I have been working on this book on the Soul for twenty
years and am putting most of the chapters onto the website. More will
follow. Obviously this material is copyright but I am happy for people
to draw on it, provided they acknowledge its source. I have changed
the original title of The Dream of the Water to The Dream
of the Cosmos as I gradually came to understand the meaning of
the “Divine Water”. I would like to express my
heartfelt gratitude to Joy Parker without whose editing skills and encouragement
this book could not have been completed.
THE DREAM OF THE COSMOS: A QUEST FOR THE SOUL
who are we and why are we here?
Preface
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human
consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our
being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed
– be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown
of civilization will be unavoidable.
— Vávlav Havel, address to US Congress
To reclaim the sacred nature of the cosmos – and of planet
Earth in particular – is one of the outstanding spiritual challenges
of our time.
—
Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum Theology
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly
find out how far one can go.
— T.S. Eliot
Although I had begun writing this book on the soul over twenty years
ago, the call to focus on it again came in a dream I had in the summer
of 1998.
I am at my grandmother’s home in the South of France, walking
with two friends, a woman and her husband, near the bottom of a valley.
Suddenly, on our right, we see a serpent. It is about five feet long,
a beautiful glowing ruby red on its bottom half and gold on its top
half. It has small wings but no claws or feet. Its head is not flat
like a cobra’s but is slightly bigger than its body. There is
a black marking like a V on the top of its head. It is definitely a
serpent or a winged salamander rather than a dragon. Its red and gold
scales gleam luminously, like enamel. We look nervously at it and I
say, “I hope it won’t bite us.” We walk on through
olive groves and come to the furthest edge of the property. Suddenly
the serpent is there, on our right. It has flown from its former place.
It moves towards me and bites me on my right hand, at the base of the
thumb. Its bite leaves a circle of tiny red dots on my thumb.
It took
me some days to make the connection between “right” and
“write,” but when I did, I knew that I had to return to
the work I had begun many years earlier. As I reflected on what form
the book could take, and the difficulty of conveying ideas that are
so alien to the spirit of our time, I remembered the words that the
psychologist C.G. Jung had written in his last book, Man and His
Symbols, “As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single
individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must
indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can
afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is
loathe to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it
might be worth while for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance
his or her unconscious may know something that will help us.”
(1)
The Dream of the Cosmos is the story of a multi-layered
quest to understand the causes of human suffering and to re-connect
with a deeper reality than the one we inhabit in this physical dimension
of experience. It answers the question “Who are we and why are
we here, on this planet?” It is written for those who are looking
for something beyond the superficial values of our culture, who may
be disillusioned with religious and secular belief systems as currently
presented and who question the political values which are deeply mired
in the pursuit of power. It is written with two voices: one the voice
of a personal quest and the other which explores the historical and
psychological causes that have brought into being our present view of
reality.
In it I
seek to recover a very ancient image of the soul, one that has long
been lost. The soul was once imagined as an all-embracing Web of Life—not
so much something that belongs to us as something to which we belong,
in whose life we participate. The world is crying out for the primary
values that have always been associated with soul understood in this
wider sense: wisdom, compassion, justice, relationship—values
which I will define further as the book proceeds.
I hope it
may make a small contribution towards healing the Wasteland—the
current state of the planet and the lives of the billions of men, women
and children that are blighted or destroyed by human cruelty, greed
and ignorance. Centuries of conflict between nations, religions and
ethnic groups have brought us to the present time when we must find
a way of transcending this archaic pattern of behaviour or risk destroying
ourselves as a species.
Over the
course of many centuries, we have developed a formidable intellect,
a formidable science, a formidable technology. But what of the soul—source
of our deepest instincts and feelings? What of our visions, dreams and
hopes as well as our unhealed wounds and the suffering generated by
our cruelty and lack of compassion towards each other? What of our need
for relationship with this unrecognized dimension of reality? The pressing
need for the soul's recognition has brought us to this time of choice.
It is as if mortal danger is forcing us to take a great leap in our
evolution that we might never have made were we not driven by the extremity
of circumstance.
In the
medieval Grail Legend, Parsifal asks the question of the wounded Grail
Guardian, “What ails thee, Father?” It seems appropriate
to ask this question of our culture. Our current worldview rests on
the premise of our separation from and mastery of nature, where nature
is treated as object with ourselves as controlling subject. This belief
has its roots in a far distant past, in the Myth of the Fall in the
Book of Genesis and its profound influence on the development of Western
civilisation. There we find the story of our expulsion from a divine
world and our Fall into this world, a Fall that was brought into being
by a woman, Eve, who disobeyed the command of God and brought death,
sin and suffering into being. From this myth there developed the belief
that the whole human race was tainted by original sin, a subject that
will be explored in later chapters.
There is
a second problematic legacy from the past: the image of God shared by
the three Abrahamic religions which has defined 'God' as a transcendent
creator, separate and distinct from the created order and from ourselves.
Western civilization, despite its phenomenal achievements, developed
on the foundation of a fundamental split between spirit and nature,
creator and creation. Only now are we brought face to face with the
effects of this split in the devastation we have wrought upon the Earth.
Because
of the influence of this transcendent concept of God as well as the
influence of the Myth of the Fall, we have come to look upon nature
as something separate from ourselves, something we could master, control
and manipulate to obtain specific benefits for our species alone because
ours, we believed, has been given dominion over the earth. It has come
as a bit of a shock to realise that our lives are intimately bound up
with the fragile organism of planetary life and the inter-dependence
of all species. If we destroy our habitat, whether inadvertently or
deliberately by continuing on our present path, we may risk destroying
ourselves.
The threat
of global warming and the urgent need to free ourselves from dependency
on fossil fuels appear to be the catalyst which is bringing about a
profound shift in our values. Instead of treating our planetary home
as the endless supplier of all our needs, without consideration for
its needs, we are having to rethink beliefs and attitudes which have
influenced our behaviour for millennia—beliefs and attitudes which
are deeply rooted in our religious traditions as well as in the secular
beliefs of modern science.
Once again,
as in the early centuries of the Christian era, it seems as if new bottles
are needed to hold the wine of a new understanding of reality, a new
worldview. What is the emerging vision of our time which could offer
a template for a conscious humanity? I believe it is a vision which
takes us beyond an outworn paradigm where we are held in bondage to
beliefs and attitudes specific to race, nation, religion or gender,
which have led us to exclude and devalue those who are different from
ourselves and neglect our relationship with the Earth, our planetary
home. It is a vision which takes us beyond an outworn image of deity
and offers us a new concept of spirit as a unifying energy field —
a limitless sea of being — as well as the creative consciousness
or organising intelligence active within that sea or field, and a new
concept of ourselves as belonging to and participating in that incandescent
ground of consciousness. It is a vision which recognises the sacredness
and indissoluble unity of the great cosmic web of life and imposes on
us the responsibility of becoming far more sensitive to the effects
of our decisions and our actions. It invites our recognition of the
needs of the planet and the life it sustains as primary, with ourselves
as the conscious servants of those needs. Above all, it is a vision
which asks that we relinquish our addiction to weapons and war and the
pursuit of power; that we become more aware of the dark shadow cast
by this addiction which threatens us with ever more barbarism, bloodshed
and suffering.
From this
perspective, the crisis of our times is not only an ecological and political
crisis but a spiritual crisis. The answers we seek cannot come from
the limited consciousness which now rules the world but could grow from
a deeper understanding born of the union of mind and soul, helping us
to see that all life is one, that each one of us participates in the
life of a cosmic entity of immeasurable dimensions. The urgent need
for this psychic balance, this deeper intelligence and insight, this
wholeness, could help us to recover a perspective on life that has been
increasingly lost until we have come to live without it—and without
even noticing it has gone—recognizing the existence of no dimension
of reality beyond the parameters set by the human mind. It is a dangerous
time because it involves transforming entrenched belief systems and
archaic survival habits of behaviour that are rooted in fear, as well
as the greed and desire for power that are born of fear. But it is also
an immense opportunity for evolutionary advance, if only we can understand
what is happening and why.
After so many
billion years of evolution, it is simply unacceptable that the beauty
and marvel of the Earth should be ravaged by us through the destructive
power of our weapons, our insatiable greed and the misapplication of
our science and technology. It is inconceivable that our extraordinary
species, which has taken so many billion years to come to conscious
awareness, should destroy itself and lay waste to the Earth through
ignorance of the divinity in which we dwell and which dwells in us. For
a small but rapidly increasing number of us, there is the possibility
of choosing whether to continue in the patterns of the past or to create
new patterns, living and acting from a different relationship with life,
committing ourselves to the immense effort we need to make to understand
and serve its mystery. As we do so, we would begin to live the Dream
of the Cosmos.
1. C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Aldus Books, London, 1964,
p. 10
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