I have been working on this book for twenty years and am now putting its twenty chapters onto my website. Obviously this material is copyright but I am happy for people to draw on it, provided they acknowledge its source. I would like to express my profound gratitude to Joy Parker without whose editing skills and encouragement this book could not have been finished. My gratitude also extends to my husband and the close friends whose trust, encouragement and invaluable assistance have helped me to bring this book to completion – in particular Scilla Elworthy, Veronica Goodchild, Belinda Hunt, Betty Kovács, Kimberley Saavedra, Kit Constable-Maxwell (who created my website and taught me how to manage it), David Lorimer, Douglas Hamilton and Paul Hague. To each and all of you a huge and heartfelt thank you!

THE DREAM OF THE COSMOS: A QUEST FOR THE SOUL

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

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 our present view of reality into being.
          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 one of the medieval Grail Legends, 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. Yet this was never more than a belief, although it was presented as divinely revealed truth.
           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 realize 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 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 organizing 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 recognizes 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 habits inculcated by 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 may 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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