May we be with the Force

This post is pretty much a follow-on to the previous one, "The world within", which I recommend you read first if this one is not to make even less sense than it probably will anyway. Here, I want to weave together the work of two people from different religious traditions, writing forty years apart, who have probably never heard of each other, but who are, I think, saying something very similar and vitally important.

Along with Joanna Macy's "World as Lover, World as Self", which I talked about last time, I have been reading Letter XI of Meditations on the Tarot, "Force" (see "Worth a look", above right, for more on this astonishing book). The "Force" card from the Tarot deck shows a woman effortlessly holding apart the jaws of a lion. The anonymous author of the book starts by observing that this immediately presents us with a puzzle. No woman can exert sufficient force, in the commonly-understood sense, to overcome a lion's jaws. So something other than "brute force" must be meant here.

The title of Macy's book arises from its first chapter, where she presents four ways of looking at the world: world as battlefield, world as trap, world as lover, world as self. Not surprisingly, she is less than keen on the first two, particularly "world as battlefield", which is where we picture existence as a battle between good and evil, with ourselves (of course) on the side of good. Many environmental campaigners see life in that way, and it leads, she says, to self-righteousness, frustration and burnout.

I think she is right. I think that kind of us-versus-them campaigning is an (entirely understandable) example of trying to wage war through conventional force; moral and intellectual force rather than physical force, but force nonetheless. The jaws of our world-destroying economic system cannot be overcome in that way. If you're going to stare into the throat of the Beast, your courage is to be saluted, but you'd better come up with a more effective strategy.

For the author of "Meditations", (true) Force has many names. It is the life force ("zoe" rather than "bios", for the Greek scholars). It is the waters flowing from the throne of God. It is holy animality, the kingdom of God in and through the unconscious. It is virginity. It is Mary.

He quotes the Emerald Tablet, the core text of Hermeticism, which says that Force "overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance". He asks how it is that Force can overcome solid obstacles, and answers himself this way:

"By action opposite to that of explosion, i.e. by emollient action. With regard to a mental obstacle presented by a rigid intellectual system, Force will not occupy itself with the mental formation itself, but will admit its breath into the heart of the person concerned. The heart having tasted life ("zoe"), the creative movement of life will pass its breath to the head and will breathe movement into the mental formation. This latter, having been set in motion -- not by doubt, but rather by creative elan -- will lose its rigidity and become fluid. It is thus that the liquefaction of crystallised mental formations is effected.

"With regard to psychic [psychological] obstacles, it is again emollient action which effects the transformation of a psychic complex from rigidity into sensitivity. Here again it is the breath of life which dissolves the complex, by way of the heart so that the mistrust, fear or hate concentrated in the complex is dispersed and the soul is left free of the blinding influence of the psychic complex."

We will start to change when we get a glimpse of the world as our lover; of the world as our self. Then we will be able to really take on board the science and the moral arguments. Then we will not have to force ourselves to tread more lightly on the earth. It will hurt too much to do anything else.

We will change when we fall in love.

O breath of life, come sweeping through us.

The world within

This will be one of those posts where it's a relief to be anonymous.

I have been stuck for years, and I want to get unstuck.

I was a campaigner for a long time. My parents were environmentalists, and belonged to the Green Party before it was even called the Green Party. During the eighties, I was active in CND. Then the Berlin Wall came down, and my focus shifted away from nuclear weapons to a more gradual but just as deadly threat to life, that of climate change. For five years I slogged away in Green organizations, both Christian and secular. During that time, environmental issues rose up the political agenda. But...in practice, nothing much changed.

I was left with questions. Why did the vast majority of people, even those with the intelligence and opportunity to really appreciate the situation, just not do anything significant about it? I used to knock on people's doors during election campaigns to try to get them to vote Green. Nearly everyone was friendly, but the most typical response was "well, we recycle our newspapers..." -- as if that was one tenth of one per cent of an adequate response to what they and the rest of us were doing to wreck the planet. I also saw how the effectiveness of campaigns was limited by the personalities of those who ran them. A lot of the campaigners, almost certainly including myself, were just a pain to work with.

These two factors caused me to look inwards, to try to understand people's motivation (or lack of it) and why personalities so often sabotaged the work. I got into psychotherapy and eventually trained and worked for a while as a counsellor. I also started meditating every day, and have kept at it; the practice has become the linchpin of my life. Together, these two things brought me alive and made me feel much more vital and more human. Whether I was nicer to be with is for others to judge, but I certainly liked myself much better.

After about five years of this, I quite suddenly felt I'd done enough work healing the past. My personal pain, at least in the sense of things I could link to my childhood, had pretty much gone. It felt like stepping out into a wide open space. I left therapy and soon afterwards stopped my counselling work. I just didn't feel I needed to do it any more.

Then, over a couple of years, everything went wrong, or so it seemed. I went numb. I stopped wanting to be with people. Meditation became an empty emptiness, not a full one. My energy veered away from emotional matters to intellectual ones. The words of a song by Leonard Cohen seemed to express it well: "Things are going to slide, slide in all directions; won't be nothing you can measure any more. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overcome the order of the soul." The song was called "The Future", and I despaired of the human race ever coming to its senses. George Bush's "victory" over Al Gore in the 2000 US presidential election epitomized that. There seemed no point in going back to any campaigning. I continued to try to limit my personal environmental impact as much as possible, not because I thought it would make any difference in the end, but just in order to allow myself to have some self-respect.

I have been stuck in that despair for nearly ten years. It hasn't been fun. Neither therapy nor antidepressants have really touched it. I have never been someone who can habitually shift my attention away from what I believe to be the truth in favour of something more cheerful. I have thought a lot about death, personal and planetary, and have tried to develop a spiritual life that stares it in the face and carves out some meaning to existence in spite of it. But it's been very inward-looking.

Now, at last, something is shifting. This year, the election news from the US is, I think, very, very good. Obama seems to me to be not just likeable and inspiring but highly intelligent, a genuinely good man, and perhaps above all, deeply sensible. Maybe this will look silly in a year's time, but I do expect him to make a serious attempt to point his country and the world in a saner direction. For the last couple of mornings, as I've woken up, a prayer has surfaced: "Oh God, please keep him safe". The ending of Bush's disastrous presidency symbolizes something vital within me, too, though I can't give a name to it.

I have been reading. One book is called "Global Warning: the last chance for change". The author, who is the Guardian newspaper's long-time environment correspondent, insists that change is possible, but he shows just how close we are to the tipping point where the carbon dioxide we've already pumped into the atmosphere is likely to trigger positive feedback loops, leading to runaway warming that would make the earth largely or totally uninhabitable for human beings. We must change, radically and very, very soon. A few years, not a few decades. If Obama doesn't grasp the opportunity, the next person to step up to the plate may be too late.

I've also started to read Joanna Macy's "World as lover, world as self". She writes from a Buddhist position, and emphasizes how embedded we are in the world, and the world in us. I chose the title of this post, "The World Within", to refer not (just) to the inner world but to the outer world with which we have such a strong connection that it is effectively inside us, too. If Planet Earth is shrieking in pain and close to death then anyone with a heart cannot escape the resulting suffering (and we all have hearts, open or closed).

My self-diagnosis: the world situation is so painful to me that I have shut myself down and only allowed myself to know about it intellectually. Macy has a chapter on "Despair Work" which is very affirming of despair. She describes a ritual where participants gather in a circle around four objects: dead leaves for despair; a stone for fear; a stick for anger; and an empty bowl for confusion. They each pick one of these things up and say whatever comes. I want to pick them all up together and just scream. I know all of them far, far better than I would have chosen to.

Joanna Macy insists that it's not just the campaigners, or ex-campaigners, who feel this stuff. It's virtually everyone. Those who appear indifferent, who choose to live their lives as if there was no crisis, do so not because they are unaware of its seriousness but because they cannot bear to look at it squarely. Hence the many and widespread forms of self-medication: alcohol, computer games, fast cars, television and all the rest; a broken relationship with Mother Earth hurts at least as much as a broken relationship with one's literal parents. Hence, also, the relentless increase, in both numbers and severity, of mental illness in its various forms. Effectively, nearly everyone is insane. That's the only explanation for our collective idiocy.

I don't know exactly what I'll do, but even if a positive outcome for the planet is very much in doubt, I know I'd rather spend my life acting with integrity than acting without it or not acting at all.

Lost for words

A wonderful moment on the Today programme on BBC Radio Four on Thursday, very early. (Yes, I was up with The Bean).

The programme was being hosted by two regular presenters, John Humphyrs and Sarah Montague. Humphrys is famous as a masterful interviewer, who for decades has been getting the better of seasoned politicians of all colours, and has written a book called "Lost for Words", which he himself never is. Well, almost never. It went like this...

Humphrys (reviewing the newspapers): "There's a story here about a 176-year-old tortoise on St Helena who is reckoned to be the world's oldest living animal. It says that he's lost his sight in one eye, but he obviously doesn't let that cramp his style, as he regularly mates with three females. That's quite something, isn't it. 176 years old, and he's got three mistresses."

Montague: "Oh to be a tortoise, eh, John?"

Humphrys: "Er, um...er..."