Convergence

The End of Separation, Part 3

Sometimes I know what the next posts will be, and sometimes I have no idea until an idea or perspective takes root, grows branches, bounces around inside me in words and phrases until I set them free. This one only began to take shape a week ago, and I feel it wants to be released on the 3^rd, on Imbolc, the inflection point halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. I have been feeling this turning more deeply this year, noticing the lengthening days and the movement of the Sun and planets through the constellations.

I have also been finding threes everywhere: looking at clocks at 33 past the hour, $33.33, 33.3 degrees on the weather station, 30.33” on the barometer, office in room 33, train with 33 cars, cumulative count hitting 3333 while I’m watching. So here is Part Three, in three parts and 3,333 words. I didn’t set out for this to be a three-part series, but it is my third writing focusing on resolving polarities, moving beyond duality or imbalance to a yes, and synthesis. The first part addressed the human-nature or natural-artificial divide. The second focused on masculine and feminine currents. This one explores science and spirituality, matter and spirit, spiritual ecology and ecological spirituality, paths that can converge if we are willing to break the rules, to dissolve barriers created by culture and mind.

I – Spiritual Ecology

I live in an “environmentally conscious” community. In my experience, what this means is that most people feel some level of innate connection to nature: a zest for gardening and backpacking and exploring tidepools and swimming in mountain lakes that cannot be reduced to a practical desire to live in a world free of pollution and generally conducive to human survival. Within this broader community, there has arisen a body of thought and poetry and literature that affirms this sense of wonder, that begins to develop ethics and values and practices that would sustain human communities indefinitely within a thriving biosphere, that offers an alternative to the tired paradigm of extraction and profit.

I find myself almost-but-not-quite in resonance with this community, largely because there are a couple of electric-fences-of-the-mind that the vast majority of scientists, academics, and modern secular humans are unwilling to leap.

Spirit is real.

Modern science holds that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, that it arises within brains and bodies and perhaps future computers. Recognizing that humans need a spirituality, a meta-story imbued with sacredness and meaning, this same worldview then attempts to construct a spirituality-without-spirit, a spirituality that is itself emergent from consciousness and ecology, grounded in mutualism and symbiosis. I personally find this unconvincing, and at some point it begins to feel like elaborate mental gymnastics to avoid considering the alternate possibility: that matter is an emergent creation of consciousness.

When we peer into the structure of atoms and subatomic particles, we find a swirl of energies and probability fields that don’t take form until we make a conscious effort to observe them. We then back away and say “that’s weird” and return to the more comfortable realm of theory and experiments and replicable results. But that raises the obvious question of how our entire physical universe holds its form, what underlying force or consciousness is choosing from among probabilities in each moment. Not to mention the question of why exactly this astoundingly complex and evolving physical reality came into existence, and why we find ourselves here within it. I don’t really intend to make a case here for quantum mysticism, nor do I wish to prove the limits of scientific understanding from within the paradigm of science. Such a feat is impossible. I simply wish to point out that to be comfortable with a scientific, materialistic understanding of the world is to carefully avoid asking certain questions.

It doesn’t help that the spiritual side of this cultural divide has its own barriers and well-worn thought-paths, and so we tend to assume that to accept the reality of spirit is also to accept the mythology of one religious tradition or another. But let us ask ourselves: what is spirit, really?

I would offer a simple definition: spirit is consciousness independent of matter.

Many, perhaps most, of us have had experiences that defy explanation. Wildly improbably synchronicities. Encounters with ghosts or nature spirits. Energy healing. Dreams that foretell the future or offer glimpses of events at a distance. Visitations from friends and family who have passed on. We can choose, within ourselves, whether to explain these away as anomalies or whether to accept them as evidence of a larger reality: one in which consciousness is primary and exists within brains and bodies but not solely because of them. Despite the passionate rationalist ravings of Richard Dawkins and James Randi, the social pressures to conform to a “consensus” worldview, there really is no right or wrong choice. We can each discern, within ourselves, what feels most true to us, and within myself I have no doubt that spirit is real.

We are not the only authors of our collective story.

Toward the more spiritual fringes of spiritual ecology, I have encountered assertions that Earth is a living, spiritual being but that still refuse to grant her any agency, to ask or explore what her perspective might be. This results in a habit, also common among more conventionally religious folks, of projecting our own judgments or self-judgments outward onto spirit. So, if we are feeling guilty for our species’ pollution of rivers and burning of fossil fuels, if we are hearing warnings of doom from our scientists, we then imagine an angry Earth Mother who demands our repentance, to whom we must plead for forgiveness and offer promises of devotion. This can be more disempowering than empowering: we place our own guilt and shame outside of ourselves, where we are then unable to process and release it. In a sense, we recreate the story that we are sinners who need to be saved.

The idea that humans are the only consciousness that matters is a central tenet of the modern secular worldview, and one that is difficult to let go of even as we embrace the possibility of a conscious universe. But to embrace the concept of spirit without considering or asking what that spirit thinks and feels, without allowing spirit to challenge our “consensus” reality, is to believe a story rather than participating in the story, entering into relationship. Based on my own experiences, I would even say this: If your spiritual awakening has not yet upended your worldview, realigned your relationships, brought old trauma to light and healing, released your mind from a prison of its own making, then you still have an adventure ahead, if you choose to allow it.

In my second Dendroica writing, A Letter from Earth, I attempted to explore how we might appear to a consciousness who has inhabited a planetary body for over four billion years, whose blood is molten iron and magma, who has weathered asteroid impacts and mass extinctions and whose own tectonic turmoil has nearly re-set life on the surface several times. It was not a direct message from spirit but was partly thought experiment, partly the same intuitive inspiration that guides all of my writings, partly informed by my mother’s more direct interactions with Earth consciousness. I can only assume that such a consciousness values life itself, creativity, diversity, participation, exploration of new possibilities, and will be able to weave our own unconscious disruptions into the next round of unfolding.

II – Ecological Spirituality

Although I have spent much of my life in materialist circles, it would seem that a majority of humanity maintains a firm belief in spirit, largely in the context a few major religions. It has not been my path to follow a journey away from religion – that was my parents’ story – but it is clear to me that there are analogous barriers in place: electric-fences-of-the-mind that hold adherents within confined pastures of thought and perspective.

Spiritual connection is our birthright

Imagine a world in which only certain people were allowed to read, having completed special schooling and having been granted spiritual authority, and the rest of us were expected to trust their interpretations. Or imagine a world in which one composer in Ancient Rome was the source of all music, which could be slightly reinterpreted and endlessly performed, but no new creations, no inspired improvisations were ever granted legitimacy.

If that seems strange, then let us ask ourselves why we accept the possibility that the truth about the spiritual nature of reality was solely revealed to one human being centuries ago, that it is recorded in a Holy Book to which no future edits will be allowed, that only specially-educated and ordained masters are capable of interpreting this reality.

It may be true that, during the last several millennia of human existence, the ability to directly experience spiritual dimensions was relatively rare. But it was never that rare. There have always been seers, psychics, mages, healers, herbalists. From this perspective global religions can really only be viewed as hierarchical power-seeking endeavors, exercises in influence and social control played in the same arena as empires and multinational corporations.

At the same time, I have set foot in plenty of churches and cathedrals, and I know that the space inside feels holy, consecrated. But I am quite certain that this sacredness derives not from Popes or Bibles or bishops or priests, but from the thousands upon thousands of individual humans, generation after generation, who have filed through those doors to share prayer, grief, love, song, celebration. That the power of spiritual connection lies within each of us but has been corralled and constrained by institutions of religion.

We have been conditioned to look outward for spiritual truth. My father, a Catholic priest, freed himself from the doctrines of the church only to spend the rest of his life embracing a series of new sources, attempting to reconcile inconsistencies and never quite feeling satisfied. The history of spirituality is full of stories of prophets and charismatic leaders and gurus and writers who claimed the Real Truth, the One True Way, the Best Method, or some such and amassed wealth and fame while leaving their followers disempowered and dependent.

Anyone who claims they know The Truth is lying. They might not know they are lying, but they are. Because they do not know your truth. They do not know what you need. Some of us discover our true nature through meditation, some through dreams, some through nature immersion, some through dance, some through music, some through writing. There are perhaps as many paths as there are souls. A real spiritual leader will not tell you what is true or what to believe; they will vibrate their own essence through their work and their self-expression and serve as a catalyst, pulling each of us inexorably into our own unique process of awakening.

Earth is not a lesser realm. Matter is not inferior to spirit.

An ecological spirituality is necessarily a personal one, a community one, a dynamic and evolving pattern of connections that demands no conformity and yet is united by a shared experience of embodied presence, that flows and shifts with cycles and seasons. It is a story of being that looks within and around for truth, rather than outward and upward. And the fact that we so readily associate upward with spirit points to another barrier, another feeling of not-quite-resonance I often experience in reading spiritual writings, even those that tend toward the personal and ecological.

It is a powerful frameshift to realize, to come to know within ourselves, that we are more than our bodies, more than our minds. That our awareness is not merely emergent and transient but is an aspect of immortal, universal consciousness. That a core part of us cannot truly be harmed, cannot die, no matter what happens to our physical bodies, and so we need not fear. However, many spiritual traditions take this one more step to say that we are primarily spiritual beings, that physical reality is an illusion that we can dissolve, a dream from which we can and should awaken to know our true spiritual nature. And this has never resonated with me. When my ever-seeking father chose a path with this perspective in my young adulthood, we had our fair share of arguments. As I have grown older and (hopefully) wiser I have come to see that truth is, to a great extent, relative, and that this message is perhaps what some souls need as they begin the process of letting go, of transitioning out of an earthly body. But it is not the message that I need, and I also feel strongly that it is not the message that humanity as a whole needs as we move through this time of convergence and awakening.

Consider, from within your own experience, the times that you have found yourself in an alternate reality, that your awareness has been projected into a story-within-a-story. Unconsciously, in dreams. Or consciously, in theater performance, in strategy games, in virtual realities. How often has it occurred to you that the goal in dreaming is to wake up, or the goal in acting or role-playing is to escape back to “real life”? By analogy, if we are immortal souls in embodied experience, does it not make more sense that we are here to be here, that we chose into embodiment, that it is helpful to gain a certain lucidity but that we can use that awareness to be present, on Earth, more fully rather than to escape or transcend?

And if we are here to be here, then what is here exactly? The gravitational dance of galaxies and stars and planets. The miracle of photosynthesis. The ever-evolving biosphere. The hydrologic cycle. Our wondrous physical bodies, that transform protein and sugar and fat into bone and eye and motion and thought, that can grow new bodies inside of them. Germinating seeds, dance-directed bees, fragrance of springtime, owl serenade, taste of wild strawberries, sensation of sunlight or breeze or lover’s touch, iridescence of sunrise clouds and hummingbird feathers, music and art and poetry and architecture, layers upon layers of creativity. Matter that is condensation of energy. Energy that, it would seem, is intention within consciousness, a woven structure of creation. Matter that is spirit, and spirit that matters. Knowing that we will return to spirit soon enough, is this really an experience we would choose to turn away from, to diminish, to deny the reality of?

III. Synthesis

If there is, indeed, a convergence of ecology and spirituality, then what are they converging on?

I will say what feels true to me, but with the caveat that I have no wish to convince you, that if you are seeking an external reference for truth then please consider me utterly unqualified. But if you feel a resonance, a calling inside leading you to explore or to open or to awaken, then I encourage you to lean into that, to allow it.

I think it is also important for me to say who I am. Who is this Markael Luterra anyway? I am a child of three parents. My mother, a mystic and channel and energy healer, who moves as readily between dimensions as most of us pass through doorways. My late father, a former priest and lifelong spiritual seeker, gardener, birdwatcher, explorer of wild places, poet, songwriter, chronicler, yet constrained by an old heart-wound he could not heal while embodied. My “godmother” – my father’s best friend and collaborator of nearly fifty years – a former nun, teacher, talented artist, intuitive, deep listener, counselor, and one who knows the ways of the heart. I had a socially-isolated and somewhat traumatic childhood, and I found a deeper sense of belonging in the wild lands surrounding my home than in human connections. I am trained as an ecologist, microbiologist, and engineer, and I spent many years pretending to belong in a scientific, materialist worldview. I pushed the cutting edge of technological progress and found largely blind faith and hype and competition, then I transitioned to tending and growing seeds and found life and love and community. Over the past several years I have experienced a spiritual awakening, a re-birthing of sorts, a releasing of mind-identity and a relaxation into a deeper sense of self. I am one who exists outside of stories, between them, one who does not easily fit in any category, nor would I wish to. I write, in part, because I cannot do otherwise, and I share because I feel called to do so. But I also write, in part, in the hope of finding resonant community, of connecting with others who are experiencing a parallel awakening and convergence.

But back to the synthesis, and what feels true to me.

It is a perspective within which conflicts and contradictions resolve into yes, and coexistence.

Yes, ecology and astronomy and geology and genetics and physics reveal wondrous truths about our physical reality, its history and evolution. And, consciousness underlies matter, and science cannot answer every question, and intuition and insight and communications with spirit are also valid ways of knowing.

Yes, our actions borne of separation, in pursuit of growth and profit, are causing immense disruption to the biosphere and atmosphere. And, the consciousness that is Earth will weave this change into her own story, into new creations, as she has woven in past disruptions of much greater scale. And, she is not judging us or demanding our repentance but is welcoming us into participation, waiting for us to awaken, to explore new ways of being.

Yes, religions are old patriarchal structures that maintain dependency and extract wealth and power. And, they still carry spiritual wisdom within them, and the connections to spirit that people feel within them are very real.

Yes, we can awaken to the reality that we are spiritual beings, aspects of universal consciousness. And, with that knowledge, we can choose to fully embody and immerse within our experience of Earth.

Thanks largely to my mother’s first-hand experience, the way in which she can ask a ghost to leave in one moment and drive a grandchild to hockey practice in the next, I have come to view the spiritual dimension as a normal part of life, even if I don’t experience it directly in the same way that she does. It is not woo or paranormal or spooky. It just is. And I think a broader de-woo-ification of spirituality might be helpful. An understanding that if the universe is woven from consciousness in the same way that it is woven from energy, then it is reasonable to assume that a broader spiritual reality will in many ways mirror our physical reality. Energy meridians in our bodies and ley lines in Earth mirroring blood vessels and rivers. A great diversity of spirit and consciousness mirroring a great diversity of life forms on Earth. A wide variety of soul backgrounds and experiences mirroring a wide variety of human cultures. Old friends and collaborators in spirit keeping an eye on us, waiting to welcome us back when our lives are complete. If we experience a spiritual reality as an expansion of our familiar reality, as just a part of the nature of the universe, then we can readily rule out the fairy-tale versions: the happily-ever-after in heaven, the eternity in hell, the day of judgment. We can trust that our experience after we leave this body will be rich, surprising, creative, ever-evolving.

We are, in a sense, creators within creation. Creation not as a moment or an event, but as a process. A stars-forming-in-nebulas, bathed-in-the-light-of-nuclear-fusion, evolution-and-speciation-and-extinction, ever-exploring-new-possibilities process. We can bring our true natures, evolved over many lifetimes on Earth and perhaps elsewhere, into these bodies, into communion with each other and all of the life and spirit here, into relationship in each moment.