I'm especially pleased that I'm publishing this on Friday the 13th! I love synchronicity!
Why Patriarchal
Consciousness Fears Death
With the advent of the Cartesian
scientific world view, a distortion occurred in our Judeo-Christian belief that
we are stewards of the Earth.
Christianity, on the other hand, fearing the growing influence of
scientific thought over people’s beliefs, unfortunately refused to incorporate
this new scientific understanding into its cosmology. The result was a twisting
of both beliefs that has caused a great amount of the damage to the Earth and
our psyches. With the belief that
science was slipping further and further away from any belief in divine spirit
at work in matter, and religion rejecting the spirit in matter, we got cut off
from our place in the scheme of things.
Our Western cultural dominants – both
science and religion - have cut us off from our instinctual knowledge of life.
These dominants represent the Father King who is so removed from life that he
would marry his own daughter. This is
not to say that either science or western religions are evil; just that they
have created an imbalance that adversely affects us all. Because they devalued the Earth and the life
of the body, when we experience something new or upsetting, we don't know how
to let our bodies tell us what to do.
The Body Knows! But our minds
challenge that knowledge and we get stuck in the pros and cons of
indecision.
More importantly, as we separated
ourselves from the Earth, we lost touch with the wisdom of the natural cycle of
birth – death – rebirth, and so death became a mystery and the fear of the
unknown attached itself to this inevitable part of life. And as we rejected the feminine body and
instinctual wisdom of the Earth, we lost track of the cycles that allowed for
the fallow times. Our masculine
consciousness wanted it all – always alive, always moving forward, always being
in control.
In the end, this fallow time, whether we call
it unconsciousness or Chaos (nothingness or formlessness), becomes a silence
which is equated with death, and so death became a fearful thing for us,
suddenly split off from life instead of being a natural part of life. When the scientific community began to view
the Earth as dead matter, the Western psyche further split off from its
grounding in the body, which the church had already damned as a major source of
sin. A new God-image arose, one in which
the Earth, the body, as well as women, who were seen as the source of earthly
life and pleasures, were condemned as 'the devil's playground' and we began to
believe that life was an opening for sin, and sinners could not even hope for
peace after death, for death brought them to their just punishment.
As our beliefs about the intrinsic goodness
of the physical world changed, it created a split between our body and spirit,
between our consciousness and our unconscious. Rejecting the life of the Earth
cut us off from the wisdom of her cycles.
We hungered for more life, and fought against death itself, because we
had lost our understanding of the necessary connection between life and
death. The images of our deep-seated
fear of death entailed either pain and suffering or nothingness and chaos,
rather than the ancient image of death as a doorway to new life (which Christ’s
resurrection also ensured).
Death is still an inconvenience and a
terror to us, and so we continue to misunderstand it. We do not say, as many Native Americans
warriors did, "It is a good day to die!" for we have very little
understanding of what death means to us.
It is psychological and symbolic truth that our rejection of death
constellates the very death we fear.
Perhaps this is the reason we live in a society that is destroying our
environment and our health, and creates death all around us.
In Ursula Le Guin's wonderful Earthsea Trilogy, she images this fear
of Death as a shadow, a shadow that drains all the joy and color out of
life. In The Farthest Shore, the Archmage Ged (Sparrowhawk) and the young
king, Lebannen (Arren), go on a journey to try to restore the balance of life
and death, which has been disrupted by a sorcerer who is so afraid of death
that he has opened the gates between life and death and now cannot close
them. The young King wonders why men are
destroying the trees and the earth, and the Mage explains that they have no
guidance, no king to show them how to live in the Balance.
In his youthful innocence, Lebannen
wonders how this one fearful man could so easily destroy the Balance of the
world as his fear spreads And he asks
the Mage, "Where are the servants of this (man) Anti-King?"
In
our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self, the self that cries I
WANT TO LIVE, LET THE WORLD ROT SO LONG AS I CAN LIVE! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark,
like the spider in the box. He talks to
all of us. But only some understand him. The wizards, the singers, the makers. And the heroes, the ones who seek to be
themselves. To be oneself is a rare
thing, and a great one. To be oneself
forever, is that not better still?
Arren
looked straight at Sparrowhawk . 'You
mean that it is not greater. But tell me
why. . . . I have learned to believe in death.
But I have not learned to rejoice over it, to welcome my death, or
yours. If I love life, shall I not hate
the end of it?
. . .
'Life
without end,' the mage said. 'Life
without death. Immortality. Every soul desires it, and its health is the
strength of its desire. But be careful,
Arren. You are one who might achieve
your desire.'
'And
then?'
'And
then - this. This blight upon the
lands. The arts of man forgotten. The singer tongue less. The eye blind. And then?
A false king ruling. Ruling
forever. And over the same subjects
forever. No births; no new lives. No children.
Only what is mortal bears life, Arren.
Only in death is there rebirth.
The Balance is not a stillness.
It is a movement - an eternal becoming.'10
Are we one of those who would deny
death, thereby denying the soul and the possibility of rebirth? Or can we passionately love our lives and
give them over to an eternal becoming?
No comments:
Post a Comment