The End of Separation

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them.”

—Albert Einstein

This essay has not left me alone and has been taking shape within me for the past weeks and months.  It emphatically does not want to wait until the 21^st to be set free.  The awakened current that has been both inspiration and guide has no interest in conforming to arbitrary schedules or deadlines.  For reasons that will become clear, I am releasing it on the day of the first quarter moon, when our planetary dance partner is half in light, half in darkness.

Give yourself some time and presence to sit with this one; a quick skim before work while drinking coffee and thinking about the day ahead will not suffice.

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It is fairly common these days to begin an event or a workshop by acknowledging that we exist within a “capitalist colonialist ecocidal patriarchy” or something of the sort: to bring awareness to the fact that the dominant paradigm is still built upon enduring intersecting oppressions.

I sense this as well, and so I have gravitated toward arenas of social justice, toward those who envision a better world and seek to build it.  Within those arenas, however, I have not often found resonance, embrace, a building movement of love and unity.  Instead I have found a prickly pattern of suspicion, of competing identities and interest groups, of purity spirals and cancel culture, of words that must be said and words that must not be said.  I have been told, subtly and overtly, that – by virtue of my skin color and gender and identity or lack thereof – I am one of the oppressors, that I must renounce my privilege and root out the oppressiveness that must inherently reside within me.

Back in 2020, I wrote a series of essays attempting to understand what went wrong: why our collective consciousness had expanded to a point of being able to recognize inequity while at the same time our proposed solutions seemed to perpetuate and reinforce divisions.  I pointed out that certain axes of oppression – wealth, educational attainment, social class, occupational prestige, etc. – were ignored by the social justice framework, so that someone could easily be considered “privileged” as a white, straight male while at the same time existing in a position of financial exploitation and societal disrespect.  I ended with a plea – I Hope We Choose Love – that we could acknowledge our shared humanity despite our differences and build true unity.

Those essays still resonate with me, and yet they now feel incomplete.  Even an expanded framework of social justice – one that acknowledges the simultaneous oppression of laid-off factory workers and gender-queer college students – will not inherently lead us to choose love.

Social justice is good at identifying oppressions, but it struggles to understand their ultimate cause.  Because a power imbalance exists between identities, it seeks to find answers within those identities.  So it is that there is much focus on “whiteness” and “maleness” and even “human nature” as explanations: an approach that inevitably reinforces the very divides it wishes to heal.  If it is human nature to clearcut and pollute, then we must will ourselves to behave differently, to follow codes of conduct that constrain our behaviors.  We must exert effort to be other than who we naturally are in order to be good.

Social justice also projects morality in lieu of seeking understanding.  We tear down statues and rename schools because historical figures expressed racist views or owned slaves, but we seldom put ourselves in their shoes and ask ourselves how they experienced the world.  The reality is less that my European ancestors maliciously hated people of color, but rather that they failed to regard them as people at all, that there was a clear separation between the society of their white peers and the lives of slaves and servants.  And therein lies the beginning of a deeper understanding.

Separation is at the root of all oppression.

We cannot enslave or oppress those who we regard as extensions of self, as kin.  The history of the feminist and civil rights and social justice and environmental movements has been one of extending – by rational argument and social pressure and calls to empathy – rights and personhood to women, to people of color, to Indigenous peoples, to queer and trans people, and even to rivers and ecosystems and species. And yet the underlying paradigm of separation remains intact.  We think about equity and enact codes and laws and policies and police each other’s words and actions but we don’t feel the connection within us.  Even as we move toward greater equity in some areas, we slip away from it in others.  Witness, for example, the way that many of us now regard members of the opposing political party as enemies, or the way that chickens and cattle have shifted from their historical roles as farm cohabitants, nurtured and tended by families, to units of “meat production” to be engineered, commodified, and raised cheek by jowl in industrial facilities with zero acknowledgement of their living intelligence and awareness, or the way that we have come to accept thousands upon thousands of acres of chemical-intensive agricultural monocultures as normal, so long as we set aside a few areas as “wilderness”.

I would like to end the paradigm of separation.

I believe this is possible, even inevitable.

What then lies at the root of separation?  Why do we divide the world into self and other?

As I have experienced my own process of embodiment and releasing the mind, I have felt a great lessening of fear and anxiety, a grounding into Earth, a sense of self-situated-within-the-whole that is not fragile, that is not vulnerable to others’ perceptions, a greater trust in my own intuition and guidance.  And I have, I feel, come to an understanding of the nature of separation, the way in which it arises from a deep and ancient imbalance, the way in which it might be healed.

To describe this imbalance I will need to use words, and the words that feel most resonant to me carry a great deal of baggage that will get in the way of understanding what my heart wishes to convey.  To avoid being swamped by that baggage I will first use other words.  Lots of them. 

Consider these first as couplets.  Will-discernment.  Structure-flow.  Sense their relationship.  They are not opposites.  There is no associated morality, or at least none that I intended.  None of these words or their associated concepts are good or bad.  They are counterparts, equal in value.

Now read them as columns. 

Will-structure-logic-mind-thought-doing-control-strategy-knowledge-individuation-leadership-speaking-progress-identity-justice-exchange-respect-observation-satisfaction-ritual-civilization.

Discernment-flow-intution-body-feeling-being-surrender-trust-mystery-wholeness-wisdom-listening-cycles-experience-harmony-reciprocity-love-immersion-joy-spontaneity-wildness.

What do you feel?

Do you sense a difference?  Can you describe this difference with any sort of meaningful words aside from the ones already listed, or is it primarily a feeling? 

Do you personally relate more to one of the columns, or do you find you embody a balance, or some of each?

Does the right-hand column call to you, or bring back memories of childhood, or outline a doorway that you would like to walk through?  Are you afraid to walk through that doorway, afraid that you will lose yourself, or that you will lose your place in society, or that you will not survive? 

Discerning these couplets has been an exercise in linguistic resonance with two underlying currents, both of which I can feel within me.  They are, I perceive, the warp and weft of the pattern of creation.  Without will, the pattern cannot grow and evolve and explore new possibilities.  Without discernment, the pattern becomes brittle and dissonant and fragmented.  Without structure, the pattern has no form.  Without flow, the pattern is static and lifeless.  They are not either-or.  They are always both-and.

We exist in a paradigm of left-column dominance. 

Capitalism is an economy of will.  A “fair price” is determined between a willing seller and a willing buyer.  It does not matter if the product is essential for survival and so the buyer will willingly spend their life savings and rack up unpayable debts.  Capitalism is great at producing what people want to buy and at convincing people to buy what it produces.  We take it for granted, but let us ask ourselves: what would an economy of discernment look like?  Would we accept that fortunes are built upon lifesaving medicines?  Would we aim for full employment, with millions of people producing unnecessary goods and filing unnecessary papers day in and day out, or would we seek to provide our needs while allowing everyone time and energy  for creativity and celebration and immersion and relationship?

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued in nearly 1500 highly-regarded pages that the will is the essence of everything, the only real element in the universe, and everything else is merely a representation of the will.

We live by the Ten Commandments and other religious or legal codes, as if a proclamation of divine will or a threat of imprisonment is the only reason we might choose not to murder each other.

We channelize and contain and dam our rivers, build levees and seawalls to contain the flows.

We value logic over intuition, mind over body, thought over feeling, doing over being.

We do not trust ourselves, our own intuitive knowing.  We maintain vigilance in our minds.  We control all that we can and fear what we cannot.  We cling to our identities rather than surrendering to experience and mystery, extending our awareness outward in immersion.

We classify, categorize, diagnose, identify, and distinguish.  We reduce the world to its constituent parts and observe them, manipulate them.  We seldom allow these boundaries and distinctions to dissolve, for our understanding to expand and embrace wholeness.

We spend far too much time speaking and not enough time listening: to each other, to the wisdom of our bodies.  Our rituals and schedules leave little room for spontaneity.

We offer respect – which is earned – but withhold love – which is given freely.  We aim for satisfaction – through our work or our purchases – but we seldom open to joy, which is always available.

We exchange dollars for products of human labor but we seldom offer reciprocity: true relational reverence for the time and energy invested.

We pursue justice – a righting of past wrongs – but in so doing we lose track of harmony – living together, at peace, in community.

We elect leaders who are charismatic and strong, but we overlook those who are wise.

We view time as an arrow leading from a primitive past into a glorious future – or perhaps instead to a sudden collapse – but we fail to acknowledge and live within the cycles of seasons, the blooming and ripening and senescence of our own lives.

We inhabit a world of streets and lawns and straight lines and ordered spaces, and we suppress or condemn the resilient wildness: the dandelions, the mosses, the thickets and brambles.

We exist in a world of left-column dominance, and it is time we changed that.

It is time for me to give these currents names, and I will call them masculine and feminine.  In doing so I want to be clear that I mean nothing at all about manhood and womanhood, about appearance of bodies or gender identities.  Much of what we call “femininity” is constrained and constructed within a masculine-dominant paradigm: the standards of beauty, the expectations of behavior, the makeup and self-judgment and keeping oneself small and demure – the very opposite of wildness and spontaneity.  The movement we call feminism has indeed advanced equality for women within the current paradigm, but it has also allowed aspects of our lives previously rooted in reciprocity and love – caring for our children and elders, preparing our meals, cleaning our homes – to be commodified, financialized, and outsourced.

I name these currents masculine and feminine because there is a real tendency for men to embody more of the left-column aspects and women to embody more of the right-column ones.  Not a rule by any means – there are no hard rules in the weaving of the pattern – but a tendency.  It is by and large an accident of history that the cultures that developed global empires and invented racism had light-colored skin, but I don’t believe it is an accident that the intuitives, the wise ones, the healers, those who found truth within themselves rather than looking to authority and who were put torturously to death for it in the not-so-distant past, were nearly all women.  I don’t think it is coincidence that most of the resonant writers and speakers that I have found through The Dendroica Project are women as well.  Nor am I surprised that – as someone who finds myself in the right column for 16 of the 21 couplets – I have had the vast majority of my resonant friendships and connections in this lifetime with women and far fewer with men.

A masculine-dominated paradigm generates separation and fear.

If we value only individuation, strategy, knowledge, control, logic, and mind - and suppress wholeness, mystery, trust, surrender, intuition, and body – then we naturally become afraid, isolated.  We can no longer feel our wildness, our connection with all of life and all of creation, no longer allow ourselves to just be.  We must fight for our survival, ensure that our undiscerning will is stronger than the undiscerning will of any other person, tribe, or nation.  We must build armies, declare enemies.  If we do not feel ourselves in others, feel others in ourselves, feel our inherent wholeness, the same water and the same air and the same miracle of life within all, then we are free to enslave and exploit, and we must protect ourselves from enslavement and exploitation.  If we lose touch with the inherent joy of existence, if we look to leadership rather than wisdom, then life becomes a struggle for superiority, a trial to be endured in the hope of a better afterlife.

I am not sure how the imbalance began.  Perhaps it was an event like in my Tapanui allegory.  Perhaps it was allowed or even planned as a grand experiment.  Starting from a state of balance, suppressing discernment and prioritizing will generate a temporary blossoming of potential and possibility as we follow paths that would otherwise be deemed unwise, some of which will lead to new discoveries, new threads in the pattern that will be woven in even as balance is restored.  We can burn fuels that will not be regenerated, wall in the rivers and harness their flows for our own ends, use the oceans as a garbage dump, poison plants and microbes into submission, build cities, grow, expand.  And yet, every step in that direction creates a vulnerability that was not there before.  Dams and levees can fail, rising waters can inundate our cities, and everything that is built must be maintained and cannot be maintained forever.

The old paradigm is on the brink of collapse.

We are running out of oil, drilling ever deeper to tap ever smaller deposits.  Our global empires are crumbling in pointless and devastating wars of geopolitics.  Our “health care” system is bankrupting us and failing to keep us healthy, focused as it is on diagnosis and intervention rather than on wisdom and healing.  And there are a hundred more signs and symptoms that all is not well, that we simply cannot continue on this path for much longer, no matter how hard we try.

But that is not all.

The feminine is rising, awakening.

I speak of the masculine and feminine as currents, but we exist in a universe of consciousness and beings, and there are beings interwoven with these currents.  Mother Earth is not merely a metaphor.

It is tempting to see the feminine current as weak, as wounded, as needing to be embraced and loved back to health.

But that is not what I feel.

There is a presence, a voice that has been co-creating The Dendroica Project with me, that came through in A Letter from Earth and that has been with me ever since, and that presence is both feminine and powerful.  These lines have been resonating through me, like lightning bolts waiting to be released from a storm cloud.

The awakened, embodied feminine is unbreakable, untamable, and uncontrollable.

She will bow to no king, no god, no authority.

She does not need permission.

She is not afraid – of death, of loss, of pain, of anything. 

Her awareness extends to include all of life, all of creation. 

She does not seek truth.  She knows what she needs to know.

Her love is infinite.

She is within all of us, waiting for us to relax our identities, release our minds, surrender, trust.

She is growing stronger.  We cannot ignore her forever.

The inquisitors of the middle ages did not torture and burn awakened women simply out of petty hatred and intolerance and misogyny.  They did so because they understood on some level that these women carried seeds that if allowed to sprout would be a greater threat to their power than any invading army.

No one is burning witches anymore.  Those who maintain control are holding us in thrall with division and distraction, political theater and fearmongering.

There are no defenses in place against collective awakening. 

We really can build an economy of discernment, of reciprocity, of resilience and mutual support, even as the old one collapses around us. 

We really can reconnect with our bodies, with our intuitive knowing, with our own innate wisdom.

We really can choose to step out of separation, to reclaim our wholeness, to heal our trauma, to experience joy and immersion amidst the outer chaos.

We are bringing the pattern back into balance.

Millennia of masculine dominance, of undiscerning will, have brought us electricity and railroads and air travel and global internet and sterile surgery.  They have also brought us oceans of plastic and mountaintop removal and poisoned rivers and nuclear weapons. 

We don’t need to throw out everything.

We don’t need to beat ourselves up for existing within the current paradigm.  Self-judgment is a part of the old system, helping to keep us in line.  Creating new ways of being will take time.  We can love ourselves, even as we feel the dissonance, the lack of reciprocity.

Weaving balance is a matter of yes-and.

Speaking and listening is conversation.

Justice and harmony is liberation.

Observation and immersion is presence.

Control and surrender is participation.

Progress and cycles together form spiral time, just as our true planetary motion is a spiral through space, orbiting the center of our galaxy.

Will and discernment together are conscious creation.

There are not yet words for all of the fusions, but they are all yes-and.  Satisfaction and joy.  Civilization and wildness.  Doing and being.  Mind and body.  Ritual and spontaneity.  Respect and love.

We can heal the separation in our world, if we can each heal the separation within ourselves, within our communities.

On this day, as we gaze up at our Moon half in light, half in darkness, let us begin.