Experiences, Mythos
Leave a comment

Decolonise

In a world where some have far more than a fair share, leaving others literally in the dust, we will still compete for gold, for sex, for water, for shelter. Traumatised from this process of ponerisation – the process where selfish, psychotic behaviours are in effect rewarded in a hierarchical ‘death race 2000’ situation of ‘grab yours whilst you can’. And now we sit in the circle, together, hoping we are not the bottom of this particular hierarchy.

For a thousand years or more we have been in a system where we outsourced our method or craft of internal work to external figures, the church, the priests. Some people have always been considered ‘more holy’ than others, more pure, more in contact with the spiritual dimension of life. So we ask for the priest and healer to intercede for our departed ones, our suffering kin, our own fate. Because people can be unsure of the reality or competency of their own sacred connection to God and Universe, because the connection is a bit shaky, we grant others the authority, the power to save our souls.

These days the psychotherapist becomes the confessional, we try to talk our way out of it. The God of Jesus, Mary and the Saints seemed so fragile to science and modernism, we have turned away from these creeds and looked outward to spirituality that make ‘more sense’ to our scientific rationality. Creeds emphasising the illusion of relative forms of Gods, such as Advaita, and Buddhism work well in a secular world. But the heartburn of our essentially orphaned nature still persists. Because those who have fallen under colonialism have lost their land. They may still stand upon it, but somehow have lost it.

The West was merely the first to fall to colonialism. All those that live in the West and have hitherto propagated colonialism have done so because their indigenous ways were conquered, traumatised, and doomed to repeat the pattern. Western Europe got very good at being ‘successful’, because it began to grapple with empirical and ontological existents, developing powerful forms of measurement and cartography and navigation and engineering and medicine, and these many fruits of human genius gave the West an edge. And yet the scientific fruits of colonialism now bring us to comprehension that we live on a Globe of finite size yet virtually infinite inter-connectivity. We experience our limits of control and measurement as ‘Chaos’, yet we still push the maps further.

Upon the map-making edge of chaos, the fractal foam laps the shores of the rational, and we look out to archipelagos, to make a ‘conceptual leap’ from the terra-firma of hum-drum mundanity, to straddle chaos by one foot in the secular, and another in the exotic ‘mysterium tremendum’, the mystics wilderness. We try to find enough balance, to hoist ourselves right over, to plant both feet in that new, terra-incognita, but we are straddling, split too far, and it seems the terra-firma and the terra-incognita pull from each other, the foam of chaos beckons.

I dreamed that a star *blessed me*. I dreamed that a star in my own inner sky rose, shining like the light of Venus, and sang to me, sang to my heart. An immaterial love, that travelled from a very far away place, to reflect in intimacy in the chalice of my own heart. And there it gave its blessings, its succour, like the Holy love of the Virgin Mary, like the Purity of Eve’s first joys, like the rolling wisdom of Yemanja, like the secret silent voice of Sophia. “I love you.”

And I woke and that blessing still caressed my heart, like the reassurance of a line of grandmothers, and grandfathers, who had lined up to say ‘we bless you, child’ – and that blessed soul is trying to wrestle free from the foam of chaos. I don’t care if it sounds sentimental.

I remember hearing, that for the Amazon traditions, the plants are a university, a book of nature, a place of study. We westerners have isolated a few of the ‘Plantas Maestras’, the teacher plants, just as we may isolate extracts and so on. We reduce, cleave, split. We take Plantas Maestras away from plants with other human animals and listen to music that human animals play on musical instruments, with human words made up to somehow intimate that place, that exists all pervading.

Outside, beyond the walls, the river keeps flowing from the rain on the sky peculating through innumerable aortas of moss root and lichen and leafy growing things and communities of creatures and ancient rock which burst up, crackling and frying from the fire-heart of this still fire-hearted EA, Gaia. And if we watch, the pages unfold, the ‘pages’ are holographic glass, the more we abide, and let our own depths clear, the more we shall see into that ‘vegetable glass’ of nature, and behold subtle things, things un-mapped, things un-tongued, things unsung.

To discover for ourselves the things unsung that no rainbow song has sung. To see with our own eyes. And to discover for ourselves. To no longer be orphans. To de-colonise. To come home.

I wish us strength and light, in this journey!

 

Leave a Reply