every time I have read that line over the years I took it as a personal challenge.

Now over twenty years later I am six months into a project of trying to answer almost the same question, restated now as, "What is the shift of consciousness needed to support the Great Turning from our industrial growth society to a sustainable civilization?"

The quote below from David Korten comes pretty close to serving as a summary of my findings to date. He has been working for years to articulate the over-arching "Story" that is struggling to emerge to replace the belief system that has gotten us into this mess. On page 28 of the .pdf of his latest iteration he pauses to summarize what he has been saying:

I now see a world gripped in a values struggle between money and life. Global corporate power aligns with the interests of money. An expanding global people-power movement aligns with the interests of life. Corporate power mobilizes around a well-defined Sacred Money and Markets story with a pervasive public presence in corporate media and a corporate dominated educational system. The people-power movement is far less visible and mobilizes around a wide variety of peace, justice, and sustainability initiatives that lack a recognized and accepted framing story.

Based on the lessons of my life experience I have no doubt that the choice between the well-established Sacred Money and Markets story and some version of the Sacred Life and Earth Community story will determine the human fate. If the Sacred Life and Earth Community story is to prevail, it must gain clear articulation and public presence.

(Korten's quote is in italics above. My comments continue below, in regular type face).

Is it possible that this Sacred Life and Earth Community story might take hold on a mass scale?  In my opinion it is  possible, but it will be a real stretch, challenging the current mass mind's capacity for complexity. It will require a larger view on at least three levels.

1. Space - It requires people to see beyond their current personal horizon, to see the whole earth as an interactive system. This is a great leap of complexity, but the number of people who have made the leap is growing, if not exponentially, at an accelerating rate.

2. Time - It requires seeing the period of the Industrial Revolution as a recent brief, and uniquely destructive, moment in human and earth history. This awareness is also growing.

3. Depth - It requires seeing the foundational beliefs and ideas of our culture as a "story" that can be examined alongside other stories. This is maybe the most difficult leap to make, because we so totally "identify" with the culture that shapes us.  But as our cultural stories disintegrate, and options appear on the horizon, it gets easier to entertain the idea that we have an "operating system" that may need a major upgrade.

It seems to me that each of these levels is attainable for most people, at least momentarily. Putting the 3 together requires additional effort. The resulting view is something like the "shift of consciousness" needed to change our course. It needs to be digested and integrated so it becomes a pervasively assumed mental baseline. This is a very tall order to pull off globally, is theoretically doable, but will probably require an intense mobilization of symbolic resources. And...I see increasing signs that it is happening.

And... after writing all the above I was drawn back to an Internet posting called "The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness", based on the book The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, by Edward Edinger. It's basically about the unification of opposites, so maybe this whole "Sighting of the Ox", based on a clash of worldviews, is just a transitional precursor, in which the New Story makes healthy contact with the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and the life-affirming myth for our time emerges for all to see. One can hope.

Meanwhile, the research project continues.

Sources

1. Gary Snyder. The Practice of the Wild, p. 5

2. David Korten."A New Story for a New Economy”, p. 28

3. David Ratcliff. "The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness"

Day before my 70th birthday

One of the first things I saw this morning was Joan Halifax's Facebook update: "So happy to be home here at Upaya. Clear skies, fresh air, sunshine, deep quiet. What a blessing. Today will be aimless". 

Aimless sounded just right, a perfect (non)guideline for my day. It's the only day this week I will be without company at home. My todo lists for reading, writing, home bookkeeping, etc. have become so gnarly I can't figure how to start prioritizing. And my 70th birthday tomorrow seems a good enough excuse to take a day off to drift and reflect on life, and on some of the deep inspiration I have found recently online and in print.

One additional blessing for me about Upaya Zen Center is their Dharma Podcasts. Being practically housebound, I consider it something of a miracle that I could listen to all the talks and discussions from very recent retreats taught by world-class Buddhist teachers without leaving my dining room table. i was especially inspired by John Dunne's teachings on Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara (The Way of the Bodhisattva). Dunne is so bright and sharp, and I'm tickled by the quirky speech mannerisms he absorbed from studying with Robert Thurman. His depth of knowledge of the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, and his emphasis on the western scientific and philosophical implications, accelerated my exploration of how these various traditions are converging on a nuanced view of the deepest nature of reality. 

I had read the Bodhicaryavatara a few years ago, but I was baffled by chapter nine, the very technical Wisdom chapter. Dunne's course inspired me to get the Dalai Lama's commentary on chapter nine, a book called Practicing Wisdom. I usually thought of Shantideva as being only about compassion. But Dunne emphasized the wisdom aspect, and especially the message that reality isn't as solid and real as we think. He followed the thread from the early Buddhist ideas of impermanence and non-self through to the Mahayana idea of emptiness, or sunyata.

This had a strong resonance with a cluster of similar ideas I had been recently seeking out in Western science & philosophy. First, the sociology of knowledge and the social construction of reality. Second, 20th century particle physics, in the context of philosophy of science, the inquiry into whether or not science describes reality or can provide any certainty about the way things are. 

I'm supposed to be searching for the shift of consciousness needed to support The Great Turning from the industrial growth society to a sustainable civilization. Instead I'm reading all this seemingly random esoteric philosophy. But I see now that I am being drawn to sources that strongly suggest  Reality isn't as solid and real as we experience it and think it is. That's a prerequisite for being able to change what seems to be an absolutely overwhelming world situation.

Now I have a better sense for why I am reading

Reality Isn't What It Used to Be by Walter Truett Anderson,

Conventional Reality and Social Construction (a blog post by Tom Pepper),

Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy by The Cowherds,

and listening to 

John Searle's Philosophy 138 - Philosophy of Society on iTunes U,

and the Great Courses CD called "Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It" taught by Steven Goldman.

Identity

Earthling
Human Being
Student of Life
Working my way toward an earthy, humane, non-sectarian, inclusive spirituality
Husband, father, son, brother, friend
Retired high-school teacher librarian
Voracious, omnivorous reader
Lifelong drummer
Music lover
Aspiring writer
Intention to cultivate bodhicitta

Last night's thought

I have discovered a pattern to what I am drawn to read beside books about Buddhism, and drawn to write about, beside the stories of my life.

I want to briefly describe the various views of what kind of shift of consciousness is necessary for healing our world, according to some of the global visionaries I have been reading.

Thomas Berry
Lester Brown
Noam Chomsky
John Bellamy Foster
Al Gore
Paul Hawken
David Korten
Joel Kovel
Michael Lerner
Joanna Macy
Bill McKibben
Larry Rasmussen
Nancy Roof

Otto Scharmer
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Immanuel Wallerstein