One of the myths from my childhood that I held most dear has been shattered. The myth was that with each successive generation, we as a humanity, grew and became wiser but also more sophisticated in our thinking. NPR and PBS were born, surely as a sign of our intellectual maturity and need for a more advance stimulation than what the three major networks provided. Lincoln Center and then the Kennedy Center were built and opened. No great country, no great civilization has ever survived and thrived without great arts and here we seemed to be making a commitment to the arts. A further sign of our advancement. The EPA came into being and respecting the Earth and cleaning it up by cleaning up our own act seemed the only responsible thing to do. The Great Society programs that sought to lift up those among us who needed help. Surely all of this was witness to our continuing enlightenment and progress as a humanity, was it not? Why would we ever turn back to be less than we could be? We went to the moon and heart transplants worked and who knew what the next great advancement would be?
So said my myth. We live in a time in which many celebrate fear and ignorance and cruelty and intolerance. A time where spin and propaganda/alternative facts are countenanced in public discourse and facts and science and advancement and research are replaced with the crusade for never-ending and ever-increasing corporate profits and the rule of law is fighting for its life against authoritarianism. All of this certainly does not speak to striving to become what we as a humanity are capable of as individuals and as a society. Seems to me, we are living in an age of profound, worldwide spiritual crisis.
As spiritual beings we must acknowledge that for each of us and all of us, the future could be a nightmare, a mediocrity, or a dream. For some of us, our individual lives may get no better or no worse than mediocre – safe, not real exciting, not much variety but hey, things could be a lot worse. Don’t rock the boat. And while for some of us our lives may now be and continue to be made up of bits and pieces of our dreams for our lives, more and more and bigger and bigger pieces of those dreams coming to us – all of us, no matter where we all are on the continuum from how great our lives are to how OK our lives are, will have to witness and be a party to, in some way, the nightmare. And we are indeed witnessing a nightmare where the dismantling of our government is being attempted and corruption, unrest, lack of opportunity, economic disparity, instability and never-ending war is run riot worldwide.
These are not happy times, though that doesn’t mean I can’t personally be happy. But still that isn’t always easy nowadays. We must have hope, we are told. We’ve gotten through worse, we’ll get through this. I am not so sure. Given the magnitude and breadth of problems worldwide, I think it fair to say we are all well into uncharted territory. The eminent mythologist and comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell, in his Mythos series of lectures, discusses the common use of the directions – East, South, West and North – in the mythologies of many religious and spiritual traditions worldwide. This order that the directions are listed in reflects the course of the sun.
The sun rises in the East and a new day is born. I would think that the story in the Christian tradition of the star in the East is a reflection of that myth; the star, the fire in the night heavens portending a new day. The sun reaches its zenith in the southern sky at noon, representing as Campbell says, “the culmination moment of conscious in the field of time.” In the West the sun sets, sinking into the transcendence waiting to be rise again tomorrow. The North, Campbell tells us, is where the demons and disease and danger and tyranny come from.
Myths are not fairy tales. Myths are stories, rituals if you will, of how to navigate one’s way through this unfathomable mystery of life. If I have had to give up the myth from my childhood that gave me much comfort, then maybe I could garner some hope from this new myth. We are currently and collectively all facing North. It is dark and it is cold and the potential for the spread of tyranny is much with us. Perhaps we are collectively like the Moon who must shed her shadow in order to be born again. We are witnessing our collective Shadow, our Dark Shadow as I believe Jung would call it. All of our darkness; all of our negativity; all of our judgments and prejudices; our jealousies, envies and rages; all our selfishness and greed; all of it staring us all in the face as a humanity and it isn’t going away. Perhaps we as a humanity are about to confront and heal our Dark Shadow. Perhaps we, as a collective, are about to shed our skin like the serpent in order to be born again. Perhaps we are at the threshold of a new age that we have all been promised – the Aquarian Age and the return of the Divine Feminine into our lives.
I could live with that new myth. But for all of that to come true, for the Dark Shadow that now spreads to be confronted and healed – not fought and defeated – it will take our will, our free will and it will need to happen now. There is no do it later. There is no let them do it. There is no it can wait for a future generation. It will take our free will individually and collectively. I can hope for that. I can take comfort from that. And each day as the Sun rises in the East, that effort must begin anew.
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