Let us this July 4th look for medicine that can heal our ailing species that is busy threatening itself and other beings on our planet with extinction. Such medicine is offered by the wisdom of indigenous peoples and pre-modern mystics whom we have journeyed with in our recent daily meditations.
When Europeans landed in the Americas they had already squelched an earth-based religious consciousness largely due to the fear generated by the Black Death pandemic of the 14th Century. This killing of creation spirituality, fueled by the “Doctrine of Discovery” decrees, found its expression in genocide toward indigenous peoples and enslavement of African peoples.
Without “bringing the entire cosmos into our lives,” as Eddie Kneebone taught in yesterday’s DM and Black Elk and all indigenous teachers urge us to do, we are lost. We are lonely. We are violent. We do not feel like we belong. Maybe that is where so much of the violence and anger is coming from in American politics today—people are lost and disconnected from their souls and from creation.
I am stupefied, for example, that an entire political part in America remains in denial about climate change in 2021 and unwilling to put taxes into doing something about it. In the latest proposed infrastructure bill all representatives of that party demanded subtracting any investment that would address climate change. What planet are they living on? Entire towns go up in flames in Canada and heat records are set daily for the pacific northwest—the response of 48% of congress is: “What, me worry?”
Psychologist Otto Rank celebrates a psychology of microcosm/macrocosm and considered our separation from the cosmos as the greatest issue besetting our species. He felt that this cosmic separation is temporarily healed by our experiences of mystic union, the return to an original identity of union with the cosmic process that “has to be surrendered and continuously re-established in the course of self-development.”
Such folly underscores how important cosmology and its sister ecology are, and why indigenous wisdom and the wisdom of the great pre-modern mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, St. Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, and Julian of Norwich (all of whom celebrated a Cosmic Christ and a psychology of microcosm/macrocosm) need to be heeded.
When we surrender ourselves in art or in love, says Rank, we undergo a
potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost. The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered…in the prenatal condition which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother buy beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved.
Rank believed that premodern and ancient peoples saw physics (nature, or the macrocosm) and psychology (human nature, or the microcosm) as one. All of life was a celebration of this union of psyche and cosmos.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times, pp. 145f.
Banner Image: “Stop the Williams Pipeline,” rally to protest a project that would have run through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the waters off Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Rockaways. Taken on April 18, 2019 by @brownsvillain.
Do you agree that “modern man and woman” has lost a connection with the cosmos and the result has been great neuroses? And that there are ways to reconnect to the whole? And that our present earth crisis is part of that neurosis?
Recommended Reading
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time
While Matthew Fox recognizes that Meister Eckhart has influenced thinkers throughout history, he also wants to introduce Eckhart to today’s activists addressing contemporary crises. Toward that end, Fox creates dialogues between Eckhart and Carl Jung, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Heschel, Black Elk, Karl Marx, Rumi, Adrienne Rich, Dorothee Soelle, David Korten, Anita Roddick, Lily Yeh, M.C. Richards, and many others.
“Matthew Fox is perhaps the greatest writer on Meister Eckhart that has ever existed. (He) has successfully bridged a gap between Eckhart as a shamanistic personality and Eckhart as a post-modern mentor to the Inter-faith movement, to reveal just how cosmic Eckhart really is, and how remarkably relevant to today’s religious crisis! ” — Steven Herrmann, Author of Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward
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4 thoughts on “July 4th, 2021: Can We Heal Our Lost & Violent Souls?”
All of the Christian mystics and many mystics from other cultures had The Lords Prayer to transform them. Christianity is based on the Lords Prayer. It is very simple. The Lords Prayer is ingeniously designed to infiltrate our being. It is obviously a prayer for the Cosmos. The prayer is all the mystics of yesteryear needed and is all we need today. Christianity is an offshoot of this prayer. All we have to do is “continually meditate on its words” and listen to those who have highly achieved the prayer and are capable of translating the message. The Lords prayer is a call to action for awakening the human heart. The Lords Prayer is unconditional love personified. The greatest mystic of all time who was the greatest reality orientated person of all time put our vision into this prayer.
Gary, thank you again for your comment. And I would point you in the direction of a book that was studied at Matthew’s school when I attended there, which is, Neil-Douglas-Klotz, PRAYERS OF THE COSMOS: MEDITATION ON THE ARAMIC WORDS OF JESUS…
The very things that can and do heal the collective wounded and violent soul of humanity in large part, are being destroyed. Things like the beauty and goodness of creation itself, as well as the arts. To salvage what’s left of these things, is to establish a kind of grass roots movement… in which those whom know the sacredness and value of such things gather together in small groups to tend to, care for and nurture these things within their communities. Great movements have often manifested neccessary healing and transformation through such small beginnings. Sometimes those small steps steadfastly and enduringly taken, generation after generation although appearing so slow to bring about change, actually have a kind of mysterious wisdom and timing to them… which can create a collective paradigm shift that eventually moves the whole, through the sum of the smaller parts. I do believe that in this time and in this season we are in fact seeing and experiencing this movement.
Jeanette, I sooo agree with you comment, but would highlight this: “To salvage what’s left of these things, is to establish a kind of grass roots movement… in which those whom know the sacredness and value of such things gather together in small groups to tend to, care for and nurture these things within their communities.” It is my prayer that we commit to this…