Anne Baring's Website

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles; else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved. Matt. 9:17; Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37,38

The human world of today has not grown cold but is ardently searching for a God proportionate to the new dimensions of a Universe whose appearance has completely revolutionised the scale of our faculty of worship.

If it be true, that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man on earth.

We live today in an extraordinarily challenging time when we face greater dangers but also greater opportunities than we have had in the whole course of our evolution on this planet. Many people feel that this century will be the ultimate test of our survival as a species. Not since the beginning of the Christian era has there been such a powerful impulse for transformation. On the one hand the highest value that has presided over Christian civilization for two thousand years is dying and this death of God or the process of the decay or waning of an archetype is affecting the whole world. On the other hand, beneath the surface concerns of our culture, we can see that a spiritual awakening on a planetary scale is taking place. This awakening is beginning to heal the great split in the patriarchal psyche between spirit and nature and the dissociation between thinking and feeling that lies at the core of scientific reductionism. It is being led by men and women who are bringing into being a new paradigm of reality and a spirituality arising from the need for direct connection with a transcendent dimension, a spirituality which recognises and honours the interconnectedness, indivisibility and utter sacredness of life. Their vision is creating a powerful alchemy in the culture, slowly transforming our understanding from lead into gold.
          From the first stirrings of conscious awareness, we have sought relationship with the cosmos. This is perhaps our deepest instinct. Gazing in wonder at the stars, naming the constellations, minutely charting the rising and setting of the moon and the sun, imagining a divine intelligence that has created the beauty and marvel of the earth, and longing to communicate with that intelligence, we have created many sacred images to draw us closer to the mystery. To deny the existence and fascination of this mystery is to go against one of our most powerful and deep seated instincts yet one of the most problematic issues of our time is the image of God we have inherited from a patriarchal past shared by the three Abrahamic religions.
          Three hundred and fifty years ago the Judeo-Christian image of God was still the focus of Western civilization and no-one could imagine life without belief in God. The highest vision of the different religions of what has been named as the Axial Age (beginning about 500 BC) was that we were in the world, yet not entirely of the world and could, through meditative and contemplative techniques, gain access to an invisible dimension of reality that lay beyond the phenomenal world. In the Christian tradition, through prayer, we could ask God or Christ or the Virgin Mary to intercede in our lives. We could live a godly life, following the model of compassionate service offered by Christ. We could trust in the teaching of the Church that our sins had been redeemed by Christ’s sacrificial death and that, at our death, we would be united with Christ in His kingdom.
          Then came the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the gradual repudiation or weakening of this great meta-narrative. It had begun to fade under the impact of the publication (after his death in 1543) of the major work of the Polish astronomer Copernicus that the earth moved round the sun, so displacing the belief that the earth was stationary and the fixed center of the solar system. (1) His discovery shattered the long-established Ptolomaic system and the belief in an ordered cosmos where the earth occupied the intermediate space between heaven above and hell below.
          The second impact was Newton’s (1643–1727) formidable discoveries and the development from these of the idea of a mechanistic “clockwork” universe. The third was Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and his totally different reading of the appearance of man on this planet from that set forth in the Book of Genesis. As with Copernicus’s great discovery, Darwin’s findings appeared to invalidate the Christian meta-narrative of the story of Creation and the Fall of Man and therefore the need for redemption by the sacrificial death of Christ. His theory seemed to undermine the need for the existence of God, or at least, the Biblical concept of God.
          Darwin’s theory inaugurated a great age of discovery as scientists working in different fields began to explore the geological, biological and anthropological history of the planet. While science had begun to diverge from religion as a result of the persecution of Galileo, it began to replace religion as the purveyor of new and exciting discoveries that could be tested and proven by scientific methods. In effect, it became a new religion.
          Yielding to the pressure of a new secular philosophy Christianity began to weaken. In 1867, Matthew Arnold in his great poem Dover Beach wrote of the “long withdrawing roar” of the tide of Christianity. Within a hundred years the tide of faith had withdrawn so far that there was nothing to aspire to beyond the pursuit of the aims that now dominate modern secular culture. Within a few generations, the older vision seemed to have vanished into thin air as the image of a transcendent reality faded. Reason, it was thought, would replace Faith.
          The combined influence of Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx in the late nineteenth century laid the foundation of a new secular meta-narrative: This world is the only one we need to recognize. There is no other world. There is no need to pray to God. There can be no expectation of union with God or Christ after death because there is no God and no afterlife. Recognizing the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution, Nietzsche in his introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra, asked the question: “Have you not heard that God is dead?”

The Breakdown of the Old Meta-narrative
          This was the general cultural atmosphere which as a young woman I found so perplexing and unsatisfying, having, through my travels in the East, encountered the idea that there was an enlightened state of mind or state of consciousness which could be reached through contemplation, meditation and a gradual attunement to a transcendent ground of being.
          There seemed to be nothing in the secular West that could bring me to this level of being, no path to follow other than that of conventional Christianity with its emphasis on belief, worship and charitable works or the path of science with its exploration of the physical aspect of reality. The direct experience of the numinous was never mentioned in Sunday sermons. There was an emptiness, a longing for something that I sensed was missing at the heart of both religion and secularism, an answer to the perennial human questions: What is the meaning of my existence? Why are we here? Why is life so full of evil and suffering? I became aware that thousands like myself were on a quest to answer these questions, to fill the vacuum left by the deconstruction of the old image of God and a weakening of the moral values that had guided Christian culture for centuries, however much these had been tarnished by the predatory emphasis on territorial conquest and the unbridled acquisition of wealth and power.
          At that time (in the 1950's and 60's) millions of people including myself were turning away from Christianity because its beliefs no longer evoked a response in our soul. For many they were too literal, too remote from ourselves, too male and paternal, too tied up with the inflexibility of dogma, too ignorant and intolerant of other traditions, too fanatically convinced of the infallibility of their own. Seeking a direct relationship with spirit, people turned to shamanic traditions and to the writings of mystics like the Sufis. Many, like myself, traveled to the East to explore Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism. Women went in search of what has long been missing in the patriarchal image of God—the feminine dimension of the divine and the feminine values of relationship and nurturing which were becoming increasingly difficult to honor in a culture intent on “the survival of the fittest” and voracious consumerism.
          A huge vacuum had been left by the weakening of the older myth or meta-narrative and into this poured the secular ideologies which ravaged the world in the twentieth century. The Utopian ideologies of Communism and Hitler’s vision of a Third Reich seduced millions of individuals into subscribing to beliefs which brought enslavement and death to millions of others. The men who promoted them became inflated with a god-like omnipotence, as have contemporary leaders of whatever faith who claim to be guided by God and have unconsciously identified themselves with the power of the missing archetype. Edward Edinger sums up the effects of this situation in his book, The Creation of Consciousness – Jung’s Myth for Modern Man,

The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence; the fluid is spilled and drains away, soaked up by the surrounding undifferentiated matter. Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. (3)

In a predominantly secular culture, it has become fashionable to dismiss religious beliefs as the residue of primitive and outgrown superstition. While I have sympathy with the secularist position I am concerned that if we do away with God and a transcendent order, we are left with man’s idea of what creation should be and man’s dream of manipulating creation to serve his own interests and needs. Whatever the abuses of it by religions which have claimed to know the will of God, the transcendent image has given us a moral compass to forge the values which could protect humanity from the dangerous hubris — the “god-almightiness”— of the secular dream as well as the undoubted distortions of the religious dream. These primary values are grounded in the service and protection of life: compassion, mercy, love, truth, justice, freedom.

          This beautiful image of God from Winchester cathedral—a precious fragment left after the destruction wrought by Cromwell's army— is still meaningful to millions of people. Yet, the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, writes in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space that from time to time, the image of God has to die if it is not to become an idol. It has, he says, to become transparent to transcendence in order to be renewed. (4) The same theme is reflected in the image of the death of the Old King that is found in many alchemical treatises. In our time the Old King may be identified not only with an outworn image of God but an outworn worldview and a system of values— part religious, part secular—that can no longer provide an adequate container for the soul of a whole civilization. It may be that the image of God, like ourselves, needs to evolve because something in the old image is missing or incomplete.
          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 revelation. As Jesus pointed out two thousand years ago, bottles become worn out and have to be replaced. But how do we create the vessel which can assimilate the wine of a new vision of reality and a new image of God? How do we relinquish the dogmatic beliefs and certainties which have, over the millennia of the patriarchal era, caused indescribable and quite unnecessary suffering and the sacrifice of countless millions of lives? I cannot answer these questions. But I know that as the new understanding, the new wine comes into being, we have to hold the tension between the old and the new.
          It must have been like this two thousand years ago when the disciples of Jesus tried to assimilate what he was telling them, something so utterly different from the belief-system and the brutal values that governed the world of their time. Those new teachings and those different values seem barely to have touched the consciousness that currently governs the world, however much political and religious leaders proclaim their allegiance to them. Millions proclaim themselves to be Christians yet millions betray the teaching of Christ about compassion and not shedding their brothers' blood.

Much of what was lost to Christianity during the early centuries of persecution has been recovered, including the important Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. (5) But there is as yet no cultural vessel to receive this recovered material, no way in which it can be integrated or married with the orthodox religious traditions because these cling tenaciously and even fanatically to the literal interpretation of revelatory texts written down centuries and millennia ago.
The level of consciousness so far attained by “believers” does not seem strong enough to tolerate a change in the image of God; yet if the image of the divine does not change so that there is a better balance between the masculine and feminine archetypes, it seems doubtful that human consciousness can evolve further, either because it is in thrall to an unbalanced image of God or to the atheism that repudiates the whole concept of God. We now know why the feminine dimension of the divine was repudiated by the patriarchal religions but it does seem astonishing that none appears to question the adequacy of the concept of God or Allah they have inherited from the past. In this sixteenth century carving of the Vierge Ouvrante we are given a startling inversion of the usual image of God; God and Christ are both contained within the maternal vessel of the Virgin. As Susanne Schaup points out in her book Sophia, Aspects of the Divine Feminine:

The image of God in Western religion, including Judaism and Islam, is a masculine one, despite all protests to the contrary, and as such is a direct cause of the devaluation of the Feminine and feminine priorities in our culture...That which gives a culture legitimacy is, ultimately, its underlying concept of God. If this concept does not change, nothing can actually change…No scientific, ecological, or social paradigm shift can take effect, as long as the theological paradigm does not change along with it. (6)

           Despite the efforts of many feminists to“marry” a feminine image of deity with the masculine one and the world-wide change of consciousness that is gathering momentum with regard to our relationship with the planet, it is nevertheless a fact that the world is still ruled by a patriarchal and increasingly secular mindset, whether we look at religion, politics, science or economics. The great nations of the world are still competing with each other for power and resources — even those becoming available through the melting of the Arctic ice-cap — rather than coming together to serve the whole planetary organism. There is as yet no political consensus about how to work together and how to formulate different values, although a movement in that direction is becoming increasingly articulate.
          It seems as if we are living through a tumultuous interregnum, made critically dangerous because of our immeasurably enhanced capacity to destroy each other and irreparably damage the fabric of life on this planet. While the “death of God” has been welcomed by a secular culture, this fact nevertheless creates in many people an unconscious anxiety and a deep fear of the void, and gives rise to a moral vacuum as well as to a defensive fundamentalist position in both religion and secular science. The Jihadist who believes that it is God's will that Islam should conquer the world may draw the power of his ideology from this fear. The roots of the tendency to polarize lie deep in our solar past but they are strengthened whenever there is a situation which arouses uncertainty, anxiety and conflict.
          It may not be God who has died but rather the image we have projected onto Him, an image that was formulated by a male priesthood according to the level of understanding at a specific historical time. It may be that “God” is longing for release from His imprisonment in the strait-jacket of our beliefs. Or, to use a gardening metaphor, “God” has become pot-bound, constricted by the anthropomorphic, gender-biased, paternalistic image that was projected onto Him millennia ago. As Teilhard de Chardin suggested, we need to formulate a new image of God, a new cosmology that is related to the phenomenal discoveries of science which have revealed the vast dimensions of the universe. We also need one that can reunify spirit and nature— the two aspects of life that were polarized during the solar era. As Teilhard pointed out, “Something seems to have gone wrong in the way God is represented to man. Man would seem to have no clear picture of the God he longs to worship.”(7)
          Mythologically speaking, as the prevailing myth of our civilization wanes, dies and disappears into the underworld of the collective unconscious, it could be said that we are living through a lunar phase of death or darkness. “We are,” as the historian of culture Thomas Berry comments, “in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.”(8) In mythic terms, we are waiting for the rebirth of the moon and for a new story which could unite the whole of humanity.
          During the phase of darkness however, we are still living under the spell of the solar meta-narrative described in Chapters Four and Six—the Promethean myth of progress and the mastery of nature through the power of science and technology. This meta-narrative has no relationship with a transcendent dimension. The human mind is the supreme value. “Progress” serves the perceived needs of our species alone. In its hubristic stance, this secular meta-narrative has banished the unknown, unexplored, transrational aspect of life and of our own nature. Yet, paradoxically, this secular meta-narrative has developed out of the belief enshrined in the Book of Genesis that God gave Adam dominion over the earth.
          Jung foresaw this situation in his book, Psychology and Religion, East and West. He understood that Nietzsche’s phrase “the Death of God” was not to be taken literally, any more than the doctrines of the Church about the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection of Christ were to be taken literally, but described a profound transformation that was at work in the depths of the modern psyche. Addressing the need for the emergence of the Christian myth in a new form, and offering a new mythical and symbolic interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection, he wrote,

The myth says he [Christ] was not to be found where his body was laid. “Body” means the outward, visible form, the erstwhile but ephemeral setting for the highest value. The myth further says that the value rose again in a miraculous manner transformed. The three days' descent into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. The fact that only a few people see the Risen One means that no small difficulties stand in the way of finding and recognizing the transformed value. (9)

           We now know that over the millennia of the solar era, the image of deity changed from the primordial Great Mother of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras to many goddesses and gods and finally, in the three patriarchal religions of the solar era, to the image of a single Father God. Throughout this time, whatever the religion, the sacred image gave us a vertical axis, an Archimedean point beyond ourselves to which we could relate, keeping us in touch with the Source from which we have come.
          I think we can understand that, as our species evolved out of nature and as our conscious mind slowly evolved out of the matrix of instinct, the sacred image and the mythologies which grew up around it were like an umbilical cord holding us in touch with the foundation of life. But, at the same time, as we moved into the solar age and the monotheistic god-image of the patriarchal religions, the older relationship with the earth and the living cosmos was gradually lost and with it the idea that the whole of nature was sacred, infused with divinity, alive with spirit.
          During the solar age, the literal interpretation of the myth of the Fall and the doctrine of original sin cast a pall over our lives and led us to look upon the earth as a fearsome place of punishment, suffering, toil and death. I think it was these two linked beliefs that cut us off from the kind of connection with nature that we once had (in the Neolithic era) and that indigenous peoples have retained in certain parts of the world.
          The ramifications of these beliefs are enormous and I have tried to explore some of them in earlier chapters and leave the reader to reflect on them — relating them to the current political situation where all three Abrahamic religions and the peoples who have embraced them are embroiled in conflict in the area of the planet where, long ago, they originated.
          The Christian meta-narrative, arising out of the matrix of Judaism, emphasized an image of God as a loving Father, concerned for the well being of each and every creature—even the humble sparrow. Christ himself became a new God-image — unifying divinity and humanity in his person and offering a template to humanity of what all men and women could become by discovering and manifesting the latent divinity within them through the creation of a direct relationship with that mysterious ground. Yet this great revelation which pointed to the further evolutionary potential of humanity — already highly developed in the Eastern traditions, was deflected into a new religion in which Christ’s sacrificial death was interpreted as being offered for the redemption of the sins of the world and, specifically, for Christians who had been baptised into the faith. The emphasis was on redemption through faith and belonging to a group with a superior revelation rather than on the transformation of consciousness. Redemption was only available to believers. I find the idea that belief and belonging to a religious faith can bring redemption incomprehensible.

The Conflict between the three Patriarchal Religions
It could be said that the tragic conflict in the Middle East is, at root, a conflict between three religious traditions, each of which believes itself to be the carrier of a special and unique revelation. Any threat or challenge to the collective belief system is met by a furious and at times, an hysterical defence. The reason for this seems to be that, at the deepest level of the psyche, religious beliefs are tied into survival instincts. A threat to a religion is a threat to the survival of that group and the deep and sacred bonding between members of that group. Because these beliefs are so deeply held and because beneath them lies the terror of the Void, of the meaninglessness of human existence, it is rarely possible to have a discussion about whether certain beliefs might need to be modified and even discarded in the light of new discoveries, both scientific and psychological.          In the distant past, the Jewish belief that they were the Chosen People left other groups excluded and gave rise to the longing in them to be equally valued, equally loved by God. It gave a Cain and Abel twist to relationships between different belief systems and ethnic groups. The Christians went one better, claiming that they too were “chosen” to carry a revelation that was brought by the only son of God and was therefore, by implication, superior to other systems which it would ultimately supplant and replace. This conviction led Christianity into an arrogant and inflated evangelical position which led it to look down on other religious traditions and attempt to convert their believers to the “true” path. What course was left to Islam other than to try and emulate the Christian example by propagating the spread of its faith by all possible means, attempting to supplant Christianity by sheer weight of numbers and force of arms? Psychologically speaking, this whole unconscious process set up a massive sibling rivalry between the three patriarchal “brothers” wherever the specific revelations were interpreted in a literal way.
         Even though each religion was, in principle, against killing, in practice all were and still are prepared to kill if the political or religious situation seems to demand it. Hence, in European history, Christians routinely demonised and killed Jews. In the course of four Crusades, they attacked the Muslims whom they saw as their rivals in the Holy Land. The Christian monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled both Moors and Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century. In the same century Christian Europe united to defend itself against the Muslim armies whose aim was to conquer Europe for Islam and perhaps avenge the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. One has only to look at the Serbian response to the call of Slobodan Milosevic to expel the Kosovan Muslims from Serbia to see how these ancient rivalries can be re-ignited in the modern psyche and how easily the tribal call to kill and avenge ancient wrongs can override the Christian ethos of loving one's neighbour as oneself.
          The old atavistic behaviour pattern of predator killing prey, already deeply embedded in tribal rivalries, was unconsciously incorporated into religions: human sacrifice in defence of a belief system or an ideology was sanctioned as something that was acceptable to God, something that God might even approve of and support. The idea that a particular belief system was more true, more pleasing to God than others and offered a path to salvation denied to those following another belief system was accepted and taught as part of a religious tradition, indoctrinating generations of children with this pernicious idea. Worse, the idea that anyone who was a threat to that tradition could be killed in order to preserve or promote the “true” religion was woven into the fabric of the teaching and from there found its way into ideologies and relations between nations. The Christian Church was flawed from its inception by the exclusion of texts that were unacceptable to a handful of very powerful individuals.

The Split between Spirit and Nature
          The image of God we have inherited from the patriarchal religions portrays a transcendent God creating the earth from a distance, distant from the created world and ourselves. What was lost was the idea of the immanence of God — an idea that the Jewish philosopher Spinoza (1632–1677) was briefly to revive in the seventeenth century, suffering persecution by his Jewish community for daring to suggest it. This image of God became embedded in belief systems which fixed the god-head in the image of a male deity and rejected or failed to include both the feminine dimension of the divine and the idea that material creation, including the body, is a theophany—a showing forth or manifestation of a divine ground or source. How then could human life, human experience, be valued and honoured as something precious, something sacred, a vehicle of divinity? How could the life of the earth and all its species be respected?
          What have we done to God? Like a conjurer demonstrating his skills, we have cut God in two and have utterly lost the sense of the divinity of nature. We have fixed the image of deity in the masculine gender, refusing until very recently to entertain the idea that the feminine aspect of spirit is essential to the completion and balance of the image of deity and therefore to the balance of a civilization.
          The problem may not lie with God but how we use God to serve our own ends. Christians (to focus on one religion) have believed that God ratified their prejudices in their persecution of women, homosexuals, blacks (slavery) and people with a different belief system from their own, whether Jews, Muslims or the indigenous people of different continents (India, China, Africa, North and South America). They have claimed that the Christian revelation was superior to that of others, and have tried to convert people to the “true” path to God, proclaiming that belief was the path to redemption and that “outside the church there is no salvation.”
          For centuries they persecuted shamans, visionaries, prophets, mystics and all those who might have introduced us to a different experience of spirit. Meister Eckhart, one of Christianity’s greatest mystics, would have been burnt at the stake if he had not fortunately died before the Church could implement a trial and a sentence of death. What is there in the actual behavior of so-called Christian nations that justifies their claim to superiority? Where was their compassion towards the peoples they conquered? Or, until very recently, their respect for the earth?
          For all its extraordinary achievements in holding society together in a shared vision, the abuse of God and God’s creation has been a major flaw throughout the history of patriarchal religion. With the “death” of God proclaimed by a secular culture, many of these old habits and beliefs are being challenged. Yet still we hear religious leaders condemning contraception and homosexuals and excluding women priests in the name of God. We even hear them speaking of the “redemption of sexuality.” Under the banner of Islam, we see the terrible persecution of women, as in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In many of these instances of persecution, there is a conflation of ancient tribal custom and human prejudice with divine command.
          What use is belief if it does not lead to a deepening of understanding and compassion? And what use is the continued worship of God’s sacrificed Son if nothing fundamentally changes in our habits of behaviour? Would Christ have approved of weapons of mass destruction? Of Hiroshima? Of depleted uranium and the bombing of Baghdad?
         The power of religious institutions over the collective psyche of believers is still immense. Any deviation from the given belief may still be viewed as punishable by God, bringing retribution in the form of terrible natural disasters like the tsunami of 2004 or diseases like AIDS. Imams in Sumatra told their congregations that the tsunami was a punishment from God for the sexual sins of the women in their community. An American Christian pastor has said that the people of Haiti were punished by the terrible earthquake that struck them in 2010 because they renounced being governed by the French in the eighteenth century.Women are murdered in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere for dressing inappropriately or condemned to death by stoning. Religious conformity is imposed by threat of death.
          Even though each religion was, in principle, against killing, in practice many religions were and still are prepared to accept the killing of others if the political or religious imperative seems to demand it.
          The literalist reading of the Book of Revelation has led fundamentalist Christians eagerly to anticipate Armageddon, the final battle at the “End-Times” which is to be the precursor of the “Rapture” and Second Coming of Christ. Shi’a Muslims await the return of the Mahdi in the same expectation of a New World Order. Ultra-orthodox Jews await the Messiah. All accept mass sacrifice in the final battle between the forces of light and darkness as a necessary preliminary to the arrival of the new order. Naturally, only the “Chosen” will be saved, some even taken up to heaven from one moment to the next.
          When literalist beliefs take over the collective psyche, aroused in a credulous public by fanatical priests, they can override the highest values of that religion and cast what can only be described as a spell on the psyche of those who claim to believe in God. All this perversion has arisen from a mistaken concept of what deity is—the worship of an idol rather than true insight into the nature of divinity.
          Yet when read as metaphor rather than the Word of God, these prophecies about the end of the world and the coming of a Messiah could be understood as referring to the raising of the consciousness of the whole of humanity rather than predicting the appearance of a single redeemer who will impose a new order. Rabbi David Cooper, for example, writes in his book, God is a Verb, “Kabbalists say that we are rapidly approaching another major paradigm shift in awareness. It will be called messianic consciousness, and we will understand everything in an entirely new light.”(10)

The Influence of the East
          Over the last half century, a priceless treasury of texts from the eastern religions has reached the West. From the 1950’s more and more people, disillusioned with Christianity, began to travel to the East in search of the wisdom enshrined in the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Daoism and Sufism— the mystical traditiion of Islam. From these they learned methods of meditation which could open a direct path of communion with a transcendent dimension of reality—a path to the experience of enlightenment. As I had done on my two journeys to the East, they encountered a radically different image of spirit as well as the concepts of karma and reincarnation. They absorbed the idea that suffering arises not from original sin but from unconsciousness or ignorance of the fact that Spirit is the ground of all life.
          Many texts became available in excellent translations for a new and interested audience. The celebrated poems of Rumi drew a cult following. Tsultrim Allione drew attention to extraordinary women in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in her book Women of Wisdom (1984) Aldous Huxley’s books opened the door to the recovery of the shamanic traditions of indigenous people. Publishers sprang up who specialised in these books. Anthologies of eastern texts were compiled.
          The invasion of Tibet by China in 1950 forced many Tibetan monks to flee to India, America and Europe. Some learned English and other languages, became renowned teachers, and wrote books which had a considerable impact on Western culture. Sogyal Rimpoche’s book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, for example, was widely read. They brought with them ancient methods of healing and meditation and offered an enormous enrichment of different approaches to healing the sickness of body and soul. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is recognized by millions as the greatest spiritual leader in the world today.
          California was for many years a focus for the development of these ideas, practises and contemplative methods of the East and a centre for the spiritual development of the individual; but Europe also benefited as Tibetan monks established temples and teaching centers in several countries, bringing Buddhism to many thousands of people looking for a different approach to spirituality. The Vietnamese monk Thich Naht Hahn established a renowned center in France. The Maharishi Mahesh Yoga attracted thousands to follow his method of Transcendental Meditation and established a centre in England.
          People began to seek out new methods of healing such as acupuncture, aromatherapy, reflexology and Chinese Herbalism, as well as Ayurvedic medicine and the already well-established approach of Homeopathy. Despite the sometimes virulent opposition of established medicine to these ancient methods of healing, thousands of men and women have now trained in them and millions are being treated by them. The focus of this approach to healing is on an empathic holistic attitude which treats body and mind as a single organism. These different influences gradually began to have an impact on the vacuum left by the deconstruction of the image of God inherited from the patriarchal past.

Part 11 - The Search for a Unified Vision: Healing the Wound in the “Body” of God
          Many years ago I had a dream that I was walking in a wilderness of rock and shale, a landscape similar to one above the tree line of the Alps. Suddenly I heard a faint voice crying, “Help me. Help me.” I looked around but could see no-one. The cry was repeated and seemed to come from the ground at my feet. I looked down and saw a tiny leather purse lying in the dust, almost hidden among rocks and boulders. I picked it up and opened it. Inside was a small stone and it was from this that the voice was coming. Does a stone have consciousness? I wondered. Can it communicate with me in words? “Why not?” I thought. “How can I help you?” I asked the stone, as it warmed to the touch of my hand. It gave me no answer then but the urgency of its plea haunted me. I had to find out what needed help and how I could help.
          Finally, I understood that what needed help was the consciousness that is buried in the deepest aspect of our psychic life as well as in the densest aspect of matter that we believe has no consciousness—a lost aspect of spirit that has not been recognised as spirit, something that asks to be redeemed from a state of immolation and fragmentation created by our beliefs. The image of spirit inherited from the past may from time to time need to be discarded but the archetype of spirit will always be re-discovered in a new form, incorporating aspects of itself that may have been split off or excluded in the past by our too limited understanding.
          Years after this dream, when I was researching the history of Kabbalah, I found this passage in a translation of a text written by the sixteenth century Spanish Kabbalist, Moses Cordovero:

These words seem to resonate with the words of Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas when he said that the kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it. Or when he said,: “Cleave the wood and there I am; Lift a stone and I am there.” (logion 77) I feel that the insight that the essence of divinity is found in every single atom of life is precisely what has been missing in our concept of God and it is this which has led to the split between spirit and nature and, ultimately, to that between religion and science as well as our growing capacity to inflict destruction on each other and on planetary life.

Nature as a Theophany
Amazingly, in the ninth century, there was a most beautiful and clear exposition of nature as the expression or theophany of spirit. This concept flourished in Celtic Christianity until this branch of Christianity was superseded (after the Synod of Whitby in AD 664) by the Roman or Catholic version of Christianity. Yet it must have survived for John Scotus Eriugena (810–877), a renowned Irish scholar and Neo-Platonist who lived at the royal court in France for many years, wrote an extraordinary book called Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae. I first came across this book many years ago when I was studying medieval history at Oxford and it made a deep impression on me at the time. But I did not realize its significance and its relevance to our times until recently, when I came across these electrifying words which eradicate the split between creator and creation:

We should not understand God and creation as two different things, but as one and the same. For creation subsists in God, and God is created in creation in a remarkable and ineffable way, manifesting Himself and, though invisible, making Himself visible, and though incomprehensible, making Himself comprehensible, and although hidden, revealing Himself, and, though unknown, making himself known; though lacking form and species, endowing Himself with form and species; though superessential, making Himself essential...though creating everything, making Himself created in everything. The Maker of all, made in all, begins to be eternal and, though motionless, moves into everything and becomes all things in all things. (12)

How radically different this view of God is from the one currently set forth by the three major patriarchal religions and how refreshing it is. Eriugena’s book was condemned by the Church because it was thought to promote the idea of pantheism—that God was present in nature. Fortunately, his book survived although he himself is said to have been murdered by his own monks in Malmesbury Abbey when he returned to England.

New Wine in New Bottles
          Over the past fifty years a gradual restoration of a sense of the sacred has been taking place beneath the surface of our culture, called forth by the multi-faceted crisis of our times. Now, through the awakening power of the environmental movement, we are invited to enter a new era, where nature—the life of the earth—can once again be recognized as sacred as, in the Neolithic era, it once was. This need not be expressed in religious terms; it is more a response to an instinct than a belief. Survival needs are being focused on the awareness of our dependence upon the well-being of the greater organism of the planet.
          This new focus is beginning to heal the great split between spirit and nature or wound in the body of God which has so tragically flawed the three patriarchal religions and the whole solar era. However, because neither religion nor science are aware of the origin of this split and its influence on our attitudes and our behaviour, neither seems able adequately to engage in this process of awakening and to address the immense challenges we face today. Something beyond either needs to come into being—a new meta-narrative, a new worldview. As in the medieval story of the Grail where Parsifal, after many trials, heals the wound of the Fisher King by simply asking the right question, “What ails thee, Father?,” perhaps we need to ask the same question of our beliefs.
          Joseph Campbell recognised the need for a new myth when he wrote: “The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?”(13) And he answered the question by saying that the new myth is that earth is the country that all people belong to and that the earth itself belongs to the cosmos. He would have agreed with the astronaut Edgar Mitchell when he said that his view of the earth from space was a glimpse of divinity. For Campbell, the view of earth seen from space in 1969 was the new revelation, although he would not have used that word. But he saw that this vision of earth gave us an image of the cosmic entity to which we belong, that could evoke our love and respect, taking us beyond the divisions and rivalries that veil our essential relationship to each other and our planetary home.
          Like Campbell, thousands, if not millions of individuals today are searching not only for the unified field in science but for a unified vision of life—a unified vision of spirit, earth and humanity that could be in time to mitigate the catastrophic effects of our fragmented view of life. The birthing of this vision asks us to relinquish many cherished beliefs—ultimately a fundamental transformation of our values. Our knowledge about the world and the universe is accelerating geometrically. We are overwhelmed with information about every aspect of what we observe. The microscope and the telescope have enormously extended the range of our vision and our power to control our lives, yet we understand almost nothing about the mystery of why we are here and what the role of our species on this planet might be.
          Suppose the source we come from is attracting us back to itself, helping our consciousness to connect with it, to evolve further? There is today a crying need for a new way of living and relating to each other and the cosmos. This need, emanating from the core of our being, is urging us to break through the veil separating our consciousness from the consciousness of the cosmos. It is brilliantly reflected in a poem written in 1945 by Christopher Fry in his play called A Sleep of Prisoners.

The human heart can go the length of God,
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere.
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size,
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake
But will you wake for pity's sake?

          The old idea that we are separate from God is breaking, cracking, beginning to move. A regenerative spring is urging us to take the longest stride of soul we have ever taken into the heart of God. The extraordinary discoveries about the size, complexity and incredible beauty of the universe are opening the door to a new meta-narrative, a new way of living and relating to each other and the universe. This dawning meta-narrative is bringing about a breakdown of old beliefs, old images of God and nature and our own human nature. It is challenging our political and economic structures, our enslavement to obsolete beliefs and atavistic habits of behavior. It is awakening the heart, the soul, often through means which may appear destructive, threatening. Sometimes, as many people working in the field of psychotherapy know, there has to be a breakdown before there can be a breakthrough. The deconstruction of the old image of God may be one aspect of that necessary breakdown. However, there is a risk that breakdown could also precipitate a regression to a more unconscious state. We could lose the priceless treasure of civilization. Everything depends upon whether we assist or resist the process of death and regeneration that is taking place within ourselves and our culture. It is a time of awesome responsibility.
          The problem now is that the culture is in a dilemma. Part of it, particularly that concerned with established institutions, whether religious or political, is still acting from the old solar paradigm of the separation of spirit and nature. It still thinks in terms of competition between nation states. It is still hypnotized by the idea of power and progress, intent on conquering and controlling nature and exploiting the resources of the planet for the financial gain of a few nations and corporations and for the benefit of the human species alone. It glories in the technological achievements of science but neglects to address the poverty and anguish of billions of people and the disastrous effects of the burgeoning growth of the human population on the biosphere of the planet.
          The other part is rapidly learning how to think in global terms, understanding that our species cannot be separated from the planetary biosphere. It realizes that nationalist power struggles are becoming increasingly obsolete and dangerous and that war is no longer an option for us. It regards our weapons and the colossal sums of money spent on them as something truly obscene. It sees population growth as one of the greatest problems that face us.
          The deep malaise in society may help us to grow beyond the current secular mind-set and beyond the religions of the past which carry so much dead wood, towards a new spirituality and a new god-image which unifies the two great archetypes of life. This new spirituality which incorporates the best aspect of the great religious traditions of the past, including the indigenous traditions, could open the door to a new understanding of our role in the cosmic drama.
          Supposing you were God. How would you make yourself known to humanity at this present time? Revelation can come through the visions and dreams of individuals but it can also come through questioning the doctrines and beliefs that we have received as “revelation” from the past.
          Every mystical tradition says that at the core of our being, we are one with the divine. We are one with the immensity we contemplate. Each teaches that the eye of the heart—the eye which perceives with gnosis or insight into the nature of reality—can only slowly open to awareness of this mystery. The ground has to be well prepared to hold the revelation of this vision and the preparation for it requires much time for contemplation as well as a growing respect and love for all aspects of life. The great Indian sage Sri Aurobindo writes about this slow illumination of the soul in his book, The Life Divine:

What seems to be happening now is that a new or perhaps very ancient understanding of spirit is dawning on us. Although it is not yet fully conscious, the realization that our brain acts both as a receiver and transmitter for a greater field beyond our “normal” range of awareness is leading us to the point where we may be able to say, as Arjuna says to Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita: “Thou art the Knower within me and the One to be known. By Thee alone this universe is pervaded. Overjoyed am I to see what I have never seen before.”
Years after I encountered this very different Indian concept of spirit, I found this comment in a book called Science and the Sacred, by an Indian physicist and philosopher called Ravi Ravindra, until recently Professor of Comparative Religion and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Dalhousie University in Halifax:

The one central insight into Truth to which all Indian wisdom points is the oneness of all that exists. This is not something alien to the sages in other cultures; but in India all the great sages again and again return to this insight. In fact the realization of this truth is what defines the greatness of a person in India…And the realization of this truth is held as the purpose of human existence. All art, philosophy and science, if they are true, reflect this vision and aid its realization…Over a period of at least four thousand years, the sages in India have repeatedly said that there is an underlying unity of all that exists, including everything we call animate or inanimate, and that the cultivation of wisdom consists in the realization of this truth. (15)

          In the light of this different understanding, spirituality invites us to focus more on the experience of illumination than on faith and belief, although belief may initially be a path which can lead to illumination. Many people in the West are discovering, through the direct revelation of spirit, that the experience of spirit is utterly different from what they had accepted as “truth” in the past. In these discoveries there is no division of God. There is nothing outside God. God is, quite simply, Life. Nor is there any separation between ourselves and God except our inability to see reality as it is. During the solar era, we have learned to think of spirit and matter as separate, but now we may be able to see that there is no essential separation between them; the seen and unseen dimensions of reality are continually interacting with each other.
          We need an image of God which is related to these insights. Of all the challenges we have to face, this is one of the most difficult, because it means that we have to relinquish a structure of thought or meta-narrative by which we have lived for millennia. There is huge resistance to change because instinctively, we perceive change as a threat to our survival; it is safer to stay with the known rather than forge a path into the unknown.
          The mystics of all the great cultures of the past discovered that our consciousness can interact with the invisible field or ground they named God, Brahman, the Dao, or simply, Light, Divine Darkness or the Void. In our normal state we cannot initiate or perceive this interaction, but this does not mean it does not exist.
          The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the Christian and Sufi mystics, all suggest that spirit can, ultimately, only be known or apprehended experientially, and that spirit is omnipresent, at once transcendent to and immanent within the forms of life. We are bathed in, permeated by spirit every moment of our existence, in every breath we take — breath which is itself the breath of spirit — permeating and sustaining the thirty to a hundred trillion cells of our physical organism. (16) There is no better text to describe this fusion of the human and the divine than the Bhagavad-Gita. Here is Krishna, speaking to Arjuna:

          I don't think we can really understand ourselves unless we understand the history of the evolution of consciousness and begin to bring together the different branches of knowledge that have developed with such extraordinary rapidity during the last hundred or so years.
          As we discover the incredible story of the evolution of planetary life and our own very recent appearance in it, the realization is dawning that we are participating in a cosmic consciousness or intelligence which is co-inherent with every particle of our being and every atom of matter. If we connect these ideas to God, then God or Spirit or Divine Mind is not something transcendent to ourselves. We are co-inherent with It, at the very heart of It. To co-inhere means to be together with, to abide together.
          This realization calls for a huge shift of awareness in our values. If God or Spirit is not something separate from ourselves, something transcendent to nature and planetary life, but is the intelligence and energy of the life process itself, flaring forth at every instant in every region of this vast universe as well as in ourselves, then how we treat so-called “inanimate” matter, planetary life and each other becomes a matter of how we are treating God. It transforms obedience to God's commands into love and respect for God's creation.

The Immanence of Spirit in this Dimension
          Could we perhaps understand the story of our evolution on this planet as the story of the “incarnation” of cosmic spirit in our time and space, the story of its long evolutionary journey through stages of greater and greater complexity and diversification ( as described by Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin and others) and its awakening, through our own human consciousness to awareness of itself on this specific planet? Seen in this way, the whole evolutionary process of the universe becomes a divine drama, the drama of spirit incarnating in (from our perspective) the infinitely slow process of the forging of consciousness in the crucible of planetary life, and then being constrained within the limitations of that consciousness until it can reach the point of awakening and self-awareness. Cosmic consciousness, hidden from us by the filter of galactic and planetary evolution, cannot be recognized by us for what it is until our consciousness becomes capable of recognizing it.
          Precisely as three of the greatest sages of the last century—Bede Griffiths, Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin—have suggested, spirit may have always been immanent in this dimension of experience, leading us to the ultimate revelation that we, both in our spiritual and physical substance, are of the essence of divinity; everything we can see, perceive and reflect on, is of that essence. From the perspective of spirit, it creates this dimension of reality in order to extend the experience of itself—to come to know itself through all facets of life it has created.
          I was attracted to Teilhard’s writings from their first publication and they have taught me to draw things together that seemed at first incomprehensible. Teilhard seems to be the theologian that the Church is most in need of. His understanding of the process of evolution, showing the movement of a rising tide of consciousness embedded in the life processes of the earth, is one of the most enthralling ideas of our time. But, he asks, will this universal Spirit of Evolution “flower in time to ensure that, arrived at the point of super-humanity, we avoid dehumanising ourselves?”(18) That is the troubling question that confronts us at this time.
          I remember also how thrilled I was to find this passage in Bede Griffiths’ book, Return to the Centre:

The evolution of matter from the beginning leads to the evolution of consciousness in man; it is the universe itself which becomes conscious in man…It is the inner movement of the Spirit, immanent in nature, which brings about the evolution of matter and life into consciousness and the same Spirit at work in human consciousness, latent in every man, is always at work leading to divine life. (19)

His words, like Aurobindo's in his extraordinary book, The Life Divine, and Teilhard de Chardin’s in his vision of humanity moving towards a further evolutionary development and a further development of consciousness toward what he called the Omega Point, helped me to see that the evolution of life on this planet is like a plant, an organic growth, which has its roots in an unknown depth. Its flowering is a potential within us, something that we have still to experience, that only a few pioneers of consciousness have experienced. Again, it is something which is unfolding and evolving from within, as the potential form of an oak is contained within an acorn. We cannot know the final form until we have grown into it but we can begin to understand the process of evolution which has formed us and begin consciously to relate to it.
Our consciousness is now poised at the threshold of the encounter with cosmic consciousness. The invisible field that relates us to galactic life resonates with the call to relationship with it and many people are responding to this call. There is a new perception of life pouring into the culture through many thousands of individuals: the perception of the universe as an organic, sacred and living whole with ourselves as conscious participants in that living whole. We seem to be reaching the point where we can experience cosmic consciousness, cosmic mind or cosmic soul (I use these terms interchangeably) as the greater field or ground from which our consciousness derives and in which it participates. Could this new (yet very ancient) idea transform our relationships with each other as well as with the earth and the vast cosmic field in whose life our lives are embedded?

Cosmic Consciousness
It is now roughly a hundred years since William James wrote his ground-breaking book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is clear to me from my study of visionary experience in many cultures that a visionary is aware of the reality of worlds and presences inaccessible to our “normal” state of consciousness. I am absolutely certain through my own experience and my study of visionary experience (see The Mystic Vision) that a wider, deeper consciousness than our own is trying to reach us, trying to make itself known to us. It has been doing so for millennia. As long as this dimension of consciousness is denied existence and dissociated from our own, it will act in the manner of an unconscious autonomous complex, influencing us without our awareness in all kinds of ways until it finally attracts our attention. As long as we believe that consciousness begins and ends with the brain, we will never reach what we are capable of becoming — people who are in conscious communion with metaphysical reality.
In his book, Cosmic Consciousness, published some hundred years ago, Richard Bucke described an experience that changed his life and his understanding. Because this passage means so much to me I would like to share it with readers who may not know of it.

I had spent the evening (in 1872 in England) in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost. (20)

To return to the ground from which we have come, so completing our evolutionary journey on this planet is one of the most exciting quests that I can imagine. To discover that spirit, so long projected onto a God remote from ourselves and creation, is the quintessential consciousness which is awaiting discovery both in nature and ourselves is one of the greatest revelations it is possible for us to experience. The other revelation, no less overwhelming, is that we have the extraordinary privilege of helping spirit to achieve its evolutionary goal for this planet. It may be that Cosmic Consciousness has waited aeons for us to reach the point where more than a handful of individuals could awaken to this revelation. To respond to what is happening at the deepest level, to take a new step in our evolutionary journey, we have to create the vessels to hold the new wine that is now pouring into our culture through the awakening consciousness of many different individuals.