Welcome friend to THE HARMONIES THAT ONCE SURROUNDED US, a history of human consciousness from a Western point-of-view. I truly hope the time you spend here proves worthwhile. However before you dive right in, and if you haven’t done so already, may I suggest that you first visit the ‘about’ directive at the top of the Home Page. The information you’ll find there will help you determine whether or not you really want to stay; and if you do, what you can expect. Either way: may both our alter-ego goddesses walk by your side as you wend your way through and across this beautiful, but oft-times painful ‘school’ we so endearingly call our Mother Earth…

What say you and I conduct a little experiment in consciousness? Using our mind’s eye, let’s put ourselves back into that long forgotten moment when humans everywhere are still experiencing the Earth as a living Goddess, and honoring her fruitful generosity as befitting a Great Mother. We can do this you know. All it takes is some imagination, and a willingness to temporarily suspend our 2500 year-old propensity to perceive the world in a manner the philosopher Karl Jaspers has so succinctly dubbed: the subject/object split.

The split is a perceptual and cognitive divide, a subtle but potent functional disconnect between an experiencing ‘subjective’ awareness (i.e., you), and an experienced ‘objective’ reality (everyone and everything that’s not you). So what exactly does suspending a deeply conditioned manner of being human-in-the-world actually mean; and what does it involve? This entire 3-Part essay is my answer to these questions. As a preface, let me briefly explain my intentions in authoring it…

First: I wanted to show you how your alphabetically-literate Western education has set you up to experience yourself and the world in the polarized manner Jaspers is alluding to. For the majority of us in the West today, including a good many of our philosophers and scientists, the subject/object split is assumed to be a neurologically-hardwired given. Rarely, if ever, does anyone question it. I like to call this unconscious narrowing of our human possibility: the “one size fits all” theory of consciousness.

History, however, argues differently. It suggests that humankind’s experience of consciousness has undergone as rich and varied an evolutionary development as the US, or physics, or baseball. From this perspective, the story of human consciousness is a pageant of differing forms or configurations of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with ourselves, each other, and the world. None of these experiential configurations however — the subject/object split included — is or will ever be the final definition of consciousness. All, including the split, are culturally-sourced, deeply-habituated conventions.

Second: To illustrate this I have pieced together a distilled overview of this as yet-unfinished, still-unfolding pageant. Thus in Part 1 we’ll employ intellect and a visceral imagination to understand as best we can the essential nature of the First People’s experience of consciousness, or what I’ll be referring to from here forward as: the At-one-ment.

Then in Part 2 we’ll explore when, why, and how the subject/object split became first the West’s, and with time the world’s, dominant expression of consciousness.

And finally in Part 3 we’ll turn our attention to ‘the future human’, and what the term ‘consciousness’ will likely mean for her or him in the coming decades.

Until right now the history of human consciousness has been driven exclusively by the way human neurology ‘partners’ with our evolving communications technologies; and all of this has been working unconsciously. The bill for this chronic state of mass unconsciousness is now coming due in the guise of a global climate crisis that our split-entraining partnership with alphabetic literacy has created.

In order to deal with this worsening crisis, and if humankind is to not only survive but thrive, the future human will have to learn how to partner more consciously with our evolving technologies (such as, for example, AI) to intentionally cultivate and employ different forms or expressions of consciousness; and to get more skillful in moving as needed between specific forms. Currently this is still largely a possibility; but one which, depending on your age, will likely become a reality in your lifetime!

Still game? If so, then here’s a little hint to help you get started. As you read the following italicized section, imagine yourself being part of what you’re reading. Picture yourself inside the story looking out, rather than outside looking in. And try to hear what’s being said as if the speaker is addressing her or his personal thoughts and feelings directly to you, and to you alone.

THE FIRST PEOPLE OF HELLAS

This solid rock we feel beneath our feet is our true Mother’s bone. If I’m very quiet, I can feel her breathing. Can you? The soil we so lovingly till is her flesh. The rivers and streams that vivify and sustain our land carry her lifeblood. An annual profusion of luxuriant greenery makes for a queenly attire. And rippling fields of wildflowers bejewel her.

In Egypt they call our Great Mother Isis; and In Mesopotamia, Gulu. The Romans know her as Ceres. And for you, me, and all the inhabitants of our beloved Hellas (i.e., the land we today call Greece) her name is Demeter (pronounced Da-ME-ter).

Often conflated with the primordial Earth-goddess Gaia, Demeter is the divine personification of feminine fertility. She’s also an emissary of the plant realm, and a potent spiritual liaison between human and plant consciousness. We Greeks are especially fond of her for bestowing on us two invaluable gifts: the life-sustaining practices of agriculture, and the life-transforming experiences of Mysteria — an initiatory rite-of-passage open to all our citizens and facilitated by a powerful plant-derived psychedelic.

In our everyday parlance, Demeter is simply: The Mother. Particularly endearing to our women is The Mother’s warmhearted relationship with her daughter Persephone, whom all speak of affectionately as: The Maiden. If you’re not already familiar with their story here’s a brief, to-the-point synopsis…

The Goddess Demeter is raped by her brother Zeus, the King of the Gods; and in due time gives birth to a daughter named Persephone, whom she mothers with great love and affection. Then one fateful day Hades — Lord of the Dead, a second brother to Demeter, and Persephone’s uncle — abducts his young niece, and carries her down into the underworld against her will to be his queen.

Demeter, as you might expect, is furious. So as retribution for turning a blind eye to their daughter’s rape and deeming it a ‘marriage’ — as well as for the trauma he had originally visited on her — Demeter causes Zeus’ delight, the beautiful verdant Earth, to turn cold and barren. Then grief-stricken and despondent, she wanders the desolate countryside in search of her missing child.

Meanwhile in the Land of the Dead, Persephone is trying to come to terms with her new situation. Being a queen most certainly has its advantages; but being held prisoner is definitely not OK. Most of all, she dearly misses her mother. So she asks her new-found ‘husband’ if she might visit Demeter in the Land of the Living. Realizing that Zeus is likely to compel his daughter’s wish whatever he does, Hades acquiesces. However as a parting gesture he gifts his young queen a ripe, red pomegranate.

Now Persephone knows full well that eating or drinking anything in the underworld will oblige her to remain there forever. Yet she goes ahead and eats six tiny seeds, thinking that cannot possibly count. Turns out she’s dead wrong.

All this tumult he’s responsible for has left Zeus in a quandary. How can he possibly placate his sister’s wrath, punish his brother’s chicanery, do right by his daughter, and rescue his beloved Earth — all at the same time? Seeing no better solution, he declares that Persephone is to spend half of each year with her mother in the Land of the Living. and the other half (one month for each of those six tasty little seeds?) with Hades in the Land of the Dead.

This is how the indigenous Greek mind explains the oscillation of the annual vegetation cycle between the lush, fruitful warmth of summer and the cold, lean span of winter.

Why each September for almost 2000 years those of us who call the Goddess-blessed village of Eleusis home, and our guests from all across the civilized world, have come together to celebrate what the initiates of the sacred rite drink the perception-enhancing, reality-bending kykeon to brave: the terrible dark beauty of Persephone’s wedding night.

And why every year to this day, when her annual finery is spent, Persephone must leave her dear mother, her devotees, and the welcoming Earth behind, and alone make the obligatory descent to the World of Shadows and ‘the Dark One’ who ever so patiently waits…

“In the world of the dead there is no time. Yet every autumn, as the days grow shorter, the spirits of the underworld sense that Persephone must soon return. They grow restless and call to her with lost, hollow voices. In the world of the living, the sound of their cries becomes the sound of the wind sighing in the dry grass and moaning through the bare trees. For many of the living it is a sound that speaks to them of the frailty of life and the ultimate, unknowable void of death. They draw closer to the fire and to one another, and they cherish the warmth of life.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

PERSONAL DREAMS & COMMON DREAMS

Now bring your awareness back to the present moment. Well how did you do? Were you able to catch a brief glimpse of what the British novelist L.P. Hartley was hinting at when he wrote: ”The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” If not, then be patient. You’ll have more opportunities to perfect your new ‘time-travel’ skills shortly. Just know that every italicized section in Part 1 is a personal invitation to you to intentionally move beyond, or ‘overcome’, the deeply-engrained psychology of the subject/object split.

Until this point in history, in our very lifetimes, the form of consciousness humans in-habit has never been a matter of personal choice. Instead it has always been an unexamined component of one’s cultural heritage. As such, its day-to-day functional operations have remained effectively invisible.

Think back to your early years. How long did it take you as a child to perfect the perceptual and cognitive habits of the subject/object split? I’m willing to bet that never once in all those years did you have any awareness whatsoever of what you were actually doing.

What about all those tedious hours you spent learning to read printed material, to write cursively, and even to sing your ABC’s? Until your efforts earned the praise and adulation of your elders, and you were officially recognized as an initiated member of the ‘literate’ (think: ‘educated’) community? We’ll be exploring this fundamental connection between our culture and our experience of consciousness in more detail as we proceed. For now just know that in the history of human consciousness alphabetic literacy and the subject/object split have always been two sides of the same evolutionary coin.

But I‘m really getting ahead of myself here. What we need to do first is set the stage for our imaginal journey through the history of Western human consciousness. And specifically here in Part 1 through the ‘pre-literate’, ‘pre-historic’, centuries of antiquity.

I began this essay with the mythic tale of The Maiden & Her Mother because it’s an artifact of an earlier pre-Western form of consciousness, and therefore so much more than just a quaint old story. Today we call such a popular, enduring tale a ‘myth’ and regard it as imaginative fiction. However according to the 18th-century historian Giambattista Vico, the original meaning of the Greek word mythos was: ‘the true story’, not ‘the false’. So which is it: truth or fiction?

The psychologist Carl Jung thought it was a little of both. Exactly like a dream, myth floats in the liminal space between conscious and unconscious, truth and fiction. The only real difference between the two is that dreams are personal and myths are collective.

So the next time you hear the word ‘myth’ being used to denote whimsical fantasy, start thinking of it instead as a ‘common dream’ — one that arises spontaneously from the imagination of an entire people, and then gradually takes shape over the course of many generations. And just as personal dreams can sometimes play a compensatory role in our individual psyches by dramatizing problematical attitudes and situations that require our attention, common dreams often play a similar role in the collective psyche. For example…

Rape appears to have been an unusually recurrent theme in the common dreams of the First Greeks. Perhaps this was simple testimony to traumas unhealed and crimes unpunished. But when a difficult theme appears more than once in a dream or a myth, or in multiple related dreams or myths, then it’s likely that the psyche is attempting to come to terms with something rather gnarly.

So with not just one but two rapes, The Maiden & Her Mother must have been trying to make a point; and I suspect that point may have been something more than compensation. What if this strange little story was also a well-camouflaged alternative history, a poetic account of some very significant turn of events that couldn’t be spoken of openly without inviting reprisal, and so could only be referred to indirectly or in code?

The Greece our historians remember was largely a society of gods and men: a more patriarchal Greece. Could this poignant account of a mother/daughter relationship and the traumas the two endured have been an effective way of preserving the memory of an older, more matriarchal Greece, and its involuntary subjugation by a rising patriarchy? In other words: might the women of Late Neolithic Europe (ca.10,000-4,500 BCE), with their traditional matriarchal societies, have experienced the slowly tightening grip of patriarchal dominance as the emotional, psychological, and moral equivalent of rape?

Scholars have been trying to answer this question for a very long time now; and the jury is still out. So you’ll need to decide this one for yourself. And for you to be able to do that, you’ll first need to understand what the terms ‘matriarchy’ and ‘patriarchy’ really mean. Both terms today are largely used to denote contrasting ways of organizing society. But the sociological level of meaning is actually contingent on a deeper, more fundamental psychological level.

When viewed as a functional psychology, the term ‘matriarchy’ means a manner of being human in-the-world that reflects the values and priorities of a more feminine expression of consciousness. Chief amongst these is the importance of one’s familial commons, which includes not only the humans held close by biology and long association, but all the other constituents of the natural world as well. In other words: the priorities of WE in its widest, most all-inclusive sense.

The term ‘patriarchy’ means: a manner of being human that reflects the values and priorities of a more masculine expression of consciousness. Patriarchal priorities center around the primacy of personal struggle, adventure, and accomplishment — ie., the priorities of ME in its narrowest, most exclusive sense.

However underpinning both the sociological and psychological levels is an even deeper ‘bedrock’ foundation of consciousness itself. Because when we see matriarchy and patriarchy as differing, but complimentary, configurations of human consciousness, and observe the intertwined co-evolutionary nature of their temporal relationship, what we discover unfolding before us, what reveals itself so beautifully — because it’s the structural foundation of everything in the human experience of the phenomenal world — is an all-inclusive history of human consciousness.

THE PATRIARCHAL COUP

These alternating cycles of matriarchy and patriarchy appear to work something like this. Beginning sometime around 10,000 BCE, a shift away from matriarchal and towards patriarchal dominance began, and then took some 5000 years to fully mature. In other words it was a very gradual transfer of power. A slow-motion coup, if you will. So was this the only time such a shift has taken place? Or might it have been just the latest oscillation in an even more ancient and ongoing dance?

We really don’t know. But either way this most recent shift to patriarchal dominance totally transformed the place of women in prehistoric society; and as you may suspect, not necessarily for the better. Like the proverbial frog in the pan of slow heating water, no one seemed to notice just how draconian the process really was — to a degree that even the fact that things may have once been very different seems to have been totally erased from humankind’s Collective Memory.

Now I’m certainly not the first to champion what scholars call: the ‘Matriarchal Hypothesis’. It’s best known proponent has been the controversial archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. Her supporters have included a number of 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s feminist celebrities, people like Gloria Steinem. Her critics have been legion and, as one might expect, predominantly patriarchal. But their ranks have notably included a number of respected feminist scholars like Cynthia Eller.

What I’m trying to introduce into this ongoing controversy is the broader perspective now afforded us by the history of consciousness. Because it certainly appears to me that the intense academic training of all these critics — male and female alike — has required that they embody and embrace the core intellectual principles of the current patriarchal cycle — i.e., the perceptual and cognitive biases of alphabetic literacy and the subject/object split.

Please understand that I’m not disparaging the psychology of the split; but I am pointing out that a more historical perspective relativizes it. Humankind owes the split a huge debt of gratitude. It has bequeathed us our modern lives. But if one is unconsciously beholding to the split because one has never experienced another perspective, another form or expression of consciousness, then the reality crafted by the split becomes the very definition of what it means to be human. But what if instead it’s just what it means to be alphabetically literate?

Gimbutas’ literate critics have one additional predilection in common: all argue that there just isn’t enough evidence to support the likelihood of pre-historic matriarchal dominance. But again, what if this lack of evidence wasn’t accidental? What if a rising patriarchy was simply relentlessly astute at obliterating the matrifocal past?

We know that during the Late Neolithic (ca. 6500-4500 BCE) Greek temples originally dedicated to goddesses were quietly being re-dedicated to gods. No reasons were given, no justifications proffered; it was simply being done. At the same time, certain compensatory common dreams — such as The Maiden & Her Mother — may have been ‘revised’ (i.e., sanitized) to make the offending parties more acceptable. No version of the Persephone story I’ve read has ever used the word ‘rape’, or anything even close to it. However I do recall one patriarchal scholar attempting to justify the rape by claiming that Persephone fell in love with her abuser because: “he treated her so well.” And isn’t it telling that when I search my online dictionary today for the meaning of the term re-matriation, what pops up instead is re-patriation!

I believe that one can actually catch a fleeting glimpse of the old matriarchal order being deposed in the history of European shamanism, since the Late Neolithic was also the time when males began to usurp the traditionally feminine role of shaman and healer. And I find it more than a bit ironic that the main weapon the ascending patriarchy used to achieve gender and societal dominance was The Mother Demeter’s gift to humankind of the Agricultural Revolution.

”With the concentration of political power associated with the agricultural occupations, men sought and bequeathed the office [of shaman]. Rites increasingly became performances rather than egalitarian group activity. The pantheon of spirits, once accessible to all, became the shaman’s spirit helpers.” (Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw, The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature 1992, brackets mine.)

Trauma experts tell us that victims of abuse have a tendency to themselves become perpetrators. However, I really doubt that those old matriarchs literally abused their men. Restrained, held them in check, frustrated them yes; but maltreated them, no. Now I could be wrong about this, because as Dr. Gabor Maté points out trauma isn’t what happens to you, but what happens inside you in response to hurtful external events. In other words: it’s conceivable that any restraint men were experiencing under the communal priorities of the matriarchy did inhibit their fundamental psychological need for self-accomplishment.

And yet once the patriarchs had gained the upper hand, they sure behaved like they’d been abused! During Greece’s renowned Classical Period (4th and 5th centuries BCE), for example, it was Athenian women who were being restrained and relegated to 2nd-class status. And the classicist Norman O. Brown adds that by the 5th century the suppression of gender-equal rights in Athens had become a seriously volatile issue.

I do however think it’s accurate to characterize the patriarchal Greek attitude towards women in general as largely one of distrust, perhaps even fear. This possibility comes to light in another popular common dream: the tale of Jason and the Argonauts. The very first test the predominantly male crew of the Argo must pass on their initiatory journey to secure the Golden Fleece (i.e., the ‘prize’ of societal dominance) is to escape from the clutches of a community of bloodthirsty women.

The Argo drops anchor at Lemnos, where the crew finds the bucolic isle in the possession of a remnant of the old matriarchy. The women’s seductive queen laments that the men of Lemnos have all mysteriously abandoned them; and then tries to persuade the Argonauts to stay on. But the voyageurs high-tail it out of there once they discover the grisly truth that the men of Lemnos have all been ritually murdered — by their own wives, sisters, and daughters!

In addition to serving a compensatory function, there’s another way in which personal and common dreams appear to be similar. Both can be prophetic. On occasion I’ve had a dream that I didn’t immediately understand; but then the ensuing movements of my life would eventually make its meaning crystal clear.

So I wonder: could a common dream of an earlier humanity ever contain a prophetic message for a future humanity? Say, for instance, a dream about the rapes of the Great Mother and her daughter sent forward in time to help at the very moment when the patriarchal mindset is positioning itself like never before to have its way with our Mother Earth? And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider for a moment the well-coordinated effort to deprive women of their bodily sovereignty ramping up right now across the US and elsewhere around the world. And then consider the implications for the Earth and ourselves of a newly-created financial instrument that Wall Street is currently attempting to float called: a Natural Asset Company, or NAC.

BREAKING YOUR WESTERN HABIT

Before we proceed any further, let’s pause for a few moments and zoom out from all these patriarchal machinations so that I can help you better understand what a ‘history of consciousness’ really means, and why it’s such a paradigm-shifting idea.

A disturbing trend has been stealing across the world for some time now, the consequences of which have become especially visible in the U.S. The customs, institutions, and resources that have traditionally belonged to everyone — long referred to as: ‘the commons’ — are increasingly being expropriated by private interests for their own personal benefit.

“In his Farewell Address on January 14, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems and were turning to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.” (Heather Cox-Richardson from “Letters From An American”, Substack, Dec 29, 2024.)

This trend has only gotten more and more virulent since then…

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not appear to have a strategy for their war on Iran. Instead, they had an ideology. That ideology elevates individualism over the idea behind the modern American state: that government should regulate business, maintain a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and support an international order based in rules rather than in military might.

Since the 1950s, opponents of that modern state have celebrated the American individual, especially the American cowboy, as the figure the American government should privilege and protect. In their mythology, the cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to rise through his own hard work, protecting himself and his family from wrongdoers with his gun and his principles. The education, expertise, cooperation, and coalitions on which the modern U.S. stood before Trump were signs not of strength, but of weakness. Heather Cox-Richardson from “Letters From An American” Jul 31 2026

The problem with all this emphasis on the needs of the individual should be obvious: the less we hold in common, the more we divide and fragment. Thus the flag that far too many of us in the US are choosing to fly these days is no longer the traditional stars and stripes; but as the writer Kurt Vonnegut would have it, a skull and crossbones emblazoned with the words: “Hell with you Jack I got mine!”

As the popular American historian Heather Cox Richardson suggests in the quotations above, this hyper-individualistic trend is being seriously exacerbated by a growing allegiance to a politics that places the rights of the individual above the well-being of the commons. But how can such a self-aggrandizing mindset possibly lead to a peaceful, enduring, sustainable society which, by definition, is a comm-unity of individuals. So bottom line: why has all this exaggerated emphasis on individuality become so very prevalent?

I believe the answer to this question lies in our current form of consciousness: the ‘subject/object split’. Over the course of the last three millennia, the split has gradually become the West’s dominant paradigm. And now — thanks to the global success of its two most successful expressions: the scientific method and the occidental model of education — the ‘Western form’ has gone on to achieve global hegemony.

As a consequence, for the majority of us today — at least in the West — the subject/object split has become synonymous with consciousness itself. We ‘swim’ in its pervasive psychology like fish do in water; and we’re generally as unaware of it as the fish likely are of the water. On the upside, the split’s objectifying proclivities have been responsible for many of humankind’s greatest achievements, including: philosophy, science, technology, all our humanities, and a good many of our arts.

But on the downside — what Jung calls: its ‘shadow side’ — the split’s polarizing tendencies have been gradually and imperceptibly dis-connecting us each from the other, and all of us from our undeniably necessary underpinning: the natural world. This last consequence — which essentially consists in the substitution of human culture for nature — has now reached a point where we’re literally destroying our ability to sustain ongoing viability as a species. In other words: we’re literally committing collective suicide. So let’s see if the history of consciousness can give us some much-needed perspective on all this.

The term ‘consciousness’ first came into popular usage in the West during the 17th century. Prior to that, the equivalent term was ‘human nature’; and the question European philosophers and theologians had long been debating was: is ‘human nature’ — i.e., consciousness — fixed and constant in its temporal expression, or can its form of expression change?

For centuries now, the West’s preferred answer has been: fixed and constant. Perhaps the most immediately relevant example of this is the materialist (or physicalist) argument by many contemporary philosophers and scientists that consciousness is an epiphenomenal by-product of brain function. And what exactly are the chief characteristics of ‘epiphenomenal’ consciousness? Well, what a coincidence! Turns out they’re exactly the same as the core attributes of the subject/object split: (1) objective reasoning, (2) an absence of emotion in problem solving, (3) linear thinking, and (4) sustained attention span.

For me this raises two questions. First: is the physicalist explanation of consciousness settled theory, or is it really just an un-investigated assumption? What if, in fact, it is an artifact of philosophy and science as we know them today being children of the split, and therefore unconsciously beholding to the split’s inherent perceptual and cognitive biases? After all, the vast majority of Western-trained thinkers have never experienced themselves or the world in any manner other than through the lens of the subject/object split.

And second: ever since the 1850’s, Western scientists have largely assumed that the Neanderthals were something that we now know they very well may not have been: brutish and stupid. So what if our current understanding of consciousness is the new Neanderthal?

I’m asking both questions because now in the 21st century the fixity argument appears to have run its course. Emerging concepts such as neuroplasticity (i.e., the brain’s ability to construct new, or re-construct old, synaptic connections) are suggesting it too may not be true. If your brain is capable of re-wiring itself, then the structural ‘architecture’ of your consciousness as you know it is more likely to be simply a deeply-engrained habit. And since habits can be broken, it would follow that the form of human consciousness can and does on occasion change.

A contemporary phenomenon known as the “overview effect” may currently be our best evidence of this. Astronauts return from space awe-inspired. The recent Artemis Two mission is a great example of this. Seeing the Earth from space has not just ‘inspired’ the crew; it has literally trans-form-ed their consciousness. They may not be great at articulating this because it’s likely that they’ve never experienced it prior to now; but you can see early signs of it in the brightness of their facial expressions, and hear it in the enthusiasm of their exuberant descriptions. If every person on Earth today could have their own direct experience of this phenomenon, it would probably go a long ways toward antidoting all the tiresome bickering and squabbling.

Perhaps that day is coming. But until it does there’s another kind of overview experience that is available right now to anyone who makes the effort. Because one of the most awe-inspiring and exquisitely beautiful understandings of human possibility, perhaps close in its transformative power to the view of the Whole Earth from space, is the Big Picture history of humanity’s still-evolving experience of consciousness.

The Greek word historia originally meant: ‘a looking into’, or ‘narrative about’. History of consciousness, however, is fundamentally different from the factual chronicle of events, ideas, and personalities you probably studied in school. Think of it this way: if consciousness were an animal, our conventional understanding of history would be an analysis of the animal’s tracks. A history of consciousness is a phenomenology of the animal itself.

In other words: perhaps we should start paying less attention to those tracks, as interesting as they are, and more to what’s making them. So instead of presenting you with another supposedly objective compilation of knowledge about consciousness, I want to focus in this essay on our subjective experience of this still-very-mysterious phenomenon.

Here’s an analogy to help you understand this distinction. Studying the proliferating literature on psychedelics may prove quite informative; but it probably won’t trans-form either you or your consciousness. However, should you have the desire and the opportunity to introduce one of these remarkable substances into your own bodily chemistry, and given a supportive set and setting, it just might do both.

So let’s define ‘consciousness’ subjectively or experientially then as: an individual or group’s qualitative manner of being human in-the-world. When viewed in this simple way consciousness presents as an inseparable blend of content and form. Content is everything we’re sensing, thinking, feeling, or otherwise perceiving. It’s the attention-grabbing foreground of our experience. Form is the invisible background that organizes the ever-changing stream of content into a functional whole.

Content is uniquely individual. No other person has ever experienced the world in quite the same way as you do. Form is collective. Most members of any particular culture unconsciously participate in the same form. If you’ve been educated in an alphabetically-literate Western culture, as anyone reading this essay probably has, then you’ve been primed to in-habit the ‘Western’ form — which is another name for the subject/object split. The problem is: if you remain an unwitting in-habitant of any particular form, then it’s almost impossible to see that other forms can and do exist. So to be able to experience the liberating effects of a different form, you must first ‘break’ (i.e.,step outside) your deeply-engrained, largely-unconscious Western habit.

There are many ways for one to do this. Given the opportunity, you can immerse yourself in a non-’Western’ indigenous culture. Or you can make the ‘Journey to the East’ that the novelist Hermann Hesse walked us through so beautifully in Siddhartha, and that so many Western Buddhists are finding ways to do today. Another way is to intentionally re-structure your patterns of perception and cognition with some skillful guidance and an appropriate psychedelic. As we’re attempting to do here, you can use the history of consciousness to make a ‘Journey to the Ancestors’. Or you can find your own way and create your own custom vehicle.

It’s your choice.

So with all this said, the stage is fully set for our imaginal journey through the historical unfolding of Western consciousness. And so to commence our journey we’ll need to project ourselves all the way back to the very beginning of the human experiment…

IN THE EARLY MORNING OF THE WORLD

Imagine that you’ve just awakened from a fitful night’s sleep, only to find yourself alone, in the dark, and hunkered down in some unknown forest. Your initial reaction to this mysterious occurrence is an understandable mix of alarm and fear. However once you realize that you don’t seem to be in any immediate danger, you gradually begin to relax; and with that your fear begins to morph into curiosity. That’s when you first notice the soft, plaintive call of your what seems to be your only companion: a solitary night bird.

First light reveals that you’re crouched on the bank of a slow-moving jungle river. You can see that the river is making a sweeping bend against some chalky cliffs at the base of a small mountain. Mist curls off the river’s glassy surface; and everywhere you look fish are rising. ”How beautiful,” you think to yourself. “But I swear I’ve seen these cliffs and this mountain before. But when and where? Perhaps it was that little Greek tourist town we visited three summers ago. But what’s weird is that there’s no town here this morning; and looking around I see no signs whatsoever of human activity. Everything looks and feels as if it’s completely wild and pristine.”

Now the day is beginning to open out; and necessity gets you up and moving. However there’s something really odd about your body. It’s just not working in the way you’re accustomed to. “It’s as if I’ve climbed into someone else’s skin. Seeing my reflection in a still pool of the river, my face seems darker and far more weathered. And my vision is, well, really disorienting. I seem to have no perception of depth or distance, and no sense whatsoever of perspective. Everything I see appears to be uniformly co-present, as if I were living in a huge flat-screen TV image. But perhaps the oddest thing of all is the sheer volume of sensory information flooding my awareness and dominating my attention.”

The triune brain of this strange body is as fully developed as the modern brain you’re used to. You have no way of knowing, but both brains have the same functional capacity for physical, emotional, and intellectual expression. However your accustomed brain primarily utilizes its intellectual and emotional capacities to organize your experience; while this seemingly ‘older’ brain is using its sensory, instinctual, and emotional capacities. That’s why you’re experiencing such an all-consuming rush of sensory information, and such a distracting tumult of feelings. It seems as if all the perceptual filters and cognitive habits that the complexity of modern life requires have been surgically removed.

As you continue your wandering through the forest, you enter a shady cool glade where you immediately spy a tiny deer-like creature — a ‘proto-deer’ if you will —grazing on a small leafy shrub. You and the deer immediately size each other up; and when you show no signs of being a threat, the demure little creature cautiously returns to its morning meal. It’s odd, but you definitely feel some kind of kinship with this little guy! You seem to know exactly what she or he is thinking. But really it’s more how this deer is thinking, since it’s in the same sensation-bound manner you now are.

“All my thoughts, and probably the deer’s as well, are being in-formed by the same five senses; and consist primarily of concrete pictures, smells, sounds, touches, and tastes rather than the musings, abstractions, and conceptualizations that my modern brain churns out. In fact, being in this older brain seems to allow no room whatsoever for the incessant stream of associative thoughts that my 21st-century brain normally entertains. And oddly, for what may be the first time ever, that old 70’s catch-phrase: be here now is making perfect sense!”

Because the deer and you are sensing and thinking in what is essentially the same manner, you’re functionally at-one. “But this at-one-ment seems to be only a given when I’m in my older brain. When I’m in my 21st-century brain, conscious intention and effort are required to make it true. In other words: my old-brain brings the deer and I closer. My new-brain turns the deer into an ‘other’ by erecting a formidable ontological barrier between us.

So what about this whole forest then? Could it too be ‘thinking’ in the same concrete manner? If so, what would constitute the forest’s sensorium? It would have to be the sum total of the information being gleaned and shared by all the trees, plants, animals, and humans that comprise it…and right now that definitely includes me!”

Then, in a flash, all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. “These two differing patterns of brain function are responsible for two fundamentally different experiences of consciousness. For my newer brain, the forest is an interesting collection of ‘other-than-me’ phenomena. For my older brain the forest, the deer, and myself are all actively participating — each in our own way — in one unified life experience, in what the physicist David Bohm liked to call one common ‘holomovement’.”

As the magnitude of this insight slowly sinks in, you wonder to yourself: “Now what was that old indigenous greeting I once heard exchanged in Guatemala? The one that when I first heard struck me as being just a tad TOO familiar? Right now it seems perfectly appropriate.”

Suddenly your eyes brighten, and a big smile spreads across your face. You turn once again to face the still-quizzical deer. And throwing your arms wide so as to embrace the deer and the whole forest, you ebulliently exclaim…

“Good to see your face again. Good to see your mouth again. Good to smell your sweet, sweet breath!”

THE ANIMAL AT-ONE-MENT

Asked what she had learned from a lifetime spent amongst the orangutan communities of Borneo, the Primatologist Dr. Birute Mary Galdikas responded: “Serenity.” In one word Dr. Galdikas captured the essence of what it means to be present on the Earth in the animal form of consciousness. That animals, plants, and other Earth-born life-forms participate in the phenomenon of consciousness in ways that can be both similar to and very different from humans is a possibility that many Westerners, including our philosophers and scientists, are only beginning to entertain.

For most of my adult life I’ve called the ponderosa-forested mountains of northern New Mexico home. Were I asked to select a word to describe what living amongst these stately beings has taught me, I too would choose ‘serenity’. When first I arrived, however, I had a lot to learn. Now I understand that nature isn’t the competitive struggle my literate Western education taught me it is. Rather it’s a complex symphony of integrated co-operation. Thus trees don’t hoard water or nutrients for their own benefit. They share them with each other through their root systems, and through the fungal networks that they live in continual chemical communication with. Above ground, each tree gives the impression that it’s a distinctly separate organism. But in the hidden world below, all are at-one.

The same holds true for our animal brothers and sisters. ‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t always mean that the fiercest competitors in the predation sweepstakes are the winners. That’s essentially a capitalist fantasy of our current president, conditioned by the subject/object split. If it were true, predatory species would be committing suicide right and left by overexploiting their food sources; and they simply don’t do that. The prudent predator lives in a balanced equilibrium with its prey because collaborative inter-dependence, not unbridled self-interest, determines who’s actually nature’s fittest.

For the First People of the Earth, plants and animals never were ontological ‘others’. They aren’t for most contemporary indigenous people either — that is unless, or until, they’ve has been educationally entrained by the polarizing ontological assumptions of Western consciousness. The First People participated quite naturally in the animal and plant forms of consciousness. And because of this natural ‘comm-union of consciousness’, each species emanates from the wellspring of creation — which is to say each embodies its own characteristic form of one all-embracing consciousness field. So let’s dub this serene, un-self-conscious, instinctual harmony with each other and the Source: the Animal At-one-ment.

The panicked deer surrendering to the cougar’s embrace. The great flocks of birds and schools of fish all wheeling about in perfect unison. The orca families of the Pacific Northwest, where “overt violence or aggressive behavior between individuals, even among males, has never been observed.” And wherein social interaction isn’t typified by Darwin’s tooth and claw, but by “co-operation, co-ordination, communication, trust and acceptance.”

Then some 6 million years ago our most distant hominin ancestors began the long slow transition out of the animal realm. In the process they brought the Animal At-one-ment with them; and over time advanced it through at least 17 iterations. The last of these, some 300,000+ years ago, resulted in modern Homo sapiens. And somewhere in all of this — probably with the development of language-facilitated communication, estimates of which vary wildly from 70,000 years ago to several times that — the Animal At-one-ment morphed into the Human At-one-ment; and in so doing became the original form of human consciousness.

THE HUMAN AT-ONE-MENT

It’s important to understand that once the Human At-one-ment took form it never was a consciously reasoned aspiration. Rather it was completely instinctual and totally un-conscious. Functionally it consisted in complimentary modes of perception and cognition, with a structural ‘architecture’ and a set of operational ‘rules’ different from the modes you and I are familiar with. In other words: humanity’s At-one-ment was simply the way the First People were human-in-their-world.

Surely their lives had to have been, in their own way, as difficult and challenging as ours. They obviously had to deal with all the aspects of daily life and death that we do. “We eat to be eaten,” is how one spiritual teacher put it. But at the same time they had an easy, natural, unspoken connection to life and to each other that you and I today can only imagine. From a purely functional perspective, the original form was probably more closely related to what neuroscientists today call ‘primary consciousness’ — all involuntary and autonomic bodily systems — than to the thought-origination, cognition, and reason characteristic of what they call our more modern ‘secondary consciousness’.

I suspect that the original at-one form of consciousness was as fundamentally matriarchal (we) as our current Western form is fundamentally patriarchal (me). A recent study suggests that human toddlers tend to behave pro-socially towards both humans and animals. The authors attribute this to budding altruism. I think it’s more likely an example of ontogeny (individual development) recapitulating phylogeny (species development). That would imply that our children today are being born into essentially the same experience of consciousness as animals and the First People; but then, literally from the get-go, they’re getting socially indoctrinated and ‘schooled’ right out of it.

With all this said, I probably don’t have to tell you that what I’m outlining here isn’t exactly a widely embraced way of looking at things. In fact, neither of the two main competing hypotheses of human origins would be likely to concur with my evolutionary take on the progression from animal to human consciousness. Mainstream anthropologists and academics certainly wouldn’t, since a majority still generally assume that one’s form of consciousness is neurologically determined. In other words: in their view human consciousness changes quantitatively as society evolves and people learn from their experience; but it never changes qualitatively.

But I have three good reasons for championing a qualitative, consciousness-centered, developmental narrative. First, I find the possibility of an organic, ‘home-grown’ evolutionary scenario more plausible than a model that is hinged on outside intervention. Plants, animals, and humans are all children of Mother Earth. I don’t think we need outside intervention to explain the evolution of advanced civilization, even if its rise and fall has taken place more than once. The true key to the human story I believe, lies in our psychology, not in our DNA.

Second, the etymology of languages that descend directly from those of the First People appears to support the likelihood of an earlier, more unified form of human consciousness. In the mother tongue of the Tzʼutujil Maya, for example, which is a derivative of the 5000-year old ‘Proto-Mayan’, there’s no verb ‘to be’. So the only way one can say “I am,” or “I exist,” is to name to whom or to what I belong or am at-one with.

And third, I respect and take very seriously the long view of history preserved in the collective memory and oral traditions of the world’s indigenous peoples. Here’s a very distilled, even if somewhat enigmatic, history of consciousness from the writings of the Cheyenne linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford…

“Long ago, men, animals, spirits and plants all communicated in the same way. Then something happened. After that, we had to talk to each other in human speech. But we retained the ‘old language’ for dreams and for communicating with spirits and animals and plants.” 

So what exactly did happen? Why are we who we are now rather than who we were in the beginning?

This entire 3-Part essay is the full answer to these questions. So we’ll need to continue our experiment in time travel to experience as best we can what the term ‘consciousness’ actually meant for our most distant human ancestors. Plato says that all human knowing is remembering. I began this essay with the old, old story of The Maiden & Her Mother to purposefully jog your memory. It’s also why I asked you to imagine yourself — some spiritual traditions would say: ‘remember yourself’ — in that long-ago moment, rather than just reading about it as you normally might.

I did so because imagination transcends space, nullifies time, and dissolves boundaries; and to get a ‘taste’ of the First People’s at-one experience of consciousness we need to blend all three. Sounds difficult; but really it’s not. You’ve likely done it many times on your own in the past while reading something that really interested you, that literally ‘captured your imagination’. In other words: what we’re going to try to do here is to take an experience that’s normally an accidental occurrence and make it into an intentional exercise, one that’s actually a powerful old Sufi practice that Jung adapted and re-dubbed: active imagination.

So now we need to leave the ‘early morning’ of the human world — ca. 300,000 BCE and the emergence of modern Homo sapiens to ca. 3,000 BCE and the decline of the primal matriarchy. Now we’re moving on to ‘later morning’ — ca. 3000 BCE and the consolidation of the patriarchy to ca. 400 CE and the demise of the At-one-ment. ‘Late morning’ gives us much more to work with than just primitive tools, artifacts, campgrounds, and burial sites. Because this is when everything we’re discussing here was getting ready to, in the marvelous word coined by James Joyce, wholyrolyover.

“When Persephone hears the first, faint sighs of the dead in the cooling autumn winds, she is filled with dread. ‘They call to me. They call to me,’ she thinks as she gathers the harvest. ‘But how can I leave this life? It is too beautiful. The sky is too blue, the sun is too warm, the air is too sweet to leave behind. The spirits of the dead cannot understand. They are cold and remote. They have forgotten the beauty of life.’” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

HOLDING EVERYONE & EVERYTHING TOGETHER

So let’s imagine that you and I are visiting Greece at the very beginning of the Common Era. Every autumn, for as long as anyone can remember, when it’s time for Persephone to return to the Land of the Dead, the Greek tribeswomen and men throw her a big going-away party in the guise of numerous local harvest festivals. One of these humble beginnings has outstripped all others, and blossomed into Greece’s most beautiful, powerful, and influential spiritual tradition: the Eleusinian Mysteria: the Mysteries of Eleusis.

The word Eleusis means: ‘place of birth’. The time-honored rite that’s still flourishing in this modest agricultural village is the last great societal institution of the Greek At-one-ment. But the end is fast approaching for both the rite and the At-one-ment. You and I have come here to identify the true cause of their demise. What we’ll be witnessing during our time in ancient Greece is one of the best examples I know of what Moonhawk was referring to above in his enigmatic hint: “then something happened”…

The year is 364 CE. You and I are in what today is modern Greece, but at the time of our visit is the Roman Province of Achaea. For three centuries now, the Greeks have been peaceful subjects of the Roman Empire; but revolution is in the air. The Roman Emperor Valentinian I has just issued a decree outlawing all nocturnal festivals — a blow aimed directly at the region's last surviving and most beloved Goddess shrine: the temple complex at Eleusis. News of this has traveled fast; and the Greek people are literally up in arms. 

Inspired by the evolving common dream of The Maiden & her Mother, and observed each year in Persephone and Demeter’s honor, the Eleusinian rite has been a work-in-progress now for close to 2000 years. It originated sometime around 1500 BCE, when the Greeks were little more than a quarrelsome family of indigenous tribes. Then, in the centuries that followed, the rite grew steadily in size, sophistication, and renown. By 500 BCE, when most of the traditional goddess shrines had been re-dedicated to gods, the annual observance at Eleusis each September was continuing to attract celebrants from all across the civilized world.

And now, some 900 years later, the rite is still a major institution of pan-Hellenic culture — even as it struggles with dwindling participation and increasing allegations of corruption. In this newly emerging, more patriarchal era it has become a round plug in a square hole. In other words: with roots deep in the old consciousness, the rite is essentially a miniaturized version of the matriarchal At-one-ment struggling to survive in an increasingly inattentive, and at times hostile, environment.

A new kind of human — predominantly male, patriarchal, and alphabetically-literate — is now calling the Athenian polis and its closely allied poleis home. This new human is less tribal and more individualistic, less instinctual and more rationally astute, less sensually participatory and more intent on becoming self-aware through philosophical inquiry. Rumor has it that a coterie of wealthy Athenian patriarchs are throwing parties where the rite’s fabled consciousness-enhancing brew, the kykeon, is being illegally served, the carefully-guarded secret formula apparently procured through theft or bribery.

The village of Eleusis itself sits on a fertile agricultural plain, 22 kilometers west of Athens. It’s the place where Demeter, in her sorrowful wanderings in search of her missing daughter, is said to have first been treated kindly by humans. The Mother rewarded this kindness by gifting the village the practices of agriculture and the sacred rite — a natural symbiosis perhaps best illustrated by the rite’s simple closing: “Rain, bring fruit.” This symbiosis will continue to be faithfully honored long after the rite itself is gone. A Brit named E.D. Clark will visit the ruined shrine in 1801 CE, and report finding Persephone’s larger-than-life statue standing half-buried in a huge steaming pile of animal manure.

The Emperor Valentinian is a devout Christian — but a well-educated, pragmatic one. The uproar his decree is causing genuinely perturbs him. So he turns to his trusted provincial Governor, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, for counsel. “Should I back down, and allow Eleusis to remain a living hothouse of paganism? Or hold firm, and risk it becoming a nexus of insurgency against Roman occupation?”

This exchange between the Emperor and his Governor is a perfect cameo for what’s at stake in this pivotal moment. Valentinian no longer in-habits the old at-one form of consciousness. His urban lifestyle, Christian indoctrination, and alphabetically-literate education have made him a living embodiment of the new patriarchal ideal. Praetextatus, on the other hand, is not only a staunch pagan (from the Latin paganus, meaning: 'country boy’), but a loyal veteran initiate of the Eleusinian rite. So like the rite, he too still has his spiritual roots deep in the increasingly anachronistic matriarchal At-one-ment.

“I think you’re making a serious mistake,” warns the popular Governor of Achaea. “Not only is your decree fostering resentment and fomenting rebellion, it’s making life unlivable for the Greek people.”

Praetextatus’ bold rebuke agitates and perplexes the all-powerful Emperor of Rome. And just so you understand the risk the Governor is taking by speaking so forthrightly, when Plato speaks similarly to the Emperor Dionysus of Syracuse, he narrowly escapes execution and is immediately sold into slavery. 

Praetextatus concludes the discussion by summing up the Mysteria’s fundamental reason for being in six prescient words. And he does so not only for Valentinian’s benefit but for yours, mine, and all posterity’s. It’s imperative that the Eleusinian tradition be allowed to continue, adjures the zealous Governor. And why? Because, in his own words, the annual celebration of the rite is what “holds the whole human race together.”

BURIED IN THE BODY

In the above section I encouraged you for a third time to imagine yourself subjectively experiencing the First People’s form of consciousness. Now let’s expand our more objective understanding of who these first people were, and how their experience of consciousness differed from yours and mine. In other words, let’s intentionally step back into the subject/object split and use this powerful form of consciousness to do exactly what it’s good for: analytical thinking and objective reasoning. Think of this as practice. In Part 3 we’ll see just how important the cultivated ability to step in and out of different forms of consciousness at will is going to be for the Future Human.

The first Westerner to dig really deep into the idea of differing forms of consciousness was an Italian historian named Giambattista Vico. In 1725 CE, Vico published his magnum opus: The New Science. The book was as revolutionary and controversial as its author. Vico once joked that trouble would follow him to his grave. At his funeral proceedings the different colleges of his university argued heatedly about who should have the honor of bearing his coffin. A riot erupted, police dispersed the unruly crowd, and Vico’s coffin and corpse were left sitting abandoned in the middle of a road.

Vico was the West’s first true historian of consciousness. He was also the first Western scholar to see history as recurring cycles rather than a linear progression; and he was the first to argue that the original humans were very different from he and his contemporaries. He took special issue with an attitude that’s still all too common in our day, what he dubbed: “the conceit of scholars” — i.e., the presumption that humans in the past perceived, thought, and emoted exactly as we do today.

“The first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men.” (Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 1725 CE, emphasis mine.)

According to Vico, the First People weren’t the “wise philosophers” we moderns like to think they were. Instead they were “impassioned poets,” meaning: their consciousness and life energy was more centered in emotion than in intellect, and more embodied than ethereal. “They were, so to speak, all body.” In other words: they were “not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body.”

When Vico was penning The New Science, the term ‘consciousness’ was only beginning to take on its modern meaning. So even though consciousness was exactly what he was talking about, Vico didn’t routinely use the term. Nonetheless his starting point is still the same for us today. In both cases, the foundation of human consciousness is sensory experience. Surely the First People’s brains would have worked with exactly the same sensory inputs as ours do today. So why aren’t you and I as immersed in the sensory world as they? Here’s the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter’s explanation…

“A remarkable change took place in the human condition about three thousand years ago with the rise of Euclidian space, three dimensional perspective, and above all the phonetic alphabet. Each of these inventions favored the eye at the expense of all other senses. The value accorded the eye destroyed the harmonic orchestration of the senses and led to an emphasis upon the individual experience of the individual sense, especially the sense of sight. Where other senses were employed, it was with the bias of the eye.” (Edmund Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld, 1970, emphasis mine.)

3000 years ago was precisely when the movement towards patriarchal dominance was gaining momentum. So the re-organization of sensory interplay to favor visual dominance — a phenomenon Carpenter elsewhere terms: “synchronization” — must have accompanied and supported the emerging patriarchal agenda. One strong possibility is that synchronization of the senses may have increased the ability to focus, and thus the overall functional efficiency of those with access to the cultural developments Carpenter is referring to. And it was the men this time who were seizing the moment, and taking control of the access.

In stark contrast, during the earlier cycle of matriarchal organization, human sensory input had been what Carpenter terms: “harmonically orchestrated,” meaning: all five senses contributed equally to a balanced symphony of information. The closest proximation we moderns have to this radically different manner of being in-the-world — a manner that by nature would have been less focused and more diffused — is a rather rare condition called synesthesia. Some individuals experience it spontaneously. And its not an uncommon experience under the influence of psychedelics…

Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (for example, hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision). Simply put, when one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time. This may, for instance, take the form of hearing music and simultaneously sensing the sound as swirls or patterns of color. (www.psychologytoday.com)

“All body” in Vico’s turn of phrase not only prioritizes our sensory world, it also implies no mind — at least not what you and today I understand by that term. Fully immersed in their orchestrated senses, and buried in their bodies, the First People’s consciousness was largely an expression of the reptilian instinctual (R-Complex) and paleo-mammalian emotional centers of the brain. This despite the fact that, according to neuroscience, their neocortexes — the thought and higher-function area of their brains — were probably as fully developed as ours. So given such a disproportional foundation, what could the terms ‘mind’ and ‘thought’ possibly have meant for them?

An important clue lies in the work of the animal behaviorist Temple Grandin. Remember: the First People were still very developmentally close to their animal origins; and according to Grandin, animals think in sensory impressions (visual images, sounds, touches, smells, and tastes) and by making sensory-based associations.

Furthermore Grandin stresses that these associations are never established through abstract mentation; but through immediate, place-specific, personal experience. Every dog-parent can see that their dog thinks and makes choices. Do I want the toy or the treat? But canine thinking isn’t reasoned thought. It’s emotive, instinctual, concrete, and pragmatic.

Further support for this insight into the First People’s psychology comes from the philologist Bruno Snell, who in The Discovery Of The Mind (2011) tells us that his linguistic analyses of the 8th century BCE Iliad and Odyssey found no verbs referring to the generalized function of sight. Neither did he find any indication whatsoever of the kind of abstract, language-mediated conceptualizations that habitually populate our modern thought processes. What he did find was verbs and phrases that described specific and concrete modes of seeing — for example: “the stare of the snake.”

Based on his fieldwork in the Australian bush, the anthropologist Robert Lawlor came to the very same conclusion. “In spite of this linguistic power to distinguish each aspect and each individual plant, tree, or animal, Aboriginal languages have no words for abstract, generalized categories such as tree, plant, or animal.” (Robert Lawlor, Voices Of The First Day, 1991, emphasis mine.) And why are Snell’s and Lawlor’s discoveries so significant? Because as Snell concludes: “If they had no word for it, it follows that as far as they were concerned it did not exist.” 

In an earlier section I pointed out that a speaker of traditional Tz'utujil Mayan can only say ‘I am’ by naming who or what I belong to or am at-one with. Wouldn’t this suggest that in the consciousness of the First People the individualized sense of ‘I’, that you and I assume is a universal human experience, either didn’t exist or did so in a modified manner?

This possibility alone might help explain the greatest disparity of all between the First People’s at-one psychology and ours. The functional matrix of their sensory-based, concrete thinking wasn’t the individual, but the community (i.e., com [with] + unity [oneness]). In other words: think ‘hive mind’, but in its highest possibility rather than the negative ‘group think’ connotation we individualistic Westerners commonly associate with the term. Fact is, the personally constructed, carefully cultivated, private point-of-view, which is the psychological cornerstone of our modern experience of individuality, didn’t even begin to emerge until the latter half of the 1st millennium BCE.

Clearly the First People were unique beings with singular capabilities and talents. However their identities weren’t based on these distinguishing qualities, but on family, clan, and totemic relationships. Once again: it’s likely that such a communal psychology is a legacy of their lingering proximity to the Animal At-one-ment. Orcas, for instance, who live in extended family groupings, appear to display a sense of ‘self’ that’s diffused throughout the entire family.

The corollary to this is that the First People were neither self-aware, nor self-conscious, in the way those terms are understood today. According to Snell, the Homeric Greeks neither experienced their own bodies as integrated units, nor themselves as the source of their own decisions. Instead they attributed all acts of volition to the agency of gods and spirits. Similarly, in a personal communication, Michael Michailidis wrote…

“The ancient understanding of nature reveals a consciousness that did not presuppose objective space and time. For the ancient Greeks, things did not move through a uniform grid that we understand as objective space but rather came in and out of existence like flickering lights, as potencies where realized into actualities and faded back into potencies.”

I find his characterization of ancient Greek consciousness of special interest because it’s almost exactly the way the linguist Benjamin Whorf describes the Native American Hopi world-view. So taking all that I’ve presented in this section into consideration, it seems to me that we’re forced to come to three basic conclusions…

First: that the term ‘at-one-ment’, when used to describe the First People’s manner of being human-in-the-world, means exactly what it says.

Second: if people today can think more generally and abstractly about a world the First People only thought about concretely, then in the time between them and us the meaning of the word ‘think’ has significantly changed. And if what it means ‘to think’ has changed, then so too has the meaning of the term ‘consciousness’.

And third: if the meaning of consciousness has changed dramatically in the past, what’s to stop it from happening again in the future? What if it’s already happening right now, in our 21st-century lives?

THE BEAR MOTHER

Even though we couldn’t ask for a better characterization of the At-one-ment, Praetextatus’ claim that the Eleusinian Mysteria “hold the whole human race together” may seem a bit over the top. This, after all, isn’t exactly a modest claim! But remember: it’s coming from a high-ranking initiate of Eleusis, not some casual observer. So what exactly is Praetextatus trying to tell the sitting Emperor of Rome? 

He could be alluding to the fact that people from all across the Roman Empire travel to Eleusis each September to take part in the Greater Mysteries, the culminating event of the Greek ceremonial year. He could also be talking about the archetypal experience of death and rebirth, symbolized by Persephone’s cyclical descent to the Land of the Dead and ascent to the Land of the Living. This mythic backdrop unites the inner circle of initiates and the outer circle of public celebrants in one sacred, mutually beneficial rite-of-passage.

But he might also be hinting at the deep personal healing, and renewed social cohesion, enabled by the At-one-ment-bolstering kykeon — the famed potion imbibed by both initiates and celebrants on the final day of the rite.

Based on a formula found in The Homeric Hymn To Demeter (7th century BCE), the kykeon was an herbal concoction consisting of pennyroyal brewed with a generous portion of fermented barley water. Pennyroyal is considered dangerous by Western standards; but it seems that participants in the Mysteria had a different experience. Revealing details of the rite was punishable by death; so the Hymn’s formula has to be at best incomplete. What many insiders were able to say, and not pay with their lives, was that the culminating night rocked their souls. It may well have been an herbal brew; but it seems unavoidable to assume that one of its main ingredients had to have been a powerful psychedelic. 

This possibility was first suggested in the 1950’s by the chemist Albert Hofmann, the synthesizer of LSD. Then years later Hofmann, the mycologist Gordon Wasson, and the Greek scholar Carl A. P. Ruck further developed the idea in The Road To Eleusis (2008). One strong possibility was a psycho-active ergot that grows on barely — one of Demeter’s two gifts to the ancient Greeks, and their staple grain.

One thing psychedelics do quite well is dissolve boundaries — not only the ones that separate humans one from another, but also the ontological boundary between humans and the Goddess. All-become-one then through the agency of the brew as the rite draws to its conclusion on a night that the historian of religion Walter F. Otto once compared to “the terrible festival of the deathbed.” A night when the graves of the dead were said to open, and the spirits of the ancestors issued forth to join with the living in remembering their at-one-ment with each other, The Mother, and The Maiden.           

Demeter’s association with Greece’s staple grain, and her motherly concern for the fruitful living Earth, earned her the name: ‘Barley Mother’. However as Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders point out, the words 'barley' and 'bear' share a common etymology. So Demeter's name could also be understood to mean: 'Bear Mother', or better still: 'Grain of the Bear Mother'. 

“The bear is thus also identified with spiritual well-being and with physical health and healing. Not only is it the animal of beginnings, but also of re-beginnings — of recovery from spiritual malaise and physical illness and, metaphorically, revival from death.” (Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature, 1992.)

Demeter’s totemic at-one-ment with the bear is not only aligned with the Eleusinian rite’s core theme of death and rebirth, it also hints at the Mother’s esoteric role as patroness of Greece's most primordial spiritual lineage. Because as Shepard and Sanders go on to note: "The occupation to which the bear becomes an appendage is shamanism.”

O HOLY NIGHT

Now let’s imagine this… 

You and I are part of a large animated crowd gathering in the center of Athens Greece. It’s a clear, warm September morning in 803 BCE. Looking around, we can see that the city itself still appears quite youthful. The Literacy Revolution, in the form of the phonetic alphabet, has only just arrived, brought to the city’s bustling seaport by Phoenician traders. A successful coalition of four tribes is in control of the city. They’re intent on uniting the whole surrounding region into one single polity, including the agricultural community of Eleusis, 22 km to our west. 

Eleusis, as you know, is important to Athenians because it houses a shrine dedicated to the Bear Mother, Demeter. All across the northern hemisphere, the bear’s annual cycle of hibernation has won this impressive animal a place in shamanist culture as medicine-keeper of the birth/death cycle. The Celts, for instance, venerated Dea Artio: the Bear Goddess, who was specifically associated with childbirth, as our phrase ‘to bear children’ continues to give testimony. So it should be no surprise to be reminded that the name Eleusis literally means: ‘place of birth’. 

The milling crowd suddenly begins to move, stretching itself into one long line heading west. This procession follows a winding road west along the sea. As we cross a bridge spanning a small river, each of us is offered a cup containing a strong-smelling potion. The bridge, we’re told, is a portal to the Spirit-world; and imbibing the potion will facilitate our entry.

All morning we walk, heartened and emotional. Our senses are noticeably more acute, and the social bonding of the crowd more accentuated. We all have become part of something larger; and I’m certain that Demeter and Persephone are here and walking with us. The early Greeks, who pioneered this impressive rite, understood that the stresses of daily life can gradually erode the at-one-ment experience. That’s why they created this ritualized experience to periodically renew it.

By midday we’re snaking our way up and across a mountain pass. On the far side, a huge plain spreads out below us. Vast fields of barley shine in the early autumn sun, and ripple in the wind. As we descend into this undulating golden sea, our destination comes into view in the distance, sitting right in the middle of all this incredible beauty. 

As evening comes on, the sun sets before us. In response the procession lights thousands of torches, and in so doing become an earthly reflection of the Milky Way. Seeing all this evokes powerful emotions. Tears are streaming down everyone’s cheeks. Finally we arrive at our destination, still bathing in the kykeon’s warm glow, all at-one, and lit up like the stars.  

The crowd fills and then spills beyond the large open space around the Telesterion, the temple of the Great Mother, Demeter. Bonfires are lit and music fills the cool evening air as people begin to sing and dance their way through this longest and holiest of nights, when the spirits of the ancestors are believed to return to pay their respects to the Goddess and her beloved daughter. 

We know that it’s time for the Mother’s beloved daughter Persephone, who has passed the summer with us in the Land of the Living, to go back to her husband in the Land of the Dead. Her sorrow at leaving is ours as well — and even more so for the modest group of initiates, apprentices to and would-be servants of the rite, who we now see being led through the cheering crowd. 

This is the tenth night of their fast, and the culmination of one full year of rigorous preparation. Tonight, the kykeon will help them experience what you and I may only come to know at the moment of our death – the final at-one-ment — to which the Mysteria are so often compared. 

The Greeks call these ‘walking dead’: mystai — from whence comes our word ‘mystic’. Both terms derive from the verb myesis, meaning: 'to close one’s eyes'. That’s why the mystai are traditionallly portrayed In frescoes with their heads draped in scarves. On this culminating night, at the apex of the ritual, and if the goddesses and gods are willing, they will 'behold the vision (epopteia), and in so doing become ‘vision-holders’ (epoptes). 

Revealing anything about what actually transpires behind the doors of the Telesterion on this very special night is punishable by death. That’s why we today know almost nothing about either the details of the rite or the visionary experience of the epoptes. So you and I will have to be content with the poet Pindar’s discreetly pregnant hint: "Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginning." (Quoted in Karl Kerenyi & Ralph Manheim, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, 1991)

“SUPPOSING TRUTH IS A WOMAN — WHAT THEN?”

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900 CE) was well ahead of his time when he posed this enigmatic question to his 19th century peers, at a time when the long-established patriarchy was still deeply in control of Western culture. It’s even more apropos to our situation today, with the patriarchy floundering and on its last legs; and in a way it certainly would have been relevant to the pre-classical Greeks.

The First Greeks were the result of a confluence of two diverse genetic and cultural streams. The first consisted of peaceful indigenous agriculturalists who revered the Goddess. The second of bellicose equestrian invaders from the Caucasus who worshiped a sky-god. As opposite as these streams were, they did have one thing in common. Both were structurally 'shamanist', meaning: organized around the principles and practices of shamanism.

Shamanism is a global phenomenon. The anthropologist Michael Winkelman believes that this is less a consequence of cultural diffusion, and more the result of the practice being: “a universal biological adaptation that enhances the evolutionary fitness of the species.” We tend to remember the patriarchal Greeks as paragons of rationality. What we don’t remember, because it’s not part of the patriarchal model of Greek history, is that the matriarchs who preceded the patriarchal rationalists were evolutionarily-fit shamanists. (Michael Winkelman, Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Healing and Consciousness, 2000)

With roots deep in both the practice of shamanism and the Neolithic Revolution, the pre-classical Greeks were naturally attentive to the annual vegetation cycle. As I pointed out at the beginning, they made sense of the workings of this life-sustaining cycle with the story of The Maiden & The Mother.

Cycles are circles in time. Each has two phases: waxing (increase) and waning (decrease). Sometimes both are manifest in one single process, such as in the life-cycle of a plant. And sometimes cycles entangle the two polarities in a perpetually revolving dance, for example: day and night, summer and winter, or matriarchy and patriarchy. And when a major cycle — like the matriarchal one within which the story of Demeter and Persephone first took shape — is coming to an end, mightn’t one expect the collective psyche of a shamanist culture to engender a common dream to compensate those affected, and help them make the necessary adjustments so as to continue to be evolutionarily fit?

In the mid-1920’s a grave was discovered at an archaeological site in the Czech Republic named Dolni Vestonice. The burial was estimated to have taken place some 26,000 years ago. Interred paraphernalia identified the deceased as a shaman. What was truly surprising, however, was that the remains were those of a 40 year-old woman. This was truly a game-changer, because it flew in the face of the long-standing patriarchal assumption that shamanism was a male prerogative.

Since then, the now well-established thesis that First Shaman everywhere was a woman has garnered more support. For example: the  archaeologist Christopher Powell — who has done extensive fieldwork at Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico — once told me that when the Maya depicted altered states, it was always the queens who were shown receiving the visions, never the kings. So why then is a male by the name of Melampus — better known as “Black Foot” — credited with being Greece’s First Shaman?

For the same reason that few women in Greek history are even remembered. As we’ve already seen, women in patriarchal Greece were effectively the property of males. Still today, an unconscious patriarchal bias has continued to infect successive generations of Greek scholars — both male and female. Our current cycle of patriarchy first got started around 7000 BCE, but didn’t begin to achieve full dominance until after 3000 BCE. That’s when the matriarchal roots of shamanism were erased, and women in general effectively reduced to chattel.

Research suggests that in Neolithic societies (12,000-4500 BCE), women held a far more equitable status. This was recently re-confirmed by the funerary treatment given a female infant some 10,000 years ago, suggesting that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons. The most profound work to date on the pre-historic matriarchy was done by the controversial archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. In her view, the First People overall were by nature matrifocal, egalitarian, peaceful, and Goddess-aligned.

During the 8th millennium BCE, in the region Gimbutas terms “Old Europe” — which includes modern Greece — the descendants of the First People were living in large dwellings in small artistically-sophisticated towns, sustained by agricultural environs, and interconnected by established trade routes.

By the 3rd millennium BCE, the Goddess Cultures of Old Europe were in rapid decline. By 500 BCE, the remnants of the matriarchal At-one-ment were being pushed to the margins by an unprecedented new form of consciousness strategically co-opted by the patriarchy, and which we’ll explore in detail in Part 2 of this essay.

By 500 CE, the emerging centers of Western political power and commerce were fully committed to the new patriarchal consciousness and its new reality. From then on, humans who had been at-one, instinctual, emotional, poetic, communal, buried in the body, immersed in the senses, unself-conscious, of no-mind, imaginative, spirited, animist, shamanist, ritualistic, and Goddess-aligned were becoming increasingly rare. And then one day — except in the occasional surviving indigenous enclave or marginalized remnant — they were gone.

The women shamans may have been forgotten; but the practices they perfected over thousands of years remained a powerful, even if somewhat hidden, force in the patriarchal takeover of Greek culture. Pythagoras (c. 571-495 BCE), for example, required that his students engage in a disciplined regime of yoga-like practices, inherited from the shamanic tradition, as part of their philosophical training. In The Greeks and the Irrational (2004), E.R. Dodds recounts how a demoralized Plato, angry and bereft at his teacher Socrates’ senseless execution, didn’t turn to his beloved philosophy for healing, but to these same Pythagorean praxes.

When the outcome of any matter was in doubt, Socrates (c.469-399 BCE) was known to recommend another traditional shamanic praxis: divination. Oracles like those at Delphi and Dodona gave broad cultural sanction to expanded states of consciousness pioneered in the camps of indigenous shamans. Temples of healing dedicated to the God Aesclepius — like those at Epidauros and on the Isle of Kos — were popular pilgrimage destinations well into the Hellenistic Period (323 BCE — 31 BCE). Cures were based on information obtained in dream-states, often induced with soporific medicines such as opium. 

The treasured pinnacle of this deep shamanist undercurrent, however, was the Bear Mother gift of the Mysteria. And in the context of shamanist society, the use of ‘entheagenic’ agents (literally: 'becoming the Goddess within') would have been quite natural. However, as essential as such sacraments may have been in facilitating the desired experience, their role was primarily a means to an end. This end, which is the ‘raison d’être’ of all shamanic practice, is a re-unification of any discordant or separative tendencies within the individual and the community. In other words: restoring both to their original, at-one state.

The main ingredient in the Eleusinian kykeon was barley. So whatever else may have been married to this grain to enable the shrine’s transcendental mission, could the Barley Mother — the Bear Mother — possibly have bequeathed humanity a more precious gift than a path and a practice that teaches humans how to live at-one with Her, with nature, and with each other? And now, the worldly fate of this extraordinary gift is about to be decided.

THE CONCEIT OF SCHOLARS

With this broad understanding, we’ve come full circle back to where we started our imaginal exploration of the Eleusinian rite: with the story of Praetextatus and Valentinian, and the epochal turning-point in the history of Western consciousness the rite’s fate so beautifully illustrates…

When last we saw him, Praetextatus was boldly and perhaps somewhat foolishly telling the sitting Emperor of Rome that his decree outlawing Greece’s nocturnal festivals was a really bad idea. As a high ranking initiate of Eleusis, Praetextatus still holds the At-one-ment close. He may not understand the Mysteria as such, but they’re increasingly becoming a time-capsule of sorts, a miniaturized replica of the old consciousness being passed forward in time to an increasingly disinterested Late Antiquity.

As a devout Christian, Valentinian’s decision determining the pagan Mysteria’s fate is purely a matter of political exigency. So it’s to everyone’s surprise — especially Praetextatus’ — when the Emperor decides to heed his trusted advisor’s wise counsel and rescind his controversial decree. As might be expected the Greek people are ecstatic. However, just as Greg Kinear's character in the film Ghost Town barely escapes being hit by an air conditioner falling from the window of a high-rise apartment, only to step off the curb and be killed by a bus, Eleusis' stay of execution is only temporary. 

Just three short decades later, on a moonless night in 396 CE and on the order of the then-emperor Arcadius, an allied force of Christianized Roman troops and pagan Visigoth tribesmen savage the Eleusinian shrine. Greece’s last surviving Goddess-complex, and reduce it to rubble. How could this ‘rape’ not have been the preeminent insult prophesied in the dream of The Maiden & Her Mother? Whether I’m right about this or not, you might think that this is how the story ends; and in one way it is.

But in another it’s not. Because what happens next is exactly what you and I have come all this way back in time to try and understand. If the whims of zealous Christian emperors, and the cruel barbarism of ill-intentioned invaders weren't enough, Eleusis, the last surviving large-scale social institution of the Greek At-one-ment, is fated to suffer a third and final blow. Razed complexes can be rebuilt, and traumatized traditions healed and restored. But what happens when the form of consciousness that has underpinned and sustained the Eleusinian tradition simply fades away?

In the centuries following its violent desecration, the rite becomes a subject of interest for Christian commentators and historians. Problem is: they just can’t wrap their heads around it, because the form of consciousness they’re now in-habiting is too structurally different from the one they’re trying to understand. As a consequence, they make the mistake that Vico was warning his readers about, and that we’re still perpetuating to this day: the presumption that humans past perceived, thought, and emoted exactly as modern humans do. In other words: they unwittingly fall victim to the ‘conceit of scholars’.

Essentially what these post-At-one-ment scholars and commentators are doing is projecting the individualistic form of consciousness their literacy-based educations have conditioned them to embody onto the pre-individualistic Greek past. But all the exacting literate analysis in the world can’t possibly help them comprehend an experience that the at-one Greeks said was ‘arreton’ — ‘beyond the capacity of words to convey’.

In their ignorance, understandable as it may be, they consistently refer to the magical autumn days of Mysteria (plural) with the singular: Mysterion — something the old Greeks themselves never did. They do this because they’re searching for the mystery, the secret. And not finding anything they recognize, they mock and deride the gullibility of their ancestors; and arrogantly conclude that the whole 2000-year Eleusinian tradition has been nothing but an elaborate pagan hoax.

“Of the ear of wheat silently manifested at the climax of the ceremony, or of the so simple words…’Rain, bring fruit,’ the Christian writers say ironically, ‘that is the great and ineffable Eleusinian mystery!’ They outdo themselves listing the unworthy, common objects that are supposed to constitute the mysterion. And thus they prove that for them the pagan arreton has ceased to exist.” (Karl Kerenyi  & Ralph Manheim, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, 1991)

REQUIEM

“When her preparations are complete, she spends one last day gazing on the beauty of her world, drinking in its colors and sounds and fragrances so that she will not forget it during her long stay in the dark. Finally, at dusk, she stands on the edge of the world and weeps as she watches the sun touch the horizon. In her hand she holds a pomegranate, the symbol of her promise to the souls of the dead. The sun drops behind the bulk of the earth, and Persephone lifts a single pomegranate seed to her lips. ” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers”, Parabola, Summer 1996.)

When Eleusis falls in the year 396 CE, the Greek At-one-ment falls with it. An older, more matriarchal, more we-oriented Greece has become just a fading memory; and a new, more patriarchal, more me-oriented social order is rapidly replacing it. In the centuries that follow, this evolutionarily-necessary mutation in the fundamental structure of consciousness that has begun in Greece will slowly spread to the burgeoning urban centers of Old Europe, then further afield, and eventually become instrumental in defining the entire Western world. In Part 2 we’ll investigate exactly how the patriarchy accomplishes this colossal feat. But before we turn that page, and in conclusion to Part 1, we have one last piece of business to attend to.

With her beloved shrine in ruins, Demeter’s sorrowful wanderings in search of her abducted daughter take on a whole new meaning. Because just as much as Persephone, Eleusis too was her beloved child. So from now on, the barren landscapes of winter will be a constant reminder of a world bereft of its Mysteria, no longer able to hold together as Praetextatus so presciently forewarned, and straight on course to the future of intensifying individualism, division, and discord we now find ourselves heir to.

In the end, however, the old at-one form of consciousness will never completely disappear. Instead it will continue to maintain a weak pulse — first in the unacknowledged underground of culturally-suppressed, education-deprived, alphabetically-illiterate Western women; then in the various wings of the Western Esoteric Tradition; and now in the strong post-patriarchal feminine presence in the 21st century psychedelic revival. However the fact that things are changing in the year 396, and have been for some time, is obvious; but why they’re changing remains an enigma. Nonetheless it was the philosopher and priest of Delphi Plutarch (46-119 CE) who gives the unofficial eulogy for the At-one-ment sometime late in the 1st century CE.

In De Defectu Oraculorum, Plutarch tells the story of an unlettered Egyptian named Thamus, a man still very much in the habit of the old consciousness. Thamus, our philosopher claims, was chosen by the spirits to deliver to the world the sad news that the god Pan — the divine custodian of open meadows, untouched forests, and the wild undomesticated Earth — was dead.

Now aside from the occasional superpower, the main thing that distinguishes the Greek gods and goddesses from humans is their immortality. So for centuries classicists, scholars, and Christian commentators will repeatedly ask, and then propose rational answers to, a profoundly irrational question: how is it possible for an immortal like Pan to die? And please note that this is exactly the same kind of literate debate we just saw when the scholars were trying to make sense of the Eleusinian rite in the centuries following its demise.

However, in contrast to conventional historians concerned with actual events, ideas, and personalties, historians of consciousness aren’t constrained by the same parameters. A different concern produces a different question: what if Pan’s death never was an actual event, but another ‘common dream’? Should that be the case, then the conventional line of questioning becomes totally meaningless. So what if instead we were to purposefully treat Pan as a figure in a dream, what might his passing have symbolized?

Well, less than a millennium earlier the majority of Pan’s responsibilities vis à vis the terrestrial landscape had been those of Demeter and Persephone. But in the new patriarchal world, the gods are taking precedence over the goddesses. So without being in any way aware of it, both Plutarch and Pan have become unwitting instruments of the patriarchal coup. And given the uncompromising and exclusionary mindset of the patriarchs, it almost seems as if our twin goddesses of the plant realm have had to disguise themselves as a male philosopher and a male god in order to discharge their caretaker duties, exactly as women in 4th century BCE Athens had to disguise themselves as men if they desired to attend any of Plato’s lectures.

So keeping all this in mind, what if the death of Pan was really a poetic symbol for the demise of the At-one-ment? What if, just like the tale of The Maiden & Her Mother, this little story of Thamus was an alternative history for those with eyes to see? So perhaps we should put ourselves back into their world one last time. That way you can decide for yourself…

Thamus the Egyptian is the pilot of a ship bound for Italy. You, I, and as fate would have it Plutarch’s grammar teacher are among the passengers. Now for you and me the word ‘grammar’ means the technical rules of language. But in Plutarch’s time it was used more broadly to mean the art of letters in general — i.e., the fruits of alphabetic literacy.

This little detail is important because when we move on to Part 2 you’ll see the irony in Plutarch and his teacher — the person directly responsible for his becoming an exemplar of the emerging patriarchal form of consciousness — eulogizing the At-one-ment’. But so as to not leave you hanging, here’s a little hint: we usually don’t expect murderers to rhapsodize their victims. But back to Thamus and his passengers…

It’s a quiet evening, and our ship is drifting on a nearly windless sea near the Isle of Paxi. Suddenly a mysterious voice booms out: “Thamus! When you come opposite Palodes, announce that Great Pan has died.”

Hearing this is an unexpected shock for everyone onboard. After much heated discussion, all agree that if the wind carries us past Palodes, Thamus should remain silent. But if we’re becalmed, then he should do as instructed. Here we are then, a short while later, nearing Palodes; and the sea has grown breathlessly still. So Thamus looks each of us in the eye, perhaps for reassurance; and then with no hesitation at all shouts out: “GREAT PAN IS DEAD!” 

Before he has even finished, however, a thundering chorus of agonized groans arises from the pastoral isle, mingled with interjections of disbelief. This jarring cacophony continues unabated for several minutes; and then, just as suddenly as it all began, it stops. And now each of us in our own way finds themselves feeling strangely alone and helplessly adrift in an eerie, disquieting silence.

.

Summer has passed. The autumn equinox is upon us; and the goddess Persephone — daughter of the Great mother Demeter and the King of all the Gods and Goddesses Zeus — knows that her days in the Land of the Living are once again numbered. It’s closing time. A swelling chorus of pleas that only she can hear has become a persistent reminder of her promise to return to the Lower World. Her responsibilities as Queen of the Dark World are tugging at her, drawing her back in. The fatal pomegranate seed is in her hand; and deep in her heart she knows there’s no turning back.

However far more is at play in this pivotal moment than just the normal autumnal rhythm of plenty turning to privation. A several thousand year cycle of flourishing matriarchy, of which she and her mother Demeter have been the divine patronesses, has also run its course. The old at-one manner of being human in-this-world is in full retreat; and a structurally different, distinctly ‘Western’ form of human consciousness is just now beginning to emerge.

And why is all this happening? Because now it’s patriarchy’s turn…

“The light shifts and ripples. The crash of thunder rips through the world. A screaming wind tears at her hair and stings her eyes. Before her, a chasm appears where the sun had been only moments before, and Persephone cries out in horror even as she leaps into the void. For a moment that seems like eternity she forgets who she is, where she is, and why. Then darkness…silence…warmth. The spirits of the dead surround her. They speak without voices. They sing without sound. They cry and laugh as she presents her gifts from the realm of the living. And they welcome her with gifts of their own.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

THE SECOND GREAT MUTATION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

If ever you were to visit the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles southwest of Britain’s Cornish peninsula, you just might find yourself walking an ancient dirt road that unexpectedly leads you straight into the shallow blue waters of the North Atlantic Drift. “Strange,” you think as you turn to retrace your steps. But what if instead you were to hire a boat, and follow the trajectory of this poor drowned road? Soon you would arrive at the shore of another island; and there you would see your little road re-emerging from the sea as if this were a perfectly natural thing for a road to do.

Then what if curiosity were to get the better of you; and you were to charter a helicopter to get an eagle’s-eye perspective on the entire archipelago? From such a high, wide vantage point it’s easy to identify the road you were walking, and to see it disappearing and reappearing. Only now you see that it does this more than once, while at the same time intersecting other roads that are doing exactly the same. The result is a spider-web of roadways knitting together some 55 of these seemingly-disconnected and separate isles.

Then suddenly you get it. The Scillies are really just the leftovers, hilltops of what was once a single contiguous land mass that at some point in its long history of human habitation (ca. 450 CE, to be exact) surrendered its essential oneness to the rising waters of a once-friendly sea.

A few days later you’re sitting in the departure lounge of a London airport, watching passengers and crew members come and go. You cannot help but notice how totally absorbed most are in their private little worlds of earbud and cell phone. It strikes you how easy it is for us in the emerging global techno-culture to mistake device-mediated connectivity for true relationship. “Humans are just like the Scillies now,” you think to yourself. “Fundamentally interconnected and profoundly at-one; but to all appearances and behaviors not.”

Saddened by this realization, and with a haunting image of the archipelago’s intrinsic unity still etched in your memory, you wonder: “Has it always been like this? Is it simply human nature to be so insular? Or is there something else going on here — something we don’t really understand? And what about that old biblical account of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden and all those other old, old stories that seem to come from a time when humans were as fundamentally networked with each other and with the natural world as the pre-diluvian Scillies?”

Now I fully realize that my musings here may strike you as pure fantasy. But what if due to some decisive change, equivalent in its consequences to a sudden sea-level rise, humankind’s deeply rooted embrace of common identity was totally effaced? The At-one-ment, that had begun with the 1st Great Mutation of consciousness — the one that made us fully human — gradually and imperceptibly faded away, leaving the human experiment stranded on today’s global archipelago of 8+ billion individual ‘isles’ of awareness and identity.

And what exactly was this 2nd Great Mutation? It was the unanticipated emergence of our current form of consciousness: the ‘Western’ form, or subject/object split. The split is essentially a perceptual and cognitive divide between an experiencing ‘subjective’ awareness (you), and an experienced ‘objective’ reality (everyone and everything that’s not you). If you’ve been educated in the Western manner, as most of us today have, then I can guarantee that you’ve been taught to experience yourself and the world in this inherently polarizing manner. And wouldn’t it seem quite natural that such a polarizing paradigm of consciousness would eventually produce increasingly polarized societies, and ultimately a deeply polarized world?

Permaculture teaches that nature’s most interesting and fruitful interactions happen on the edges where different environments meet. Where, for example, sea encounters land; or a plain curls up against a rise of mountains. So now let’s you and I see if we can identify and visit a cultural analogue — some societal ’edge’ where the waning psychology of the At-one-ment and the waxing psychology of the split are meeting head-on in a manner that reveals the agent responsible for such an epochal shift. Somewhere perhaps on a remote periphery of the expanding Greek Empire…

CROWNED WITH THE STARS

It’s 331 BCE, 727 years before the patriarchal rape of Eleusis. In Part 1 of this essay, you and I imagined we were witnesses to this pivotal cultural violation and the demise of the At-one-ment it portended. Now in Part 2 we’ve come to a humble little seaport on the southern shore of the Mediterranean to search for the cause of such a tectonic change: the emergence and dissemination of the subject/object split.

However our first order of business here is the infamous Alexander the Great. As you and I watch, this never-modest emperor, who has only recently added Egypt to his burgeoning Greek Empire, is officially re-christening this ancient port of Rhakotis ‘Alexandria’ in his own honor. Then he orders his military commander Cleomenes to begin construction of the paramount center of culture and learning he envisions the port becoming. Finally, in a moment of supreme triumph, he leads his army north, never to return until 323 BCE when his then-regent Ptolemy I will take possession of the 32 year-old’s lifeless corpse and lay it to final rest in this his namesake city.

It takes less than two centuries for Alexander’s dream to become reality. In the words of the historian M. M. Mangasarian: “Under the Ptolemies, a line of Greek kings, Alexandria soon sprang into eminence, and accumulating culture and wealth, became the most powerful metropolis of the Orient.” The animating soul of this cultural marvel is an educational institution known as the Mouseion: the ‘Temple of the Muses’. And the beating heart of the Mouseion is the magnificent library this city will someday become best known for. A major pilgrimage terminus for scholars and students from every corner of the civilized world, the Mouseion is also the destination of choice for a whole new generation of young Egyptian astrologers.

Awareness of a connection between the movements of celestial phenomena and terrestrial experience is a legacy of the old at-one form of consciousness. I’m going to dub this ‘astrological awareness’ because it’s fundamentally different from modern astrology, which is essentially a hybrid of the original awareness processed through the patterns of perception and cognition of the subject/object split. In other words: experiential astrological awareness is to the At-one-ment as modern astrology — what we’ll call: the ‘astrology of the book’ — is to the subject/object split.

The 17th-century British poet Thomas Traherne captured the spirit of this particular form of awareness quite exquisitely when he wrote: “You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.” The roots of such an awareness reach very deep into the human past. A bas-relief of a goddess figure from the Upper Paleolithic holding a simple lunar calendar — the Venus of Laussel — suggests that humans have been cultivating this sensibility for possibly as long as 25,000 years. If a single human generation spans some 25 years, then dividing 25,000 years by 25 means that the tradition our young Egyptians are heir to has been being handed down for somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand generations.

This would make its origins roughly contemporaneous with those of shamanism; and suggests that the divinatory practices stemming from astrological awareness were most likely the result of a co-evolutionary symbiosis with shamanic awareness. Shamans garner knowledge through a corporeal participation in rather than an intellectual observation of. In other words: the original at-one awareness was embodied, shamanist, animal and animist, of no-mind, imaginative, ritualized, and communally-expressed rather than intellectual and individually-practiced. 

Here then is a distilled formula for the old-consciousness tradition our Egyptian student astrologers have been deeply entrained by when they knock on the Mouseion’s imposing door: star-mapping wonder + shamanist at-one-ment = astrological awareness.

So as we proceed now with our search for the root cause of the subject/object split, please keep in mind this distinction between traditional astrological awareness and present-day astrology. Because the story of how the former morphs into the latter is exactly the kind of cultural edge we were hoping to find, an ‘edge’ where an old and a new form of consciousness are pushing up against each other like buckling tectonic plates.

METAMORPHOSIS

In actuality it’s more like 75% astrological awareness, plus 25% Babylonian mathematics and astrological lore made available to them by Egypt’s involuntary inclusion in the Persian Empire, that our students are bringing with them. Nonetheless, once they’ve completed their prestigious Greek-style educations and are actually plying their time-honored trade, something quite unexpected occurs. 

After 1,000 generations of contiguous development, during which the Egyptian practice of astrology remained qualitatively constant, over the course of as little as a dozen generations it undergoes an unprecedented shift. The revolutionaries responsible for this take the empirical, highly-ritualized practice their elders bequeathed them, and turn it into something quite un-Egyptian but unmistakably Greek. The result is the highly-systematized, rationally-ordered cosmology we know today as ‘Hellenistic’ astrology — the prototype for all ensuing systems of Western astrological practice right up to the present day.

Whether they realize this impressive feat entirely on their own, or learn their new practice from Greek or Greek-trained astrologers as the scholar Robert Schmidt believed they did, isn’t a question you and I need answered. What we want to know is: why would such a change ever happen? Was it simply that the Greeks had a better idea? 

Possibly; but as we saw in Part 1, a recalcitrant conservatism was the shadow side of the At-one-ment; and a tradition that’s thousands of years old can sometimes be quite unresponsive to better ideas. The Arab Neoplatonist Iamblichus (245-325 CE) advances a more plausible explanation in his commentary On The Mysteries. "The men who translated the Egyptian wisdom into Greek,” he writes, “were all trained in Athenian philosophy.” 

Now Athenian philosophy was one of the inaugural inventions of the subject/object split, NOT the agent responsible for it. So even if Schmidt is correct that the actual founder of Western astrology was a student of Plato and an older contemporary of Aristotle named Eudoxus of Cnidus (c.390-c.337 BCE), doesn’t it seem a bit too coincidental that philosophy too had made its debut in just as sudden and unprecedented a manner only three centuries prior? And that it too established itself as a viable institution through the efforts of just a few generations? 

Bottom line: if philosophy wasn’t the progenitor of the split, but it’s debut achievement, then it cannot have been the agent that transformed the tradition of astrological awareness into Western astrology. Something we have yet to identify must have been responsible for the invention of both Western philosophy and Western astrology.

So with all this in mind, let’s return now to Alexandria, but at a slightly later date: the beginning of the 1st century BCE. We’re here to see what else is in play in the education being offered at the Mouseion that might help us identify the true cause of the subject/object split. And if it wasn’t philosophy itself then, to the best of my knowledge, there’s only one other significant factor that Greek philosophy, Greek natural philosophy (i.e., science), and Hellenistic astrology all share in common.

Here’s a little teaser. When Alexander leads his patriarchal occupation force into Egypt unopposed, the most consequential weapon in his imperial arsenal isn’t his state-of-the-art fleet of war chariots. 

HOW WORDS TURN INTO WORLDS

In order to read and understand the Athenian philosophers, our Egyptian students must first become fluent in the Greek language. So Hellenistic Koine, as it’s referred to at the time, is the one common factor shared by Greek philosophy, Greek natural philosophy (science), and Greek astrology. Could Koine then be the causal agent we’re seeking that’s responsible for fostering the split?

It may seem self-evident that perception and thought are one thing, and that the language we use to articulate and communicate both is something else entirely. Philosophers of language call this the ‘Picture Theory’ of language; and it’s been around now since at least the 4th century CE and the writings of Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine). If the Picture Theory is correct, and language is simply a re-presentational vehicle, then becoming fluent in Koine should be having little or no effect on our students’ astrological perceptions. And yet it seems that it is. 

Take the zodiac, for example — that band of constellations encircling the Earth that serves as a calibrated backdrop for the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets. In traditional Egyptian astrology, the signs of the zodiac have a very organic, phase-like relationship — similar to the way the changing seasons of the year blend seamlessly one into another. However our Mouseion graduates are conceptualizing the twelve signs in a more discontinuous, disjointed manner as if they were say individual beads on a necklace. So could Koine be playing some role in precipitating this change?

On this very question, 21st-century linguistics is definitely a house divided. The dominant paradigm today is called Linguistic Universalism, which in tandem with Usage-Based theories comprises the modern Science of Linguistics. Both are excellent examples of what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once termed: “the craving for generality.” In other words: both approaches are primarily interested in what language acquisition and usage have in common across all cultures. 

In the Universalist view, our brains have a genetically-determined capacity for language. Specific tongues may differ structurally and semantically; but such differences have a minimal effect on the way a person perceives and thinks. Sounds like a modern redux of the Picture Theory to me. So once again, if this characterization of language is correct, then Hellenistic Koine couldn’t possibly be a determining factor in creating a new understanding of astrology, much less be the root progenitor of a whole new form of human consciousness.

The opposing view is known as Linguistic Relativism. In sharp contrast to the generalized Science of Linguistics, Relativists are primarily interested in what makes each language, or family of languages, unique. In their view, our formal language definitely leaves an identifiable set of ‘fingerprints’ on our processes of perception and cognition. Vocabulary plays a role in this; but the factor mainly responsible is the language’s grammar or syntax — from the Latin syntaxis, meaning: ‘an arrangement’. So think of vocabulary as the players in a game we’ll call ’describing the world’, and grammar — how a language assembles its vocabulary into meaningful patterns — as the rules of that game.

Perception and cognition are the functional ‘spear-bearers’ of human consciousness. So if the syntax of a language does filter its speakers’ perception and structures their cognition, then it’s also helping to construct the architecture of their consciousness by encouraging the members of that community to share a common ‘world-view’. A Relativist, for instance, might argue that we in the US call the first 8 years of a child’s formal schooling ‘grammar school’ because this is when learning the rules of Americanized English initiates (or indoctrinates, depending on your point-of-view) the child into the common world-view of the American people.

Relativists believe that a language’s syntax accomplishes this, first: by lending its structural properties to the way a speaker unconsciously perceives and organizes the information that comprises her or his world. As another philosopher with a Relativist take on language, Martin Heidegger, once put it: "If we go to a spring, or if we go through a forest, we already go through the word spring, through the word forest, and this occurs even if we do not pronounce these words and do not think from a linguistic viewpoint.”

And second: by lending the same structural properties to the speaker’s cognition, where they effectively become the logic of the speaker’s thinking. Taken together they result in a subtle, but deeply abiding, entrainment process that takes place far below the threshold of the speaker’s conscious awareness. “A French politician once wrote that it is a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)

Despite a century of persistent Universalist attack, Relativism refuses to go away. In fact it’s currently undergoing a significant revival. Support is coming mainly from three overlapping groups. First are indigenous linguists who speak and study languages outside the mainstream Indo-European family. Second are cultural anthropologists who accept that the capacity for language is inherent, but argue that language itself is a man-made construct. And third are adherents of a relatively new branch of science called: Psycholinguistics. Research in this area done by Susan Ervin-Tripp, for example, found that bilinguals experience different mindsets when they move between languages, to the degree that they feel like different people when speaking one or the other.

Relativist or Universalist, the origins of language remain obscure. Current estimates are that it has been developing for a minimum of 100,000, and possibly closer to 500,000, years. In addition, some neuroscientists are now maintaining that language learning doesn’t take place in dedicated brain systems as most linguists still assume, but in multiple-purpose systems. For example: when we learn to read and write we preempt and transform certain visual structures of the brain because our genomes don't contain any instructions for reading or writing-specific brain circuits.

These same neuroscientists also believe that some of these multi-purpose systems may have even pre-existed humans. This is important for Relativists because it opens the way for a wider, more inclusive understanding of language — one that incorporates, but isn’t limited to, human expression and the structured use of lingusitic symbols. In other words: any means of codifying and transmitting experience — sound, text, gesture, ritual, art, movement, etc. — can be, by this definition, linguistic; and any creature, human or otherwise, that’s attempting to share experience in any of these ways is doing so linguistically.

Even though languages are going extinct almost as fast as plants and animals, as of 2003 there were still 6809 distinct tongues in the global language pool. Each of these tongues is a member of a linguistic ‘family’; and depending on how one keeps count, we currently have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 different families. What constitutes a family is that all its members have evolved from a common parent (or ‘proto’) language. Because of this common evolutionary source, family members display a formal resemblance because they share a common structural framework. Greek is a member of the Indo-European Family; and Egyptian belongs to the Afro-Asiatic Family.

So to sum up: the best analogy I have for our situation as profoundly linguistic creatures is that each and every one of the world’s languages is like the lens in a pair of eye glasses. By definition, a lens is a piece of glass or other transparent material with curved sides that’s used for concentrating or dispersing light rays. When you’re born into a particular culture, your culture ineluctably gifts you a unique pair of perceptual and cognitive ‘eye glasses’ by gently but relentlessly exposing you to the unique patterns of the language you swim in from day one.

So let’s do a quick little experiment with two different linguistic lenses, and see for ourselves if the syntax of Egyptian, or that of Greek, could possibly be predisposing its speakers to develop a world-view that might be compatible with the polarizing psychology of the subject/object split.

THE WORLD THROUGH THE LENS OF EGYPTIAN 

Word order is of paramount importance in the Afro-Asiatic Family of languages —which includes Egyptian. The syntax of this 4700 year-old language mandates what linguists call a verb-subject-object (VSO) structural arrangement. Placing the verb in first position indicates that the action is being emphasized, rather than the doer of the action (the subject). The juxtaposition of subject and object encourages an egalitarian, reciprocal relationship between the two. 

This is very different from a language like English (Indo-European Family) which mandates a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. Giving the subject first position denotes that the doer of the action is the primary element in the equation; and that there’s no reciprocity between subject and object. The ‘doer’ is purposefully directing energy towards someone or something. Thus in English, a sentence such as ”The man salutes the sun,” would in Egyptian be: “Saluting man/sun.” Here the salutation is being emphasized; and both man and sun are understood to be in a non-hierarchical, two-way energy exchange — as one might expect in an at-one culture.

Because the VSO arrangement prioritizes the action, the Egyptologist Rene Schwaller de Lubicz chose the word ‘functional’ — which he defines as “action in itself” — to characterize the nature of traditional Egyptian language usage. Doesn’t this in its own way echo Vico’s insistence, discussed in Part 1, that the First People were “passionate poets” rather than “wise philosophers?” In Nature Word, Schwaller de Lubicz tries to give his readers a taste of functional consciousness. “Be restless with the dog that barks in the night,” he writes. “Labor with the parsimonious ant; gather honey with the bee; expand in space with the ripening fruit.” 

If an emphasis on action and mutual reciprocity is built into the architecture of the Egyptian language, then we would expect to see it’s structural properties being mirrored in the Egyptian world-view — and we most definitely do. So when referring to the relationship between the human realm and the Divine, for example, traditional Egyptians treated each as horizontally equal to and inter-dependent with the other, rather than hierarchically-ranked. 

What does present a problem though to anyone trying to understand the traditional Egyptian world-view is that speakers of the original language no longer exist. But we’re fortunate that other languages born of the At-one-ment still are being spoken, and that these languages can definitely give us insight into traditional Egyptian. For example: the Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich describes her ancestral Native American tongue — Ojibwemowin (Algonquian family) — in a manner evocative of traditional Egyptian. Like Egyptian, the Ojibwe language is verb-dominant. Verbs make up a full two-thirds of its vocabulary; and each verb can have as many as 6,000 distinct forms. Little surprise then that Ojibwe, in Erdrich’s own choice of words, is: “all action.”

Verb-dominant languages are process-oriented renderings; and as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously observed: “The process is the reality.” Thus the dynamic, action-oriented quality of a verb-dominant language — whether it be by word-order or percentage — can also help explain why the First People, including the Egyptians, made sense of their world through story-telling and myth. You and I have a tendency to consider objectively-biased modes of thought, such as philosophy and science, superior to subjective modes. But in the end, isn’t a story just a different way of organizing one’s experience? What if, for some reason, the ‘different’ way is better?

“In Blackfoot (Algonquian family)...what we refer to as ‘dog’ is probably the word eemidaugh. And eemidaugh is simply trying to express some kind of an awareness, some kind of a being on the move. In other words, that dog could change. It’s always, forever, changing. So there is no finality about it. There’s always the door left open that it could be something else. Consequently, the notion of change, transformation, is part of the everyday thinking process: things will change, things will transform.” (Leroy Little Bear, quoted in Proceedings of the Year 1999: The Language of Spirituality Conference, Albuquerque NM, brackets mine.)

One very characteristic feature common to all languages rooted in the pre-historic At-one-ment — including Egyptian, Ojibwe, and Blackfoot — and that today’s languages completely lack, is that the act of speaking is treated as a spiritual practice. Each Ojibwe word, for instance, has its own inherent spirit; and learners are expected to honor and engage these spirits with gifts of tobacco and food as an integral part of mastering the language…

“When people learn the language, they’re on a path. They don’t know it at first, but the more of the language they learn, the more of the Ojibwe world-view they take in, and the more they begin to treat the world with the respect and kindness of the old Ojibwe. Learning the language is a way of becoming Ojibwe. It sneaks up on you though.” (“Dream Catcher: Questions and Answers with Louise Erdrich”, Lion’s Roar (formerly Shambala), Nov 2008.)

It’s likely that speaking was a spiritual practice for the at-one, First People of Egypt as well. Based on what I’ve presented here, I think it safe to conclude that there’s no evidence whatsoever of a subject/object split in the world-view of Afro-Asiatic Egyptian.

THE WORLD THROUGH THE LENS OF GREEK

“The gifts of the dead are those of knowledge and mystery and paradox. In this world of darkness, their eyes see patterns of incredible beauty, yet the patterns have neither color nor shape. Their ears hear rich, complex music, yet the music has neither pitch nor duration. Here, every thought, every perception has endless variations. Persephone is fascinated, and she begins to remember….” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

Unlike traditional Egyptian, Hellenistic Koine (Indo-European family) has no fixed word order. So we’ll have to consider other grammatical elements if we want to catch a glimpse of its particular world-view. In most Indo-European languages, for instance, the definite article is very important. Placing ‘a’, ‘an’, or ‘the’ before an adjective or verb transforms it into a noun. For example: ‘a’ + ‘to hunt’ = ‘a hunter’. Linguists call this resultant noun: a substantive. 

Substantives describe specific pulses of information, and help make it possible to perceptually disentangle them from the seamless streaming of experience. Repetitive use of a substantive encourages the perception that this transient pulse is a stable, independent entity (i.e., ‘a thing’). This stabilizing tendency has been a constant source of consternation for philosophers of language. As Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment; we try to find a substance for a substantive.”

So if the definite article and substantives have played a significant role in crafting the Greek world-view, we would expect to see that reflected in the Greek psyche and in different aspects of Greek culture; and once again, we do. For example: the philologist Bruno Snell makes the point that substantives encourage the sense of clearly-defined, enduring presence that was of great importance to the Greek philosophers; and then definitively states that: "We could scarcely imagine the existence of Greek philosophy if there had been no definite article.”

Another apropos feature is that Koine verbs have a grammatical attribute called ‘aspect’, which allows a speaker to classify the developmental phases of an action very precisely. The ‘perfect’ aspect is used for actions that are perfected or complete (i.e., bounded). The ‘aorist’ denotes an action that is one, or in some manner a unity (once again, though in a slightly different way, bounded). Such stasis-inducing precision, however, has existential consequences. As Snell points out, the Greek natural philosophers (i.e., prototype scientists) were neither able to formulate a clear concept of motion, nor propose any viable laws of motion.

In a different arena, August C. Mahr comments on the “curious static air” of the Greek theatre — the performance being more like a portrait than say a film. The drama unfolds in this specific place at this precise time. According to Mahr, the Greek theatre evolved from the Mysteries of Dionysus, whose indispensable prerequisite was yet again: “the bounded locale.” And in a lecture some years ago, Greek scholar Robert Schmidt described Koine as having a “discreet, quantum-like quality” — yet another variation of bounded; and exactly the quality we saw illustrated by our Koine-fluent astrologers’ bead-like segmenting of the more continuum-like Egyptian zodiac.

The question that begs to be asked here, however, is: are all the above features of Koine enough proof to claim that the syntax of the Indo-European family of languages, of which Koine is a member, was the agent that engendered the subject/object split?  Whereas ancient Egyptian clearly had no tendency whatsoever to foster the split, it seems that Koine does. But a ‘tendency’ isn’t necessarily a ‘cause’.

If we consider the evolution of word order in the developmental history of Greek syntax, there is evidence of gradual movement away from total freedom, and towards an increasingly subject/verb/object (SVO) arrangement in a very specific part of its syntax: the construction of clauses (a group of words that function as part of a sentence, but include their own subject and verb). Why would this ever happen?

Add to all this the fact that a bias towards an SVO word order in total sentence structure has increasingly become a feature of both modern Greek and other members of the Indo-European family. In Old English (9th and 10th centuries CE), for example, word order was completely free. But in Modern English, an SVO order is a structural mandate. All these trends suggest to me that something besides grammar is driving both the evolution of the Greek and English languages and the emergence of the subject/object split.

So was Koine then the root cause of the split? Probably not. However once the split was in play, its objectifying psychology, substantiating tendency, and the psychology split would have been a marriage made in heaven. So if neither Greek philosophy nor the Greek language were the agents responsible for engendering the subject/object split, what the hell was?

A LITTLE BIT OF BACKSTORY

My first inkling that there was something important missing in the human story that I was hearing, both within my formal schooling and without, came when I was a 22-year old undergraduate. I was sitting in a very tedious class on the ‘Pre-Socratic’ philosophers, watching my instructor twist himself into knots trying to make rational sense of their wildly irrational ideas. I had not yet come to understand that these long-forgotten luminaries were straddling two disparate worlds. They clearly had one foot solidly planted in the rapidly emerging new world of reasoned philosophy; but the other was still deep in the old world of indigenous Greek shamanism.

For my classmates, it was simply a boring lecture. But for me it was my inaugural lesson in the history of consciousness. It afforded me my first glimpse of an earlier kind of human — one who appeared to be experiencing themselves and what it meant to be human in-the-world much differently than I. I certainly didn’t understand it at the time, but is also was a perfect example of the incongruences and misunderstandings that were a direct consequence of the historical shift from the At-one-ment to the subject/object split.

Still, with my limited understanding, it began to dawn on me that the missing piece of the human story was consciousness. I thought it strange that everything else in the phenomenal world had a developmental history. And yet on the rare occasion that my teachers even mentioned consciousness, they appeared to presume that the form of consciousness they and their students were in-habiting was the only element in the equation that remained qualitatively constant. What was important to them was the perceptual and cognitive content of consciousness, not its functional form.

Eventually I came to realize that the question I was really asking was: is the structural configuration of human consciousness essentially hard-wired; or can it and has it changed over time — and if it has, why? It occurred to me that if an earlier form had once existed, then I should be able to find some surviving remnant of it, and through that get a least a little ‘taste’ of the earlier form. At the time I was reading Carl Jung’s Collected Works; and I was struck by the fact that he kept referring to astrology in a favorable way. I knew that astrology had been around a lot longer than philosophy. So I decided to find out if this ancient ‘language of the stars’ might possibly have a thing or two to teach me about the history of consciousness.

With all this rattling around in my brain, I was preparing to begin a Master’s program in philosophy with the intention of pursuing a teaching career. A few short weeks into the program I went to the chairman of the department and told him that I had made a big mistake and was thinking of dropping out. When asked why, I confessed that my real interest wasn’t in philosophy per se, but in the history of consciousness and the place of philosophy in that history. I shared with him what I knew about the strained relationship between the early Greek philosophers and the 2000-year old Eleusinian Mysteries. I wanted to know why all that tension existed; and lamented that there didn’t appear to be room in the accepted universe of philosophical discourse for exploring such an unconventional topic. 

To my utter surprise, his response was: “Well, here’s an idea. Almost no one writes a Master’s thesis any more; but it’s still a viable option. There are some philosophy courses I cannot exempt you from; but otherwise you have my permission to take any course in the university you can talk your way into that will help you research your topic. And if two years from now you write up what you’ve learned, and your thesis committee approves it, you’ll get your degree. And if not, then no degree. How does that sound?”

Needless to say I jumped at the opportunity; and the next two years turned out to be some of the most interesting of my life. Not sure how to proceed and with little guidance, since in 1971 there wasn’t a whole lot of available information on either Eleusis or the history of consciousness, I simply trusted my intuition and followed the clues as they appeared. Nonetheless, I was like a horse grazing in a lush green meadow. At the end of the two years I had answered my question. Something the philosophers themselves were doing, that they weren’t even aware of, had planted the seeds of a radical change in the form of human consciousness; and the conflict between the old and new forms was the source of all the tension.

When the time arrived, I wrote my thesis. It was essentially an earlier version of the 3-Part essay you’re now reading. My department chair immediately approved it. A second committee member let me know what he thought of it by tearing up his copy right in front of me. And a third refused to even vote.

Six months passed, and I was still at the mercy of a deadlocked committee. The words of an earlier mentor preyed on me relentlessly. When I told him that I was off to graduate school, his advice was: “Don’t get too creative.” When I asked what he meant, his reply was: “You’ll find out.” Then one day the committee member who had refused to vote quite unexpectedly summoned me to his office.

First he chastised me, and told me that he didn’t know what I thought I was doing but it sure wasn’t philosophy. He concluded by suggesting that my thesis was an affront to the tradition, because all I did was tell a story rather than defend or argue a specific thesis. In a way he was correct, in that I had told a story. But in the telling I thought I’d argued my ‘thesis’ very well: the Mysteries were an artifact of an earlier form of consciousness; philosophy was the creation of our current form; and now that form too is rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror and taking philosophy with it. Philosophical training will always have pedagogical value; but it’s no longer, as it once was, the growing edge of thought.

Needless to say, my judge and jury wasn’t impressed. So I respectfully nodded, and turned to leave. As I reached the door, he blurted out: “OK, OK! I’ll give you a ‘yes’ vote if you promise me you won’t try to get a PHD at this university.” Shocked by his sudden reversal, my first thought was that without a doctorate my plans for a career in academic philosophy were toast. Eventually I would come to understand that I was actually being saved from myself. In light of my own thesis, thinking I could be an effective professor of philosophy clearly wasn’t very realistic.

Over the next five decades, and throughout two non-academic careers, I continued to put the puzzle-pieces of a new human story together. Owen Barfield gave me a basic outline for the history of consciousness, and a rudimentary understanding of the unified psychology of the First People — what he dubbed: “the Original Participation.” And I chanced upon a sparse, but truly brilliant, exposition of the subject/object split scattered throughout the lesser-known writings of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

The most important question of all, however, remained unanswered. What determines the form of human consciousness? Why did the original configuration, the At-one-ment, fade away; and our current configuration, the subject/object split, take over? What could possibly have caused such an epochal shift? Then one serendipitous day a friend introduced me to the work of Leonard Shlain.

THE EGYPTIAN PARTNERSHIP: GOD’S WORDS

Leonard Shlain was a laparoscopic surgeon turned author, lecturer, and historian of consciousness. He’s perhaps best known for his iconoclastic book: The Alphabet Versus The Goddess. My first exposure to him, however, came through a truly informative, image-rich lecture of the same name that he gave at Pepperdine University not too long before he died in 2009. I highly recommend it.

Shlain begins his lecture at that pivotal moment in history when the Greeks were methodically re-dedicating their traditional goddess shrines to gods. He wonders why they’re doing this; and then answers his own question in one pithy sentence. “The only event in history powerful enough to change the sex of God from female to male was the invention of the alphabet.”

This remarkable observation has two important ramifications. First: Shlain posits a relationship between the fluctuating periods of matriarchal and patriarchal priority that we’ve been discussing in this essay and specific patterns of brain function. In his view, periods of matriarchal dominance = right hemispheric emphasis; and patriarchal periods = left hemispheric emphasis. If this correlation is correct, and because the linear one letter or word at-a-time nature of the alphabet tends to engage the left-hemisphere, alphabetic literacy would naturally create the conditions that support and sustain a more patriarchal mind-set — and in this case, specifically, the subject/object split.

Shlain argued that the Greeks were the first in the world to fully alphabetize their native language. So building on Shlain’s insight, when Alexander the Great delivers Hellenistic Koine to North Africa on the point of his spear in the 4th century BCE, he’s bringing so much more than just an innovative new technology. First: he’s giving the patriarchal revolution what with time will become its ‘weapon of choice’, even though no one at the time — including Alexander — had any clear understanding of what was really going on.

And second: Shlain’s physiology-grounded insights into the psychology of alphabetic literacy is a definite answer to my long-standing question of what determines the form of human consciousness. His work, in concert with that of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, strongly suggests that neurological function isn’t the primary determination of form when it coms to consciousness as many philosophers and scientists today continue to assume.

Rather it’s the sustained partnership between neurological function and the specific characteristics of the particular information environment engendered by a culture’s dominant technology of mass communications. So let’s take a closer look at Egypt’s and Greece’s histories of pre-alphabetic and post-alphabetic literacy. Let’s see if Leonard Shlain’s postulates actually align with these histories.

The First People everywhere partnered their fully-operational brains with different forms of vocalized language. More than any other contributing factor, this transformational partnership was responsible for morphing the Animal At-one-ment into the human. Like any language close to its parental origins, vocalized Egyptian mirrors and reinforces the unified psychology of the At-one-ment. Speaking takes place face-to-face, or within audible range. Then early in the 4th millennium BCE, the at-one Egyptian brain begins to partner with written communication.

Hieroglyphics was Egypt’s earliest native script. Believed to be a gift of the god Thoth, its 5000+ symbolic pictographs are known as: “God's words.” To master this technology, a student has to memorize and be able to reproduce all 5000; and only 1-2% of the population are motivated, or have the time, to do this. As a consequence, Hieroglyphics never really becomes a true medium of mass communication.

In stark contrast to simple one-dimensional signs (such as the letters of the alphabet), pictographic symbols are complex and multi-dimensional. Like miniature poems, they point beyond themselves to some larger reality; and by so doing activate the all-at-once, synthesizing capacity of the brain’s right hemisphere. In other words: pictographic literacy = right hemisphere = matriarchy = the At-one-ment.

A more accessible evolutionary development of Hieroglyphics emerges sometime around 3000 BCE. Essentially a sign/symbol hybrid, Hieratic script is a cursive rendering of Hieroglyphics in which the people, animals, and objects being depicted are no longer as easily recognizable, but can be more easily reproduced. Hieratic is a big step towards a true technology of mass communication; and a transitional stage between right-brain activating and left-brain activating linguistic mediums.

Then by 700 BCE, an even more distilled version known as Demotic script, which consists exclusively of 400 conventional signs (so fully left-brain activating), is in popular usage. Demotic (from the Greek demos: ‘the people’) is still somewhat complicated, as only a limited number of these 400 signs represent actual sounds — the rest being 'ideograms', which are symbols indicating ideas rather than sounds.

Egypt’s information environment, however, is completely transformed by the arrival of Grecian Koine in the 4th century BCE. Not only is Koine as totally left-brain as Demotic; but with a mere 24 conventional signs, it’s 200 times simpler than either Hieroglyphic or Hieratic scripts, and 17 times simpler than Demotic. The Egyptians find this simplicity irresistible; and within only a generation or two, Greek becomes the language of choice for the educated classes. At roughly the same time however, a fourth mode of written language called Coptic appears, which is a blend of Greek and Demotic.

As you might expect, Hieratic was a VSO (verb-subject-object) language with the action being emphasized and the Archaic At-one-ment being continuously reinforced. Coptic, however, rapidly evolves into an SVO (subject-verb-object) arrangement. No one is exactly sure why this shift occurs. Since this trend was already evident in late Hieratic (900-700 B.C.E.), it cannot be exclusively due to the introduction of Greek — although that probably accelerated the change. However Greek, if you recall, has no set word order; or, if anything, tends to be verb-final (SOV).

Whatever the reason for this shift, in the subject-verb-object syntax of Coptic the actor is now being emphasized, rather than the action. It also means that the action is no longer reciprocal; and because the exchange is now exclusively one-way, the at-one experience is no longer being reinforced. From the long-vista perspective of a history of consciousness, an increasing emphasis on the subject suggests that a stronger sense of individuality and personhood is beginning to emerge. Clearly the consciousness of the Egyptian people is undergoing a very significant paradigm shift. The At-one-ment is fading; and their future too belongs to the subject/object split.

THE GREEK PARTNERSHIP: TAKING THINGS LITERALLY

So how do we know that the sustained exercise of alphabetic literacy skills is a primary cause of the subject/object split, and not just another correlation — like the development of philosophy or the syntax of Koine were? Well, let’s see what happens to Greek culture in the wake of the alphabet’s arrival.

As with the Egyptians, the alphabet isn’t the Greeks’ first experience with written communication. Their original medium, known today as Linear A, emerges around 2500 BCE, and is comprised of nearly 600 hundred signs and symbols (once again, a left-brain/right-brain hybrid). A slightly less complicated Linear B (trending left-brain) follows around 1450 BCE. However, both are upstaged in 800 BCE when Phoenician traders deliver the Semitic alphabet to the Athenian seaport of Piraeus. Alphabetized Koine (entirely left brain) is 25 times simpler than either Linear A or B. 

Just 50 years after the alphabet is first introduced — which given the speed at which life was moving at the time is actually just the blink of an eye — the various strands of oral tradition woven into the Iliad are being successfully transcribed. The result is Greece’s first, and the world’s second, alphabetically-rendered book (the first being the Old Testament).

Then in just another century and a half an alphabetically-literate Thales of Miletus (624-546 BCE) is presenting his students with objectively reasoned accounts of natural phenomena rather than the traditional mythological explanations. And by helping to pioneer the subject/object split, Thales becomes the West’s first true philosopher. 

Socrates (469-399 BCE) is a temporary throwback. He deeply distrusts the written word believing it will undermine his students’ ability to internalize his oral instruction. He believes that written communication distracts students from the discussion-centered ‘Socratic’ method of arriving at the truth through face-to-face dialogue. And yet ironically he thrives in the new literate environment, and gets the majority of his students directly from it.

Socrates’ student Plato (427-347 BCE) embraces the new technology. At the same time, however, he shares his teacher’s wariness of what he called: “the tyranny of the written word.” That’s why Plato’s Dialogues read more like passages from the oral tradition he and his contemporaries are rapidly abandoning, rather than the purely technical philosophy that with his student Aristotle will soon become the accepted norm. 

Angry at his teacher Socrates’ politically-expedient execution, Plato rejects democracy. In the authoritarian alternative he proposes in the Republic, philosopher-kings run the show, while poets aren’t welcomed. And why not? Because, as the epitome of At-one-ment oral tradition, Greek poetry is always recited aloud and in a communal setting. The warm, passionate, emotionally-charged atmosphere engendered by the poets’ words is the nemesis of the cool, rational, examined life of the philosopher. 

Still, even budding philosophers have to learn how to read aloud to determine where breaks need to occur. Reading silently to oneself won’t become possible until European monks invent punctuation in the 7th century CE.

Plato’s adoption of the written word, and his deliberate exclusion of poets from his visionary state, illustrates the power of alphabetic literacy to induce the sensory reorganization the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter alluded to in Part 1: the shift from the balanced, “harmonically-orchestrated” senses of the First People to the vision-dominant, “synchronized” senses of the subject/object split.

Here’s Carpenter’s brief, to-the-point description of the same reorganization process pioneered by the Greek philosophers as it develops in a child being initiated into the perceptual and cognitive world of the subject/object split…

“A child learns to separate the senses when he learns, in class, to read silently. His legs twist, he bites his tongue, but by an enormous tour de force, he learns to fragment his senses, to turn on one at a time and keep the others in neutral. And so he is indoctrinated into the literate world….” (Edmund Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld, 1970, emphasis mine.)

Keep in mind that I’m making an historical argument here, not a scientific. So from the historical point-of-view, here’s the formula for the development of the subject/object split: a language environment with a split-friendly syntax + alphabetic literacy + synchronization of the senses to the visual channel = subject/object split.

This formula may still be incomplete. Nonetheless we should be able to detect an unconscious shift towards Carpenter’s concept of synchronization in the Greek philosophers’ observations regarding the human senses. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the long-acknowledged paragon of Greek philosophy, Aristotle (384-322 BCE), writing in the very first sentence of his Metaphysics: “Of all the senses, trust only the sense of sight.”

GONE GIRL RETURNS

“In the world of the living, the solstice passes. The storms lessen. The bears and squirrels stir in their sleep. And, suspended in her timeless void, Persephone begins to feel the stirring in her own blood. The voices of life’s children are calling. Their voices are like the buzzing and chittering of troublesome insects. Persephone hears their first, faint cries, and she is filled with dread and sorrow. ‘They call to me. They call to me,’ she whispers as she floats in the void.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

We began this 3-part essay by exploring the common dream of The Mother Demeter and her alter-ego daughter, The Maiden Persephone. And I suggested that this strange little tale was one way the pre-historic matriarchy tried to preserve the memory of their deposition by a rising patriarchy.

There was one highly effective method the Greek patriarchs employed to take control of Greek society. They restricted women’s access to Greece’s traditional forms of literacy. This was already a well-established practice when the alphabet arrived in Greece in 800 BCE. But once the practice of reading and writing alphabetically had become a viable communications option, it was obviously the males who were in first position to perfect the perceptual and cognitive revolution it engendered: the emergence of the subject/object split. And so, as I mentioned earlier, by the close of the 4th century BCE, mastery of the split was well on its way to becoming the patriarchal coup’s ‘weapon of choice’.

Then over the course of the next 2300 years (i.e., some 100 or so generations), and even as women across the West did begin to share in cultivating literate skills, the concomitant psychology of the split gradually became synonymous with the nature of consciousness itself. In other words: once the patriarchal split had been around long enough, everyone practiced in it came to assume that its inherent biases were the very nature of reality, rather than the deeply conditioned habits they actually were.

Southern white slave owners in the US, for example, used a split-riddled Christianity to justify not only their suppression of blacks, but of women as well. “God,” they argued, “had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage, and society must recognize those facts.” (Heather Cox-Richardson Letters From An American, Substack.com, 02/22/2024).

“A character in an 1836 novel written by a Virginia gentleman explained to a younger man that God had given everyone a place in society. Women and Black people were at the bottom, ‘subordinate’ to white men by design. ‘All women live by marriage,’ he said. ‘It is their only duty.’ Trying to make them equal was a cruelty. ‘For my part,’ the older man said, ‘I am well pleased with the established order of the universe. I see…subordination everywhere. And when I find the subordinate content…and recognizing his place…as that to which he properly belongs, I am content to leave him there.’”

I also conjectured at the outset that the tale of The Maiden & Her Mother might contain an augury for a future humanity. So as we come to the conclusion of Part 2, and hopefully with a better understanding of the origin, history, and dynamics of the subject/object split, let’s assume that you, I, and all our contemporaries are the future humanity the augury was intended for, and see if we can decode the dream’s prophetic message.

So what follows now, in closing, is my preferred interpretation…

As Greece’s divine patronesses of the matriarchy, Demeter and Persephone are epitomes of the feminine archetype. Demeter, The Mother represents the feminine in what was then its traditional, matriarchal expression; and Persephone, The Maiden, is the future feminine. If you remember, both suffer the traumatic victimization of rape — Demeter by her brother Zeus, and Persephone by her uncle Hades. I see this as a portent that the emerging patriarchal manner of being human-in-the-world — the defining psychology of which is the subject/object split — will not only in time eradicate the at-one matriarchal manner, but will continue its transgression of the female essence well into the future.

All this will transpire as an epochal shift from a matriarchal to a patriarchal world-order plays itself out across the Western world, and then expands further to encompass the entire planet. The patriarchal coup is the West’s fate because Queen Persephone can no longer care for the Land of the Living due to her self-imposed obligation to attend to the Land of the Dead. And as a consequence of this, she will forget the Living, and the Living will eventually forget her. This is at least a great metaphor; or you can take it literally if you prefer.

In her absence, humans will increasingly fall under the unconscious spell of the split, and the personal traumas inflicted by the split’s divisive psychology will begin to reach well beyond the human sphere. In time, an increasingly disconnected, patriarchal social order will come to think nothing of traumatizing and defiling the Goddess’ corporeal presence: the once-blessed Earth. The full consequences of this generalized transpersonal rape, which are clearly on display in the U.S.’s current governance are only beginning to reveal themselves. How can they possibly prove beneficial?

And so here we are now in the year 2026: right where the dream predicted we would one day be. What used to be science fiction has become scientific fact. We’re in the throes of a 6th Great Extinction, which we ourselves are primarily the responsible culprits, with a species being lost now every 20 minutes — and why do we seem to think that humans are somehow going to be exempted? CO2 levels are the highest they’ve been in the last 800,000 years. We’ve destroyed 66% of our forests, and depleted 97% of our arable soils. Based on a consensus reached in 2022 at COP 27, the number of years left before climate change reaches an irreversibly catastrophic point is today in the relatively minuscule neighborhood of 5. That’s 2030 folks.

So wake up sleepers! And remember: the dream is cyclical. A day will come when the Goddess will hear our pleas for her return; and she will once again begin to remember those of us in the Land of the Living. Now once again: whether you take this literally, or see it as a mythic metaphor for humanity learning to overcome and consciously re-unify the psychology of the split, either way it will be closing time for our current 5000-year cycle of patriarchy.

The problem with cycles, however, is that they just keep cycling. And why do they do this? Because they are unconscious mechanistic processes. How many times do you think humanity has swung back and forth between matriarchy and patriarchy in the past? No one really knows. How many times will we continue to do this before we finally get it, or ourselves go extinct? There is however a way to intentionally stop all this, to get off the wheel and out of our unconscious proclivity for eternal recurrence. We’ll explore this path in detail in Part 3.

But for now, keep in mind that new worlds spring up from the detrital decay of old worlds. When an astroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago, and abruptly ended the dinosaur cycle by driving them extinct, the better-adapted mammals — the future of life on this planet — were already zooming around under the reptiles’ stumbling, bewildered feet. Just so, as the subject/object split’s agonizing festival of the deathbed continues to play itself out, and as many around you and dear to you opt to remain with the world they know, the world the split has bequeathed them, the future human is already here.

The world this post-split human will fashion from the leftovers of climate-trashed consumer culture will no longer be either patriarchal or matriarchal. But it will, of necessity, be both respectfully masculine and profoundly feminine. I sincerely hope that you will find your way, and gift your children the necessary understanding and skills, to be part of this new world that’s now working its way slowly down the birth canal…

“On a quiet day,” writes Arundhati Roy, “I can hear her breathing.”

Share The Harmonies That Once Surrounded Us

“We may assume then, that here and there, still invisible to the public eye, the future human already exists.” — the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1976)

Every now and again a phantom of sorts rises up from the depths of our Common Memory, has her brief moment amongst the living, and then sinks back down again into oblivion. A shapeshifter, she seems to thrive on the group identity fusion created by a certain kind of gathering. Say a goddess-invoking performance , a choir-dense church service, or any other celebratory collaboration where rhythms pulse and bodies respond. Even the close physical proximity and repetitious roaring chants of a large sporting event can serve to conjure up her unmistakable presence.

At other times her visitations can be quite personal. One might catch a glimpse of her while on a solitary walk in nature, in the course of an intimate encounter, during the theatrics of ceremony, or even when doing something as simple as playing a game or enjoying music with some friends on a warm summer afternoon. In all these experiences there’s no separation. You and the other(s) have become one. And in that sweet moment of at-one-ment, you just might find yourself being made inexplicably whole again — which is the original, true meaning of the word ‘heal’.

The divine benefactress of all re-unions was at the zenith of her power and stature during the last great cycle of matriarchy, which came to an end some 6000 years ago. Today she’s a gone girl, at her nadir and literally a ghost of her former self. Her responsibilities as Queen of the Dead may have something to do with that. But so too has her profound distress at humanity’s long slow drift into dis-connection, which has been a consequence of our current patriarchal cycle and its hallmark form of consciousness: the subject/object split.

The split has been especially hard on her. Not so much because of its 2500-year duration, since she’s from another dimension and time is a mortal constraint. But because its intrinsically divisive nature is so very foreign to hers. Perhaps that’s why she keeps making all these fleeting apparitions: so that she, and we, won’t forget.

Cycles of any kind are really just circles in time. Often they progress independently. But on occasion they pair up and dance together like binary stars; and in so doing become partners in a larger co-evolutionary project. That has clearly been the story of matriarchy and patriarchy. Thus 6000 years ago, matriarchy’s autumn was patriarchy’s spring; and humanity’s loss was to the gain of the Dark World. Today it’s the opposite. Patriarchy’s autumn is matriarchy’s spring; and now it’s we in the Land of the Living who now stand to benefit.

The cultural historian William Irwin Thompson would often refer to a phenomenon he dubbed: “The Sunset Effect.” Just like a setting sun, dying cultural institutions sometimes exhibit a final blaze of color just before they finally go dark. Thus all the entrenched patriarchal autocrats in positions of power today — the Trumps, Putins, Orbans, etc. — intent on playing to white Christian nationalist males while suppressing women, targeting LGBTQ minorities, and derogating dark-skinned immigrants, aren’t exactly the heralds of a robust, flourishing movement. They’re actually patriarchy’s swan song: a last desperate attempt to perpetuate a crumbling, spent cycle.

So as you and I seek to turn away from our dying patriarchal past, and towards a more vital, more equitable re-matriated future, the Goddess’ darkly distraught husband comes quietly to her side. Then untold legions of the deceased tearfully gather close around their beloved queen…

“She knows that she must make her farewells to the souls of the underworld, and ascend to her appointed place in the realm of the living. She gathers gifts of peace and paradox to take to the living, so they might remember, if only briefly, the richly textured beauty of the dark. Finally, on the eve of the spring equinox, Persephone weeps as she floats in the darkness. In her hand she holds a stalk of wheat, the symbol of her promise to return to the living. For a single, timeless moment she turns her ears to the impossible music that sings to her. Finally, she raises a single grain of wheat to her trembling lips.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

THE SUBJECT/OBJECT SPLIT

In 925 CE the last of the Southern Maya’s magnificent forest cities were on the verge of total collapse. Societal cohesion had been steadily eroding for some 200 years, due mainly to an increasing concentration of wealth at the top of the class structure, and the rampant deforestation that had been gradually turning their once-benign climate less friendly. All it took was one prolonged period of drought and it was game over. In quiet desperation, a disenfranchised populace of perhaps 3 million took what they could carry on their backs and in their hearts, melted back into what remained of the great southern forest, and returned to the subsistence lifestyle of their ancestors.

If this description of time past sounds eerily akin to our present moment, it should. Only today today’s provoking crises of widespread social inequity and a catastrophically changing climate are really just symptoms of one basic underlying crisis: a crisis of consciousness. Add to that the fact that the problem today isn’t just local; it’s global. So how will we respond this time around, since there aren’t enough forests left for all 8 billion of us to melt into even if we wanted to or could?

Will we continue in our denial, believing that the life we’ve known will somehow carry on, and make essentially the same blunder as the 5th-century CE Romans? They too were living the good, complacent life of empire. But it all came crashing down the day 100,000 Germanic tribesmen, who had been massing on the northern bank of the Rhine for a long time, did exactly what the complacent Romans were convinced was impossible: they successfully made it across the treacherous currents of that truly mighty river.

Will we place all our hope in the dubious possibility of a technological fix? Or will we finally recognize, and actually start to deal with, the root cause of the crisis: the unsustainable manner in which you and I have been taught by our culture to be human in-the-world. I’m talking about the dominant form of human consciousness in the world today: the subject/object split. And just as a reminder: the split is a perceptual and cognitive divide between an experiencing ‘subjective’ awareness (you), and an experienced ‘objective’ reality (everyone and everything that’s not you).

Three factors have contributed to the split’s 2500-year hegemony. First is the now almost universal adoption of the Western, literacy-based model of education. Before his early death in 2009, the surgeon-turned-historian-of-consciousness Leonard Shlain came to some revolutionary conclusions regarding the consequences of the sustained exercise of reading and writing alphabetically. But to the best of my knowledge, someone has yet to connect the dots between his conclusions, the evolution of split, and our current situation. As a result, due to both education and habit, the vast majority of contemporary thinkers remain unconsciously beholding to this in some ways remarkable, yet at the same time increasingly toxic, psychology.

Western Civilization, which owes its very existence to the dynamics of the split, was a creation of the Classical Greeks. The pivotal event in this birthing process was the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet. A direct consequence of this cultural transformation was the invention of philosophy and science as we know them today. Both are the definitive litmus-test for the subject/object split. The important take-away here is that neither discipline came on the scene until after the alphabet had been introduced and was becoming widely embraced.

Second is the fact that over the last 2500 years the split’s inherent perceptual bias has become increasingly embedded in, and in turn reinforced by, the structurally congruent subject/verb/object (SVO) grammar of the Indo-European family of languages. This family has for some time been the largest on the planet, with 445 members and 3.2 billion speakers or 46% of the world’s population.

And the third factor is the implementation of the global electronic communications network which, by its very nature, has the potential to become the functional neurology for a more unified, post-split form of consciousness. Unfortunately the digital technologies that underpin it have been economically captured, and are being weaponized against us by powerful economic and political forces that are completely beholding to the split and unwittingly serve its interests. This includes the social media platforms, as well as both of the major systems of economic organization in the world today: capitalism and state-sponsored socialism.

Problem is, as this so pertinently illustrates, is that when left entirely on its own any form of consciousness eventually becomes unbalanced and toxic. It happened to the At-one-ment when its hyper-conservative tendencies stifled cultural innovation; and now something similar has happened to the split, to a degree that I cannot think of a single crisis in the world today that isn’t being either directly caused or severely exacerbated by the divisive shadow-side of this deeply-engrained, unconsciously embraced, perceptual and cognitive habit.

AT-ONE-MENT DEPRIVATION DISORDER (ADD)

“Each ailment, each disease,” writes the Peruvian poet César Calvo Soriano, “comes to the world after its remedy.” We had a remedy, a natural antidote for the ‘dark’ side of the subject/object split long before it ever began to become a problem. But because the people of that earlier time weren’t in a position to see what was happening, they allowed the antidote, their original at-one state, to fade and disappear — ‘they’ being primarily our ancestral Greek sisters and brothers. However, bedazzled as they were by the immense power of the alphabetically-rendered word, can we blame them?

Right up through Greece’s Classical period and beyond, caretaking the knowledge of how to maintain perceptual and societal unity was the primary responsibility of the Eleusinian Mysteria (See Part 1) and its related traditions. But all that began to decay the day Phoenician traders first introduced the Athenians to the Semitic alphabet in 800 BCE. Like the oft-cited frog in the pan of heating water, the perceptual, cognitive, and societal changes that alphabetic literacy produced took place so gradually that no one noticed. And when the Eleusinian tradition was brutally destroyed in 396 CE by marauding Roman troops and their Visigoth partners, the natural counterbalance to the self-aggrandizing excesses of the split was irrevocably lost.

On hindsight it’s clear that allowing this to happen was a mistake. Because without a living, continuously-maintained at-one experience the internal coherence of human perception falls apart, individual psyches fracture, and collectivities fragment into the kinds of conflicting camps that have become so dangerous in the US and elsewhere around the world today. And now, after being increasingly immersed in the perceptual and cognitive environment of the split for some 2500 years, the Western mindset is having to come to terms with the major consequence of that mistake — i.e., an explosion of what I like to call ADD (At-one-ment Deprivation Disorder) — not to be confused with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

But we’d be making another huge mistake if we were to demonize this turn of events in response, because it’s important we understand that both the At-one-ment and the subject/object split are equally creative evolutionary responses to two of our most fundamental human needs. The first is the need for connection and community — to understand and nurture who ‘we’ are. And the second is the need to actualize selfhood — to understand and explore who ‘I’ am. So purely from a needs perspective, one could argue that the At-one-ment had to slip away when and as it did because the matriarchal priority of connection had become so rigidified that the priorities of the individual were being increasingly stifled. In other words: the need for self-actualization wasn’t getting met.

Now, under some 6000+ years of patriarchy, we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. It’s the priorities of individual selfhood that have become exaggerated; and this to a degree that what little is left of the societal commons is in danger of disappearing altogether. The result is the ongoing “Hell with you Jack, I got mine” free-for-all that passes for ‘society’ in the U.S. and much of the world today. This toxic over-emphasis on the priorities of self is the first of four major symptoms of At-one-ment Deficit Disorder (ADD).

A second symptom is an increasingly normalized state of loneliness and isolation. In a May 2023 advisory entitled: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, the US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy claimed that half of adults in the U.S. are now reporting measurable levels of chronic loneliness. Similarly, a 2021 Harvard Report had suggested that 36% of all Americans, 61% of young adults, and 51% of mothers with young children were experiencing “serious loneliness.” The 14% increase in the two short years between these reports is most likely the result of a spike in isolation brought on by the misguided Covid lockdowns.

The loneliness epidemic Dr. Murthy is referring to is neither limited to the US alone, nor to any particular age group. In addition to the salient mental and emotional problems it’s responsible for, there are significant physical health consequences that include: a 29% increase in the risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults, and a 60% increase in the risk of premature death.

Dr. Murthy blames this on a breakdown of interpersonal communication. A noticeable deterioration of human connection certainly is a major contributor to the loneliness epidemic. But framing the problem as exclusively a matter of human interaction is itself a symptom of this disorder, since our dis-connection from the natural world is an equally large contributor to our growing cultural malaise.

Symptom #3 is an increase in free-floating anxiety. The clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet believes that this kind of anxiety is closely related to chronic loneliness. In his view, both are the main prerequisites for his extremely controversial and discomfort-producing theory of “mass formation” which, for our purposes here, essentially means crowd behavior. When faced with an existential threat that cannot be dealt with effectively as individuals, humans instinctively begin to function as a crowd by reverting to a strange sort of caricature of the at-one state. It tends to happen in this manner because mass formation is largely an unconscious process, which contaminates the at-one instinct with shadow elements. Think of this as in some ways analogous to the strangely distorted image that peers back at you from a funhouse mirror.

The 4th and final symptom of ADD then is resorting to false ways of satisfying the frustrated need. And when that need is for connection, then the counterfeit ways of meeting the need can range all the way from the deceptively bogus bonding proffered by social media platforms to fully-developed, widely-embraced ideologies such as socialism, communism, and now the Maga phenomenon. Anything will serve that creates an experience of belonging to, and participating in, something greater than one’s own personal self-interests — even when that experience is being wantonly manipulated by individuals or commonalities unwittingly ensnared in the subject/object split.

One thing the history of consciousness has to teach us, however, is that periodic swings between common-interest and self-interest are nothing new. Pre-history and history’s oscillating cycles of matriarchal (common) and patriarchal (self) emphasis, where victims in one cycle become perpetrators in the next, are a great example of this. Such back and forth, ‘tit for tat’ reversals have never really served us.

The Shuar, an indigenous tribe of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon, tell of a bird that has been trying to fly with just one wing to illustrate humanity’s predicament. The result of such an imbalanced effort is that the bird ends up flying in circles (or in cycles perhaps?): first in one direction (matriarchy?), then in the other (patriarchy?). This powerful (and might I add timely) common dream includes a prophecy that a day is coming when the bird will finally learn to fly straight by using both of its wings at the same time.

A North American tribe, the Hopi, have a slightly different take on the history of consciousness. By their reckoning, this is the fourth time that humans have found themselves trapped in the same evolutionary cul-de-sac. And in each of the three previous cycles, because people wouldn’t or couldn’t see that all the divisiveness plaguing their societies was the result of an unbalanced patriarchal extreme of self-interest, things didn’t end well.

So whether this is the fourth time we’ve found ourselves suffering the consequences of a split-driven hyper-individualism or only the first, know that another way of being human — one that prioritizes cooperation, community, and harmony with Mother Earth — isn’t just a feel-good pipe dream. The blueprint for it is already there, in our Common Memory, just waiting to once again be made a priority.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL MATRICES OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness is a hot topic these days. Still, thanks to the continued hegemony of the subject/object split, a good many of the philosophers and scientists taking part in the conversation espouse a ‘materialist’ view that consciousness is largely a byproduct of physical processes in the brain. And because of this epiphenomenal nature, the structural form of human consciousness, its operational configuration, is effectively fixed and constant in its temporal expression.

Thus when these thinkers look to the distant past, what they see are people dressed in skins or togas who experience themselves and the world in exactly the same way they do. And yet we live in a world where everything changes, where nothing lasts. So why should the functional architecture of human consciousness be the lone exception?

In addition to being unconsciously beholding in their world-view to the perceptual and cognitive biases of the subject/object split, materialists pay little if any attention to the Big Picture being presented by an historical perspective on consciousness. Most seem to be unaware that such an overarching perspective even exists, because a hardwired neurological process would never have anything more than a personal developmental history. Even the possibility of such is outside their accepted universe of discourse.

Unless, and until, we begin include our neurology’s technological extensions in the equation, I just don’t see how we will ever understand the true nature of consciousness. If we remain within the narrow, split-determined parameters of the materialist model, then the rich and colorful diversity of the history of human consciousness gets reduced to a split-determined, monochromic uniformity. But if entertain the possibility that the form, or expression, of human consciousness is the result of a symbiotic partnership between our neurology and the experiential environment generated by our culture’s dominant information technology, then an amazing vista of not only the past, but of future possibility as well, begins to reveal itself.

To sum it up a little differently: when a major technological innovation produces a paradigmatic change in a culture’s dominant information technology, that culture’s shared form of consciousness adapts by qualitatively mirroring the change. For example: like all indigenous peoples in the early morning of the world, the Archaic Greeks in-habited a more unified form of consciousness I call: ‘the At-one-ment’. Originally native to our animal forebears, the at-one form evolved into its uniquely human expression when the First People of the Earth began partnering their brains with the spoken word some 200,000 or more years ago.

At that time, as we discussed in an earlier section, neither philosophy nor science as we know them today existed — not in Greece, not anywhere else in the world. The Semitic alphabet arrives in Greece in 800 BCE. And within just a few generations of immersion in the information environment of the alphabetically-written word, the form of Greek consciousness begins to shift away from the ancestral At-one-ment. The Greeks leave behind their original technological matrix of right-brain activating language — be it verbalized, imaged, sung, whistled, gestured, or transcribed pictographically. And they adopt the left-brain activating matrix of alphabetic literacy, which shifts the form of their collective consciousness towards the subject/object split. And once that has occurred, then both philosophy and ‘natural’ philosophy (i.e., science) rapidly make their debut.

The problem is that all this transpired beneath the threshold of the people of that time’s awareness. The infectious enthusiasm of the first philosophers suggests that the Classical Greeks were so caught up in the break-through excitement of the Alphabetic Revolution that they couldn’t see the Big Picture. They had neither the ‘speed’ nor the ‘altitude’ required to get that there even was such a thing — much less, to accurately perceive what that picture might actually be.

So why are we today able to see what these earlier humans couldn’t? Because the faster the technological extensions of our physical and mental capacities go, the faster we go. For instance: the automobile extends the foot. Not only did the auto dramatically increase the speed at which humans could travel, there seems to be no end to it. Have you notice all the speeders in their high-tech machines on US interstates and freeways these days? And no one, including our police, seems to care.

The futurist Buckminster Fuller dubbed this relentlessly steepening curve: “accelerating acceleration”. And what’s pushing this? Well according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, humanity now generates as much information in just two days as we did from the beginning of civilization up until the year 2003. And how does the human brain deal with such a ‘cognitive overload’? The Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter has an answer to that: “Information overload requires speed-up which permits [pattern] recognition.” (They Became What They Beheld, 1973, brackets mine.) This is why you and I can now see the Big Picture that those old Greeks couldn’t.

So if the unlearned lesson at the root of Western Civilization was to preserve the at-one experience while perfecting the subject/object split, ours has to be to correct this error by preserving the benefits of the split, while marrying it to a re-vivified experience of at-one-ment. So here’s a brief imaginal analogy to help you better understand how the technology-driven process of accelerating acceleration is working in the history of your and my experience of consciousness...

Imagine that you’re sitting in a window seat of a commercial jet preparing to depart the airport at Manaus, Brazil. As the plane slowly taxis into position, distinguishing and appreciating specific trees in the living wall of forest encroaching on the runway is both possible and appropriate. That’s essentially what the First People were doing with their favored pursuits of story-telling and myth-making. Right up until the midpoint of the 1st millennium BCE, humans were immersed in the sensory world, at-one, and collectively ‘taxiing’.

But once the plane begins to accelerate and lift off, individual trees cease to be distinguishable. However the community they’re all members of still is. In other words: ‘grove’ has supplanted ‘tree’ as your relevant category of perception. The historical equivalent of this dimensional shift is the emergence of the subject/object split, and the beginnings of the “craving for generality” that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein so insightfully linked to the invention of split-enabled philosophy and science.

Then, as your speed continues to increase, and you gain even greater altitude, distinguishing groves becomes impossible. They and their constituent trees are obviously still there; but you’d never know it because your speed has forced your perception to adopt an even higher level of pattern recognition. Now the only thing you can meaningfully discern is the immense emerald majesty of the Amazonian rainforest: the endgame community of all its member communities. And the evolutionary equivalent in the human experience of this stunningly beautiful panorama is the higher level, overarching, all-inclusive framework that’s being so beautifully revealed to us by the history of human consciousness.

RE-MATRIATING THE SPLIT

The darkness shifts and ripples. The world is ripped by a crash of thunder. The wind shrieks around her. The void explodes with jarring colors and a cacophony of discordant sounds. Persephone cries out in terror even as she leaps into the blinding light. For a moment that seems like eternity she forgets who she is, where she is, and why. And then, gentle laughter…the sounds of birds…the cool mist of morning’s breath. (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

Perfecting the Human At-one-ment was the spiritual task of the pre-historic matriarchy. So were we today to intentionally re-kindle the at-one form of consciousness as a corrective counter-balance to the excesses of the split, we would literally be re-matriating the split. In the analogical language of common dreams, we would be welcoming Queen Persephone back to the World of the Living. A majority of our futurists these days, however, are members of the patriarchy with a very different vision of the future, one that’s singularly obsessed with technology.

Meanwhile Transhumanist anticipations of enhanced physical and mental powers are reverberating through the public imagination, helped along by Hollywood’s steady stream of popular super-hero/super-heroine films. But hardly any of these futurist fantasies factor in consciousness. The widely-shared materialist assumption that the form of human consciousness is neurologically fixed and constant still rules the entertainment arena. So too does the untested presumption that the subject/object split everyone involved in-habits is that one fixed and constant form.

But after all I’ve shared with you about the split and it’s potentially dangerous shadow, do you really think it’s a good idea to have a bunch of clever madmen with IQ’s of 10,000, all unconsciously trapped in the split’s divisive psychology, in positions of influence and power?

The split is largely responsible for all of today’s digital information technologies, AI included. Pioneered as we’ve seen by the Classical Greeks, the split came to North America with the European invasion; and the invaders immediately set about driving the native at-one form either to the margins of society, or demolishing it altogether. One more example of the locals simply not understanding what they were really up against. In an unpublished interview, Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Confederacy posed himself an interesting question : “If the Europeans hadn’t come to this land,” he asked, “would we ever have invented the airplane?” His immediate answer was: “Probably not.”

The psychology of the subject/object split is by its nature very masculine. Starting with its inception 2500 years ago, the rising patriarchy seized on it and made it their weapon of choice in an effort to control all aspects of the deposed feminine: women in general, the at-one indigenous population, and all the inherent resources of Mother Earth. So what if we were to treat this 6000-year-old patriarchal cycle and its current Transhumanist obsession as yet another common dream? Then we could say that the technology this cycle is producing is equally masculine and thus imagistically phallic.

A more container-like expression of consciousness — such as the At-one-ment once was — would be mythically more feminine, more ‘yonic’. So were we to begin to re-integrate the at-one form of consciousness into our own personal lives, and then grow its fruits into buttressing cultural institutions, its re-matriating effects couldn’t help but have a profound effect on everything, including the future of technological innovation.

I’ve found at least one male futurist who’s thinking in this manner; and I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of. His name is David Houle, and he publishes an excellent Substack entitled: Evolutionshift. Houle argues that as essential as the accelerating acceleration of technological innovation is to our future, it’s all in service to the still-unfolding story of human consciousness. In other words: the story of evolving technology is actually contained within the story of evolving consciousness. Were you to read Houle’s Jan 31, 2023 post, for example, you’ll see an excellent example of exactly what I’m talking about.

Simply by reminding us that consciousness contains technology, Houle is acknowledging that a process of re-matriation is already well underway — even though I have yet to see him use this specific term. Still it’s definitely already in process, since today’s more integral digital communications environment no longer supports the dis-integrating psychology of the split. And we can actually catch a glimpse of this by comparing two contemporary points-of-view on the nature of human thought.

In an essay entitled “Culture and Consciousness” (1992), the social anthropologist Catherine Lutz lists the essential characteristics of 21st century thought as: an absence of emotion in problem solving, linear thinking, sustained attention span, and objective reasoning.

Only one short decade later, the writer Nicholas Carr and the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield came up with a completely different list. The characteristics they see being expressed are cultivated empathy, associative hyper-linking (a device-enabled, nonlinear manner of thinking that the humorist Garrison Keillor once likened to "a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers”), shortened attention span, and subjective reasoning. Set these two lists side by side, and you’ll see that in each of the four points they’re exact opposites. So who’s seeing the correct picture here?

Well, when viewed through the wide-angle lens of the history of consciousness, both are. Due to her educational training and academic status, Catherine Lutz is describing the essential characteristics of the subject/object split. So she's effectively detailing the brain’s partnership with the 2500-year old literate environment that her career in higher education still demands she remain functional within. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror,” observed the revolutionary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1964. “We march backwards into the future.”

Nicholas Carr and Susan Greenfield, on the other hand, are describing the qualities of our emerging digital partnership. Please take note of the phrase “cultivated empathy” at the head of their list. Not only does it imply the kind of emotional engagement in problem solving the literate mindset finds uncomfortable at best, if you check your thesaurus you’ll see that many of empathy’s synonyms were essential qualities of the matriarchal At-one-ment. This fact alone should afford you some important insight into the more re-matriated, post-split mindset your children and grandchildren are now learning to inhabit every time they partner their brains with one of their evolving digital devices.

PANDEMICS OF CHANGE

When I first began to get interested in history of consciousness, I realized that if such a history really did consist in the pageant of changing forms I suspected it might I needed to somehow verify that for myself. Reading the psychologist Carl Jung’s Collected Works, I noticed that he was quietly but insistently referring to astrology in a favorable way — something that few other scholars in the late 20th century were doing. Assuming that astrology was probably much older than the split, I set out to see what if anything this seemingly antiquated mode of thought might have to teach me about the morphology of human consciousness.

However it took me more years than I thought it would to realize my intention, largely because I first ran into all the ways in which this old, old ‘language’ had been gradually re-configured by 2000 years of being exposed to the objectifying bias of the split. However once I finally got a handle on that, and most especially by developing my own ongoing practice of astrology, I did eventually find the vehicle I was hoping for — one that could give me an entry of sorts into the original at-one form of human consciousness. Part 1 of this 3-Part essay was largely the fruit of that effort.

But then quite serendipitously, and to my utter amazement, I discovered that modern astrology could also be an extremely helpful ally in my ongoing study of the history of consciousness. Turns out that significant milestones in this history always seem to be accompanied by major, and sometimes quite rare, planetary configurations. So let me show you an example, apropos to both our discussion here and our current lives, of exactly what I mean…

By 1962, the rapidly evolving electronic information environments of radio, TV, and film were clearly beginning to undermine the psychology of the split’s deeply-entrenched hegemony. At the same time, a once-in-a-century-plus alignment of the planets Uranus and Pluto was just beginning, and an obscure philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn was releasing his classic: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. The astrological Uranus symbolizes the unexpected shocks and surprises of life; and the astrological Pluto, all processes of trans-form-ation. Thus Uranus/Pluto together = a shocking transformation. And that’s precisely what those turbulent years, the change in the media landscape, and this unassuming little book all turned out to be.

Kuhn took issue with the long-standing belief that science advances through a continuous accumulation of theory and fact. Charles Darwin, for instance, had once observed: “Nature does not make jumps.” Kuhn, however, begged to differ. He argued that science, which like all human inventions is itself a variant of nature, certainly makes jumps. And when it does, these jumps take place in a completely dis-continuous manner in which relatively stable periods of ‘normal’ advancement are irregularly punctuated by unpredictable periods of sudden change. Kuhn dubbed these revolutionary jumps: paradigm shifts.

I first read Kuhn’s book in 1968 when I was 23, and immediately recognized that his understanding of change wasn’t limited to science. Paradigms had been shifting all around me in that extraordinary Uranus/Pluto decade. The alignment itself was exact in 1965; but these major configurations can be symbolically relevant for perhaps as long ten yers in advance, and continue to reverberate for some 10 years after.

At one point in that stormy decade I stumbled upon the words of a 10th century Christian monk, who in a letter to a friend wrote: “I don’t know what’s happening where you are. But here it seems that the world is surely ending.” The world itself wasn’t ending in 1968; but the world I’d grown up in clearly was. I’ll return to the Uranus/Pluto relationship shortly; but first let’s fast forward now to early 2020 and the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Right from the start, comparisons were being made with the notorious Black Death of the 14th century, even though the respective illnesses really were quite different. One thing that was common to both, however, was that each played a starring role in the events symbolized by an even rarer once-every-600-year alignment of three planets: Pluto, Jupiter, and Saturn.

The mythic Pluto was the Roman adaptation of Hades — Greece’s patriarchal Lord of the Dead who, if you recall, we saw drag both the goddess Persephone and the matriarchy she was patroness of down into the shadowy ‘underworld’ of humanity’s Collective Memory. The astrological Pluto is the Lord of Death, but also of Rebirth; and is therefore a potent symbol for all processes of regeneration and renewal. Combos of Jupiter/Saturn tell us something about the enduring structures, time-honored traditions, and stable institutions of society. So a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn alignment = the death and rebirth, or transformation, of human society.

But human society trans-forms when and because consciousness trans-forms. Thus the emergence of the ‘Western’ form in the final millennium BCE, and the birth of Western Civilization were inseparable, co-evolutionary events. So if we were to consider a collectively-shared form of consciousness a stable institution of society, then we could also say that Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn = the transformation of human consciousness.

The Behaviorists had a pithy little truism that can help us understand how this particular trans-form-ation actually works. “Organization,” they said, “inhibits re-organization.” So for any degree of re-organization to be effective, it first must be initiated by some degree of dis-organization. “In the destructive element immerse,” was Freud’s way of applying this principle to the individual psyche. And why would he recommend such a thing? Because the only way out of a stagnating organization of one’s energies is to go through a break-down of sorts; and the reward for surviving such a rite-of-passage is an uplifting experience of rebirth and renewal. Thus a concise schematic for Plutonian transformation would be: organization > dis-organization > re-organization.

The Black Death was a perfect example of this principle. Throughout the Middle Ages (5th to 14th centuries), European society functioned under the rigidly dogmatic organization of the Roman Catholic Church. What broke the Church’s stranglehold on the European mind and spirit, and made it possible for the imaginative re-organization of the Renaissance to flourish in the 15th and 16th centuries, was the total dis-organization of society brought on by a century of unrelenting waves of the Black Death.

Europe’s deadliest wave crested between 1347 and 1353 CE — right on the heels of another Uranus/Pluto alignment exact in 1343. It was the intrinsic dis-organizational nature of Uranus/Pluto that made possible the transformation of human society we today know as the Renaissance — from the Latin nascentia: ‘to be born’ + re: ‘again’ — which started to get traction a century later in 1445 under Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn.

And what does all this have to do with us today? Well, the exact same sequence of Uranus/Pluto dis-organization, followed by the beginnings of a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn re-organization, has just reoccurred during the global Covid pandemic for the first time since the 1400’s. We had serious Uranus/Pluto dis-organization beginning in the 60’s, a strong phase-2 echo of it exact in 2014, and then the beginnings of a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn re-organization exact in 2020. There are, however, two important differences. The current time-frame is more compressed, so it’s happening much faster; and the Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn is much tighter this time, so potentially far more powerful and consequential.

In major astrological events such as this, there’s always both a downside and an upside. On the downside — the unconscious ‘shadow’ expression — Pluto can symbolize impositions of raw power, obdurate control, and ruthless manipulation. We’re seeing this in the world-wide wave of authoritarian attacks on democracy, including right here in the U.S. We’re also seeing it in the fossil fuel industry’s desperate ramp-up of it capitalist priorities, the climate and its innocent casualties be damned. And we’ve seen it big time during the pandemic as well, since Covid has been the world’s first virus to partner with a strong-arm ‘public relations’ department.

The crucial insight my experiences with astrology have taught me over the years is that when these planetary-symbolized energies get acted out unconsciously, the energy being symbolized works us. However when you understand the energies at work, and you choose ways to align with them consciously and intentionally, we work the energy.

If enough of us can do precisely that in the coming years, then the rebirth and renewal just now getting started has the potential to flower into a major global Renaissance. And for reasons we’re about to discuss, it will in the end produce a far more consequential evolutionary change in consciousness than the earlier, more local European version 600 years ago was able to do.

Keep in mind, however, that 600 years ago it took more than a century, and wave after wave of serious illness and related crises, to dis-organize the old societies and re-organize the new. Just so, the Covid-19 pandemic and all the unanswered questions it has raised, is likely but one wave in an ongoing series of necessary path-clearing dis-integrations coming our way in the coming decades. We’ll see; but Trump’s diversionary war on Iran in 2026 could easily become the next.

So keep your seatbelt fastened. And hence the wisdom of preparing a ‘lifeboat’ of some kind. The question we’re left with here, however, is that if the Black Death had something to teach us about the transformation of society, could it possibly have something to teach us about how consciousness itself trans-forms?

THE PATTERN THAT CONNECTS

Artistic depictions of the Black Death engulf the viewer in a hell-scape. Fire was said to rain down from the sky. Death slept with you by night, and abject fear ruled your days. Psychological decompensation — the inability to cope effectively with stress which leads to personality dis-integration — became commonplace. Disfellowship, exclusion, and other mass formation strategies surged; and scapegoating was brutally weaponized. The usual suspects were Satan, your local ethnic minority, and your cat. The doctors, most of whom at the time were astrologers, blamed everything on a very difficult co-alignment of Saturn/Mars (‘fear-amped aggressiveness’), since no one at the time had any idea that Uranus and Pluto even existed.

As for the illness itself, epidemiologists generally believe that the plague was transmitted to humans via the fleas of infected rats. But as UK researchers Dawn Lester and David Parker point out, archeologists have never found any evidence of the mass rat die-offs that one would expect if that were the case. Neither were there any first-hand documentations of such. So if infected humans were dying en masse, why weren’t the infected rats?

What was observed was: “masses of dead fish, animals and other things along the sea shore, and in many places trees covered in dust...and all these things seem to have come from a great corruption of the air and earth.” (Quoted in Lester & Parker, What Really Makes You Ill, 2019, emphasis mine.) 

Tree-ring chronologies collected by the paleoecologist Dr. Mike Baillie corroborate this first-hand observation. Seems the Black Death coincided with a period of severe atmospheric and environmental stress due to a highly unusual series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and meteor strikes — even a close comet pass in 1456. All of this happening in proximity would certainly have had the potential to affect the quality of the atmosphere, which might help explain why pulmonary failure was another major consequence. It also suggests that a highly contagious pathogen wasn’t the only thing responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 75 and 200 million people world-wide.

Turns out though, that not everyone who managed to survive was hopelessly mired in mass psychosis. As society unraveled, intentional communities began to spring up in rural areas, offering safe haven from the abounding psychological decompensation and the toxic exposome ( the sum total of all your environmental exposures) co-factors of urban life. In the end these communities would serve as incubators for some of the more progressive ideas of the Renaissance. In other words: they functioned exactly like lifeboats off a sinking ship. Survivors and their descendants became the ‘seed-people’ for the re-naissance (i.e., rebirth) of European society.

As the threat escalated, the Church’s ecclesiastical thought-police lost control of Europe’s psyche. The long-instilled Catholic belief in a transcendent patriarchal God divorced from a fallen nature quietly fell out of favor, along with the split-induced dogma of an unbridgeable divide between spirit and matter. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci helped antidote people’s distrust of the natural world and fear of cats by depicting both as beneficent. In response, the common people, especially in the countryside, quietly returned to the old pre-patriarchal, at-one expression of matriarchal consciousness.

In other words: these rural pockets of a pandemic-traumatized populace invited the Goddess to return, and she graciously accepted. This time around, however, she didn’t come in the guise of either Persephone or Demeter. In a world still deeply Catholic, she came as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Later, as the Renaissance gained momentum amongst the educated, the Goddess shape-shifted once again into Anima Mundi: ‘The Soul of the World’. Sadly, all these spontaneous resurgences of re-matriation lasted at most a generation or two. And here’s why… 

As we discussed earlier, human consciousness presents experientially as content and form. Content is everything we sense, perceive, think, and feel. Form is the manner in which our psyches organize the ever-changing stream of content. The functional structure this provides is a cultural construct that evolves with the environment established by our culture’s dominant information technology. When innovation restructures this environment, consciousness itself restructures; and the result is a paradigm shift. 

Even though the faith-paradigm was temporarily destabilized in 15th century plague-decimated Europe, the communications paradigm wasn’t. The alphabetically-rendered word remained the preferred technology. And because there wasn’t a new technological foundation to support a different form of consciousness, a coalition of powerful ecclesiastical, political, and economic interests regrouped around the comfortably familiar psychology of the subject/object split, used it to reassert control, and successfully restored the patriarchal agenda to dominance.

That was Uranus/Pluto > Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn 600-700 years ago. Now the exact same sequence of major planetary alignments has just reconnected you, I, and everyone on Earth today to the people who lived and died in that earlier pandemic and prepared the way for the Renaissance. What’s different this time is that we have three things going for us they didn’t.

First: the literate information environment that underpinned the subject/object split through both the dis-organizing events of the Black Death and the re-organizing efforts of the Renaissance is rapidly disintegrating. The only things still holding its associated form of consciousness in place are personal and collective habit, split-based education, and split-perpetuating social, economic, and political institutions.

Second: it took 2500 years for the subject/object split and the 2nd Great Transformation of human consciousness to re-configure society. The vehicle for achieving this was the gradual dissemination of alphabetic literacy — a skill so highly valued in society today that it has to be one of the closest things we have to a sacred cow. As a consequence, my suggesting that it might also have a pernicious shadow effect is essentially akin to heresy. But what if I’m correct? Then what we’re really dealing with here is billions of unwitting humans, plus a vast societal infrastructure, unconsciously committed to an increasingly lethal perception of reality.

Marshall McLuhan taught us the simple truth that certain technologies extend our natural human capacities. A wheel extends your foot; a computer extends your brain, etc. The possibility that there’s a relationship between the dominant technological extension of your information capacities, and the form of your consciousness, has remained below our threshold of awareness for 99.97% of humanity’s existence. That too is no longer true.

And third: my best guess is that we’re about as far into the unfolding 6th Great Extinction as we are the digitally-facilitated 3rd Great Transformation. Combine that with the increasing societal pressure of the climate crisis, and we simply don’t have the time to let the information environment unconsciously engineer the change for us as emerging technologies have done in the two previous Great Transformations. Fortunately, for what may be the first time in the current cycle of civilization and possibly the first time ever, the fact that we’re now becoming apprised of the technological dynamics of consciousness means that it’s also possible for both individuals and collectives to begin intentionally crafting their own personal forms of consciousness.

MUSTERING THE SWARM

300,000 years ago, the 1st Great Transformation of consciousness partnered our at-one animal neurology with the spoken word and made us fully human. 2500 years ago, the dissemination of alphabetic literacy fostered a 2nd Great Transformation by engendering the emergence of the subject/object split which made a significant portion of us ‘Western’. And now today, as all of us partner our brains with digital technology, a 3rd Great Transformation is taking us global — which in essence means back to one, but on a higher turn of the evolutionary spiral.

So I wonder: how many of us will make the transition from local to global consciousness by choice and personal effort? How many will simply allow the rolling digital wave to carry them passively into the new form? And how many will remain mired in the still deeply-engrained habits of the split?

No one knows exactly what the emerging digital form will finally be. But I think it’s safe to assume that it will begin as a conjugate of the subject/object split and a re-vitalized contemporary version of the original at-one form. Our literacy-based educational systems are essentially designed to institutionalize the split. But with the exception of a few minority spiritual traditions, we lack the equivalent institutions to widely support and foster the at-one experience.

That’s one reason why I think it’s unrealistic at best to expect this evolutionary change to engage everyone. It’s far more likely that the majority will remain with their educational vector and what’s familiar. New worlds spring up like plants from the detritus of decaying old worlds. So if becoming a compost of sorts doesn’t sound appealing, I suggest you put some effort into becoming one of the newly-sprouting life-forms. Still is it pure folly on my part to think that it’s even possible to bring that about in the relatively brief time left before we all become casualties of the 6th Great Extinction with just a minority of support?

Not necessarily. I remember reading a study a decade or more ago that looked at how flocks of birds and schools of fish are able to all turn at once — the best example of which is probably a murmuration of starlings. The conclusion the authors arrived at was that a mere 15% were initiating the turn, and the remaining 85% were simply following. I cannot find that study now; but here’s an article that summarizes pretty well how researchers were thinking about that question in those earlier years.

A different approach was in the works by 2013, when the science-writer Ed Fong summarized the newest research in an article in Wired Magazine entitled: “How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future.” In a follow-up interview on NPR, Fong stated: “As a collective, there is an intelligence that does not apply to any of the individuals, or even the aggregate of the individuals.” And furthermore: “There is this swarm intelligence, this ability to make decisions, to carry out computations that exists only at the level of the group.”

So perhaps asking how many are turning and how many are following isn’t quite the right question because that approach is built on two assumptions. First: that collective behavior is determined hierarchically since there are ‘leaders’ and there are ‘followers’. And second: that in the end the determination is made by individuals, even if those individuals are all part of an aggregate.

The research that Fong cites is fundamentally different. The premise there is that insentient and sentient aggregates behave differently. An insentient aggregate — say, for example, a pile of rocks — is simply the sum of its parts. A sentient aggregate - say a flock of birds — actively generates its own unified field of perception, cognition, and experience. Their collective behavior isn’t the tabulated result of individual choices. Rather it emerges from the group’s living inter-connections and inter-actions. Fong continues…

“So for humans, for example, you can take a bunch of people and put them in a large arena with lots of different targets around them. And you - if you tell them all to stick together and you give one of them information about which target is the right one to head for, and you'll see them all moving about randomly but very gradually heading towards that target. So the vast majority of people in that group have no idea where they're going, but because they're sticking together, they can follow the single informed person to the right destination.” (emphasis mine)

If I understand this correctly, the implication is that we don’t have to know in advance where the 3rd Great Transformation is taking us; or exactly what the form of consciousness now being ushered in will eventually be. We’ll find all that out in the process of re-connecting and re-membering once again how to live at-one. All we have to do is embrace the opportunity to nurture such experiences whenever and however they present. “That’s the beauty of being part of the swarm,” says Fong. “Even if you don’t know where you’re going, you still get there.” (emphasis mine)

What seems necessary is that the fully-developed digital form of human consciousness will have to meet the two basic human needs that I spoke of earlier, and that are inherent in each and every one of us: our need for self-actualization (the split), and our need for community (from the Latin unus: ‘one’, and cum: ‘with’).

To date we’ve only done one or the other. (Remember that Shuar common dream we discussed earlier about the bird learning to fly with both wings?) We need to learn how to in-habit both forms of consciousness at will and without confounding the two. Some life situations will require us to move at-one; and some will require the distancing skills of the split. Eventually we’ll learn to move seamlessly from one to the other as necessary. But first we’ll have to re-learn how to live at-one with each other and the natural world. There will always be differences of opinion and conflict. But history demonstrates that it’s possible to have differences without them becoming these gulfs as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon that are tearing the US apart right now on a daily basis.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to go out and start intentional communities as some of those plague-beleaguered pioneers of the Renaissance did — although that’s certainly a valid and, as we’ll soon see, timely option. Re-vitalizing the experience of human comm-unity can begin as simply as a getting together with a few friends and asking yourselves: “What could we do with one mind and heart that would benefit ourselves, society, nature?” Buy our food cooperatively perhaps? Help each other with house and yard maintenance? Plant trees on each other’s property? Trust your swarm intelligence; and stick with whatever it gives you long enough to see results.

The perceptual and cognitive bias of the subject/object split has produced an over-emphasis on individuality. We tend to assume that the individual is the sole matrix of decision-making and thought; and we aggressively disparage any possibility that groups can function as thought matrices equally well or even better. We constantly reinforce this unconscious prejudice with emotionally-charged, derogatory slurs such as: ‘hive mind’, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’ — or even the term ‘swarm’ itself. And yet the reality of intentionally-directed collective consciousness seems to be exactly what the emerging science of collective behavior is now validating in such a timely way.

We cannot solve the chronic problems of the split by remaining within the confines of its polarizing psychology. We have to find a way to step outside if we’re to find a solution. Returning to the original At-one-ment is both impossible and undesirable. The First People had their problems too. What we can do, however, is learn from their legacy, which has been and continues to be conscientiously passed down to us by the indigenous peoples of the Earth. We all owe them a great debt of gratitude for preserving the old form while the rest of us have been obsessed with the seductive lure of the split.

We do, however, have one very simple but profound precedent for the possibility of re-vitalizing an at-one relationship field. After all, isn’t it the challenge in any successful inter-personal relationship for the two or more ‘me’s’ involved to become a functional ‘we’? Let’s expand that paradigm and experience to include all our relationships. Because if we truly want a new world, we’re going to have to grow it together — one relationship at a time, including in that our relationship to the natural world.

BIOPHILIA

The term biophilia was first introduced in 1984 by the biologist E.O. Wilson (1929-2021 CE). It literally means: “to be in love with nature”. The Greek word philia denotes a very specific type of love: one that’s based on mutual respect, shared devotion, joint interests, and common values. Wilson believed that humans are genetically wired to have this kind of brotherly-love connection with the natural world. That’s why this rather exotic little term may be the best synonym we have for the purposeful cultivation of a practical, 21st-century expression of the at-one form of consciousness.

Nonetheless, given the the steadily increasing pressure of climate change on the short-sighted direction currently being taken by the human experiment, the question that all of us need answered and quickly is: how exactly does a digitally-entrained, urbanized woman or man, who’s been conditioned since birth to in-habit the subject/object split, learn to overcome the split by falling back in love with the natural world?

I think the best way for me to attempt an answer to this question is to conclude this essay in the way we began: with one last imaginal ‘experiment’. Only this time, instead of turning our mind’s eye to the past or the present, let’s look to the future, and see if we can imagine what it might be like to be on the evolutionary path of human consciousness — to be the ‘future human’ — a quarter century from now, which is probably well within the parameters of life expectancy for a good number of you reading this.

We can only speculate about how the communications environment will evolve in this time period, and how that technological evolution will continue to help shape consciousness of humankind. So the focus of this concluding imaginal voyage will be on the one thing that, if the human race is to continue to prove sustainable, we likely can count on : the functional re-integration of the subject/object split and the at-one form of consciousness.

So imagine now that you, I, and a woman named Sephie have recently become friends. To further cement our new-found relationships, we’ve been taking turns sharing the story of our lives. The only rule is that listeners cannot speak. Questions or comments have to wait for another day. This afternoon it’s Sephie’s turn. So you and I have come to the modest community-supported agricultural project where she lives and works to hear the account of her personal journey.

It’s an unusually warm spring day, which has become the new norm here in chronically drought-stricken New Mexico. We’re sitting in the shade of a huge old cottonwood tree, which stands in one of the last surviving remnants of what was once called ‘the bosque’ — which is Spanish for ‘forest’ — before the great climate-sparked wildfires of the late 2020’s consumed most of the forest that had for eons so graciously held the Rio Grande river in its arboreal embrace. Sephie, who’s been sitting silently for some time now, begins to speak…

2050 C.E.

“I was born just north of here, in Albuquerque, in the summer of 2016. My parents were both of Greek-American heritage; and I’ve always loved that they named my younger sister and myself for Greek Goddesses — my sister ‘Tem’ for Artemis, the Goddess of the hunt; and myself ‘Sephie’ for…can you guess who? Why for Persephone, patroness of death and rebirth, of course!

I grew up in a rustic old farmhouse on the sunrise-facing slopes of the Sandia Mountains, which run north and south just east of the city. My father ran a small business out of our home; and my mother was a teacher in our local rural school.

Tem and I spent a large part of our early childhood playing in the mixed-conifer forest that surrounded our home. My earliest memory is feeling the pure joy of being held safe in the embrace of that welcoming forest. However my most painful memory is the sheer terror I experienced when a climate-driven wildfire ripped through our beautiful forest, destroying it and our home. I was just 13 at the time. We literally had to flee for our lives in the wee hours of the night — my mother holding my sister and I close and sobbing inconsolably as my father drove us careening off the flamig mountain to safety.

I grew up fast in the aftermath of that tragedy. Trading forest life for city life was a huge adjustment; but I did come to love going to a larger school and the expanded social life that offered. For my 20th birthday my favorite aunt gifted me what was to become a very special book for me: the autobiography of the psychologist Carl Jung. At the beginning of this book, an aging Jung stresses something that I think I needed to hear: that it was his important inner-world experiences that shaped the person he ultimately became more than the changing circumstances of his outer life. At the time I wasn’t exactly sure why this resonated so deeply with me; but now I do, and I still treasure my aunt’s prescient gift all these years later.

After finishing my high school years, and working for a time at a couple of entry-level jobs, I enrolled in our local university majoring in business. One year in, I was failing miserably, and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. I knew I wasn’t stupid; but to avoid the embarrassment, both to myself and my family, of being thrown out I voluntarily withdrew. Confused and dispirited, I desperately needed help. So I went to see a recommended therapist. To my surprise, she turned out to be a graduate of the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. After listening carefully to me detail my plight, and rather than just offer me advice, she suggested we begin by seeing what guidance I might getting from my dreams.

So I kept a daily dream journal; and she and I spent our weekly time together exploring their symbolism. It soon became clear to that studying business was what my parents wanted me, not what I wanted. I was trying to be someone I really wasn’t; so no wonder I wasn’t doing well! When the University of New Mexico unexpectedly gave me a second chance at academic success, I immediately changed my major to a combination of philosophy and literature. My parents weren’t real happy; but I was! And the inner milestone that helped me muster the courage to trust my own judgement on such a life-altering decision was the following dream…

I’m with my mother when I suddenly realize that a huge white spider is crawling up my arm. The spider bites me; and as I sink into a dark swoon my mother holds me close and frantically pleads: “Don’t die, please don’t die!” Next thing I know is I’m alone and squatting on my haunches on a large, low branch of a towering old-growth ponderosa mother tree. The tree seems familiar. It reminds me of the ones I often played in as a child. I’m older, naked, my hair is long and somewhat matted, and I’m wearing wire-rimmed spectacles. Looking down, I see that a class is in session below me, composed largely of my college friends and being led by my favorite professor. A strong feeling that I’m no longer part of their world arises and moves through, triggering a painful wave of loneliness. In my distress, I instinctively look up through the spreading branches; and am struck by the intensity of a cloudless blue sky above. The sheer beauty of this sight so overwhelms me that I spontaneously burst into tears of joy.

Back in college, my grades immediately began to improve. Something, however, was still not right. I had initially thought that my dream was asking me to reconsider my choice of studies. But now I was beginning to wonder if what it was really trying to tell me was that academic life of any kind wasn’t really in the cards for me.

Then in the thick of all this uncertainty and turbulence, I met my husband-to-be Travis; and much to my delight our relationship really blossomed. Travis, who was three years my elder and more academically inclined than I, ‘saw’ me struggling and took it seriously. One day he surprised me with a proposal that we marry after his upcoming graduation, and offered to financially support us until I could decide what I really wanted to do with my life. Well, long story short: a few months later I left academia for good, embraced married life, and soon found myself happily pregnant with our first child.

Looking back now, I can see that really we were just children having children. And even though I dearly loved being our daughter Sabine’s mother, I knew it wasn’t enough. Meanwhile I continued to hold those pivotal dream images before my mind’s eye because I instinctively knew that they had more to offer in the way of guidance than I yet understood. Just who was this older self of mine, and what was she doing squatting so disheveled and primitive in that beautiful old mother tree? What did those curious spectacles mean? And why was I so thrilled by the sight of that immense deep blue sky?”

A NEW WORLD ORDER

“After Sabine’s birth, Travis and I decided to remain in Albuquerque because he had been offered a job as a programmer on a project he found interesting. I was a busy full-time mom. One day a friend told me about a visiting Buddhist monk who was hosting an informal daily meditation circle in an old abandoned house not far from ours. I was immediately intrigued. The ‘house’ was a hollowed-out ruin, with standing adobe brick walls but no roof. Still a small group of us sat together there each day in silence — in sun, wind, rain, and snow — learning how to stand outside our discursive intellects, and simply pay attention to what was presenting itself. We followed the simple dictum left to us by our teacher’s teacher: Hakuun Yasutani Roshi. “Sitting like a mountain is all that’s required.”

One day, out of the blue, a sitting sister gave me another life-transforming book. Reading The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees by Stephanie Kaza, I was immediately reminded of how important my childhood immersion in the natural world had been for my early wellbeing. That insight immediately led to another. I realized that I was also unintentionally depriving my daughter of the same nurturing experience. With that I knew that I had to find a way to help my whole family form ongoing, day-to-day relationships with the inhabitants of what I had begun to call the ‘real world’. The problem was, with Travis’ work, just exactly how could we do that?

I had been thinking of late about my relationship with my best friend Emily. Like any healthy relationship, ours rested on two foundational pillars. First: there had to be a basic chemistry at work if she and I were to become more than just ships passing in the night. Then second: we had to spend a lot of time together sharing concrete experiences. With that I understood that if I and my family were going to intentionally re-connect with every human’s Great Mother, with Nature, we would have to walk a similar path. The chemistry was obviously there. Now we needed to share more experiences.

So I started spending time each day in a nearby park as part of my daily care routine with Sabine. I began by paying close attention to which of the park’s trees and plants I had an intuitive affinity for. I introduced myself and my daughter in my own simple way to each of them. Then I began a practice of visiting my new friends at different times of the day and with time in different seasons of the year; and I would linger a short while with them when and as I could. I also began to converse with them in my own way, and encouraged Sabine to do likewise in her own way. And since ponderosas, spruces, and zinnias don’t speak English, I harbored no expectations.

Occasionally other people would notice us doing this. Some would scowl; but most smiled. I was deliberately patient. With time I noticed that a different kind of communication had begun to develop. It was very subtle at first. But then it quickly became apparent to me that what Sabine and I were getting from this very personal activity really wasn’t the point. It’s who we were becoming in the process that in the end mattered.

That’s when Travis and I decided to initiate what’s now become a family practice. Every year we plant a modest little herb, vegetable, and flower garden in the yard of our house; and we make sure our children are involved. Each person selects a few plants, sows their seeds, and then takes daily care of them. Sometimes our gardening choices result in a pretty motley crew; but that’s all part of the fun!

Tom: before I continue, I’d really like to share something specifically with you. As I was listening to you tell your story the other day, and you were talking about the subject/object split and the at-one-ment being fundamentally divergent but complimentary forms of human consciousness, the long-puzzling missing pieces of my dream fell right into place! You helped me see myself and my life through a very wide-angle lens; and you gave me a vocabulary with which to articulate it.

You helped me see that what we, the trees and plant life of Roosevelt Park, and the plants in our home garden had been doing was perfecting a 21st-century experience of practical at-one-ment. I saw that my primitive dream-self squatting in that beautiful Tree of Life was the older and wiser, at-one woman who still lives buried deep within me. She was clearly present in my childhood; but it was totally unconscious. Now as an adult, and with full awareness, I need to follow Jung’s counsel and make what had once been unconscious conscious.

In my dream I was naked, and my hair was long and matted, because now what you see with me is increasingly what you get. No more carefully cultivated masks, hidden agendas, or calculated poses. Those wire-rimmed spectacles symbolized that I’m seeing things more clearly now; and I understand the reason why I could no longer be part of that academic class in session beneath my dream tree.

I clearly saw how my literacy-entrained Western education had helped me develop the valuable perceptual and cognitive skills of the subject/object split: rationality, analysis, objectivity, control, and otherness. But then I remembered a snippet of lyric from the traditional Irish musician Mary Black that better sums up the real course of my life: “I never cared much for the things of men; but wilderness took my breath away.”

Now I see clearly that my life work is to help not only my family, but also my friends and the greater community, to re-member themselves in and to the natural world. To re-connect in a very contemporary manner to the clear blue sky of this older form of consciousness that Westerners so long ago left behind, but now so desperately need if humans are not only going to survive, but continue to flourish. In other words: to truly become, in our present everyday moment, the future human.

So if you’re feeling the call of the wild, start taking yourself and anyone else you can out into nature, in any way you can, as often as you can. Re-connect with Our Great Mother in the company of trees, rivers, mountains, prairies, oceans, gardens, lakes, plants, and animals. Welcome her back, in your own modest way, from her 5000-year sojourn in the dark.”

RE-TURNING

“She is surrounded by the children of the upper world. They bring her gifts of iris and apple blossoms, the scent of rain on the ocean, the sighs of lovers. She hears the whisper of the crocus at her feet welcoming her and spreading the word along the grassy hills — ‘She returns, she returns, Persephone returns.’ And as the sun rises, Persephone is filled with joy and the wonder of life, and she begins to remember.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)

“As a postscript to my own personal journey, I also think it’s necessary that we include the influence of the bigger picture on everything we’ve been discussing today. The decade of global tumult (2025-2035 CE) — unleashed by the economic, political, and social chaos in the US — forced a great many of us in and beyond the U.S. to re-think our life-choices. What we were dealing with back in 2025, and in ways still are a quarter century further down the road, is a phenomenon that Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor so presciently termed: ‘end-times fascism.’

This particularly virulent brand of fascism resulted from the confluence of two closely-interrelated psychologies: the unquestioned hegemony of the subject/object split, and one of the split’s signature ‘achievements’: endgame capitalism with its attendant addiction to consumption, its demonstrated inability to accept limits, and its proclivity for engendering extreme inequalities of wealth. The naturalist John Muir's jarring lament that ‘nothing dollarable is safe’ has become far more true of late than it ever was when he first voiced it almost two centuries ago. And so too has the more recent, but still-timely, warning of Kalle Lasn, co-founder of The Adbusters Media Foundation: ‘It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that even the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.’

Also in play was the fascists’ ideologically-driven decision to ignore the realities of climate change. This unbelievable blunder has resulted in immense suffering world-wide. One close-to-home consequence for me was the 2042 wildfire which destroyed our beautiful river bank forest— known locally as a ‘bosque’ — a surviving remnant of which we’re enjoying here today. For me personally, it was the second time that a climate-driven wildfire had robbed me of the forest that was the beating heart of my spiritual life.

The global climate crisis that dramatically escalated under fascist rule was a huge wake-up call. Wave after wave of climate-related disasters rolled across the US and other locations; and ensuing food shortages quickly followed. Especially significant for me at the time was my discovery that many of the foundational ideas of the European Renaissance had been birthed and nurtured in intentional communities. These we-centered communal experiments had served as ‘lifeboats’ during the localized collapses brought on by the Black Death of the 14th and 15th centuries. This serendipitous realization led directly to Travis and I moving to this Community Supported Agriculture project where we now happily live, and where I consider myself extremely fortunate to work.

Emmanuelle Cappellin’s 2021 film Once You Know also had a profound influence on our choice. Cappellin makes a strong case for what I’ll call matriarchy-inspired, co-operative, co-effort being the tactic that will have survival value going forward, not the rugged individualism of patriarchal, end-times Capitalism. It reminded us of a truism that if and when things start to get really difficult, your most dependable lifeboat won’t be your bank account, but a functional community.

The story I’ve been telling you here won’t be complete if I don’t include one final life-transforming experience. Travis and I had decided to try and bring a second child into our family; and this time it was a boy who we named, following my old family tradition you’re already familiar with, Markos, a stylization of Mars, the Greek god of war. We couldn’t have chosen a more inappropriate name if we tried; and here’s why…

Before our son was born, I dreamed that I had two children — only thing is, in the dream, both were girls. Then one cold rainy day, when Markos was about six years old, he and I were amusing ourselves by perusing an old fashion magazine I’d found. He zeroed in on one of the decked out female models; and then after a few moments spent carefully studying her, pointed to her gleefully and said: “Mommy, that’s me!”

At the time I didn’t fully grok what he was trying to tell me, any more than I’m sure he did. But in the following months a number of related incidents forced me to admit that my son was far more the goddess of beauty and love Venus, than he was the god of war Mars. That’s when I remembered my dream. So we gave our child a new middle name: Venu — a play on Venus, and a popular East Indian name for both girls and boys. And novices that we were in these trans-gender matters, we told him that someday he would need to decide whether he was a Markos, a Venu, or both.

Why am I telling you this? Because when I realized that I had no choice but to become more informed about the issues raised by a son becoming a daughter or a daughter becoming a son, I was startled to discover just how common such gender transitions were becoming in American culture, even though how we’re going about this as a culture still warrants a lot of constructive review!

But just a few moments ago, as I was sharing all this with you, I had a surprising ‘aha’ moment. Could it possibly be that coming to accept that it’s possible for we humans to intentionally morph our own gender and sexual identities is paving the way for us to make an even more consequential transformation? Could it be a prelude to our learning how to intentionally transition between different forms, or expressions, of consciousness?

So there you have it: my life story. I want to thank you both so much for being my witnesses today. Pulling all these details of my life into one consistent narrative has been an enlightening experience for me! So in closing let me say one last thing. My mother would often share a motto with us, one she apparently found in a popular 70’s icon: The Whole Earth Catalogue…

‘We are as gods; so we might as well get good at it.’

I now enjoy sharing my own post-patriarchal re-do of the same motto, because it best sums up what I have come to understand is really my primary task in this life…

‘We are as goddesses; so we might as well get even better at it.’”