Mythical Superior Beings
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. — Arundhati Roy
The “sacred” is not something primarily religious or even spiritual. It is not a quality we need to learn or to develop. We all have within us a sense of the sacred, a sense of reverence, however we may articulate it. It is as natural as sunlight, as necessary as breathing.”l
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Magic of Creation: The Sufi’s Way
The need to heal the split between spirit and matter — the need for the return of the feminine — is one of the most important stories of our present time. As we wake up to our ecological crisis, we sense the imbalance that lies at the root of our culture, the result of our loss of contact with the sacredness of the earth that is the cornerstone of all indigenous cultures. But few have dared to penetrate to the very foundation of this cultural split and to see how it has evolved over the centuries, to comprehend the real depths of the imbalance that now threatens our whole planet.’
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul
We humans have always imagined heroic and superior beings. We conjure them out of our depths, out of a knowing that they speak to potentials inherent in human evolution. But worshiping these images doesn’t seem to help us embody the wisdom we sense is our destiny. Imitation of Christ or any other avatar doesn’t do much more than suppress the worst of our darkness. Somehow we will have to grow in wisdom of the heart, as a species.
The next chapter is uncertain. The baggage we carry is heavy. Our hearts and minds are small, and we have loaded ourselves with centuries of unhealed wounds. We have misconstrued our purpose, thinking to fend off mortality with possessions and possessing.
As I look at this scene, I notice kindhearted people appearing out of nowhere, speaking, creating, revisioning. There are some astoundingly brilliant people in the world today, ready to put their hands to the wheel of a new way to live.
That creative surge is organizing itself and starting to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing superstructure of our ill conceived lifestyle. Not a moment too soon.
We could not conjure our stories of superior beings if we did not have the ability to be superior beings. This is where we are headed. It has never been an easy road, individually or collectively. Religion may have helped some of us but it has paralysed the masses. Our minds need myth and inspiration. We need to be reminded of our depths, but when our religions become ossified and moribund, we’re in trouble.
It seems we are coming to an age of fresh new stories, of a fresh story of us and our purpose for living. We now have an opening to a kinder human civilization, if we can take it.
Look for new ideas. They will be coming thick and fast now, some good, some not so good. I expect to see a huge creative advance. This time has promise.
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- Anima Fire is my publication.
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