So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Section Three (1)

Now we begin the third section of this proposed book.

First came Section One: Who and What We Are.

Next came Section Two: How to Live

Section Three: Society and the Individual, this section, will be followed by

Section Four: The Challenge of Our Time.

Thursday January 5, 2006 (8:45 a.m.) All right, friends, I’m ready and willing. Who do I have the honor of speaking with today? Or, if you have no one special, I’ll choose.

You may find it easier to continue your long practice of addressing us as a group unless you wish any one of us, and receiving our communications the same way. We appeared this way for a reason. And perhaps this is as good a time as any to go into it a bit, if only for your book.

The question of guidance from what you call “the other side” is not so much a complicated question as it is a tangled one. But we didn’t tangle it from over here! It got tangled because of the various competing or overlapping or antagonistic strands of culture on your end.

In times when a culture is dominant – even if it is challenged from outside, it is still dominant within its own area – in such places –

Well, let’s go back a bit.

In the simplest situation, an isolated culture knows of no other ways of perceiving the world and has no competing ways within its own area and has no discordant tradition cutting against the prevailing ways. In such a society, all is consistency. As all think alike, believe alike, perceive alike – therefore it is not difficult for all to act alike. This is about as different from your time-space as can be.

The next level up in terms of a society is one in which any one of those elements is missing. The next up from that, one with two missing. You see.

No neighbors with other ways.

No conflict between tradition and new ways.

No internal strife between competing elements each with its own traditions.

A society that is uniform within, and not conscious of any discord between its practice and that of its ancestors may have neighbors with different ways. In such case, the neighbors are regarded either with a blend of indifference and tolerance or with active hostility. Thus, the ancient Romans before they became powerful. Thus, the ancient Greek city-states. Thus, the Hebrew tribes, and Indian tribes, and tribes everywhere. We do not mean to over-simplify, because of course these societies had gradations – Greek city-states viewed other Greek states differently than they did non-Greeks; Mohammad distinguished between pagans and People of a Book. But as a simple distinction this will hold.

When such a society conquers or for any reason absorbs another people, the conquered must become a part of that society – they must have their own niche into which they can be smoothly fitted – or their very existence will shake that society. So, if the society has a niche for slaves, the newly entered may come in as slaves without disturbing anything – unless they maintain their identity in some way over and above being slaves. We suggest that here you will find the key to the function, p[light, and effect of the Jews as a people – especially when you compare them to “the Jews of Asia” – the Chinese communities within non-Chinese cultures.

Without meaning to, without wanting to, without any say in the matter whatsoever, by their very presence as an unassimilated body within the simple social order, they are destructive to its simplicity. They push that society into a new stage of complexity that it may or may not be able to successfully achieve and maintain.

A society that comes to terms with a minority in its midst is one that has gained an advantage in complexity to set against its disadvantage in loss of homogeneity. How each society deals with that new situation defines differences among them.

One way to deal with it is to find a way to graft that presence onto the prevailing story the society tells itself. Jews in a Christian society are precursors of Christ; in a Muslim society, they are one of the three communities descended from Abraham; in a secular society (the west, regardless of nominal allegiances, since the 1800s) a disturbing anomaly interfering with (the myth of) coherent nationhood.

Do you see, now, why so many societies are insane when they attempt to deal with minorities? They purge, they discriminate, they murder, they exile – why? For economic reasons? Hardly! For religious reasons? Seemingly so, often, but not really. Well, for ideology’s sake? Even less likely.

All this happens because the very presence of the minority stretches the culture, distorts it, makes it uncomfortable – seemingly endangers it. Thus, pogroms. Thus, mass murder.

Now add to the disturbing presence of external foreigners and internal foreigners that presence of a contradiction between present practice and tradition. The result is, for instance, 20th century America. This is far from the only example we might seek! But take it as an example and see if it does not well illustrate our point.

America had foreigners of all kinds within its fold, but it incorporated them into its myth by thinking of itself as the melting pot. It had foreigners of all kinds outside its fold, but there was no way the foreigners could threaten militarily or economically or culturally. So the first crack in the seamless façade was the culture war between those wanting to change to other values and those seeking to retain current nominal values. Each side could claim legitimate descent from the past because of America’s revolutionary tradition – a sort of historical oxymoron. So neither one could be shrugged off as alien. The result is deadly warfare.

By necessity this outline is too short, and glosses over many a complexity and many a difficulty. None the less, it holds, and offers you the key to your society’s problem.

The problem is not the removal of one or the other set of proponents. The problem is not the return to simplicity, for a return never happens.

Here is the problem to be solved: How to move from one layer of simplicity through layers of complexity to a new, more sophisticated, simplicity. This is the puzzle your society has before it. You may solve it, you may not.

We find it difficult to confine any discussion, as you well know. Every subject links up seamlessly with every other subject – in other words, just as, in a sense, there is only one person, so there is only one thought, only one perception, and that is – everything! This is the meaning of the Buddha’s admonition that every time you make a distinction you make an error. Not that no distinctions are to be perceived, but that no distinction is or ever could be absolute.

So, to move back toward the center of what we want to discuss – people perceive guidance differently because their cultural traditions describe it differently. In a homogenous culture the expectations are homogenous. The more complex and self-contradictory the culture – the more competing threads – the more diversity in understanding; the greater the number of images and concepts, many appearing to be entirely contradictory.

So, angels. Aliens. Saints. Past lives. Various archetypes. The collective unconscious. Power animals. The ancestors. Earth spirits – we could continue, but the point perhaps is made. We will make it more clearly:

Every society “creates” us in its own image. If it is a fragmented, self=-warring society, then the gods are at war. If a peaceful homogenous society concerned at most with the transgressions of individuals, this is what it will see on the other side. It isn’t a chaos over “here” – except in that it is chaos over “there.”

You are fighting over competing visions of what you call the afterlife, or the spiritual reality, or the other side, or heaven and hell, or nirvana, or even the energy of the great mindless machine – and you don’t see that you are grappling with your own contradictions in the only way you know – by projecting them onto us. There are two forms of projection: one, projecting one’s inner stuff; two, creating, of that projected material, shapes and beings.

So, if you project warring forces (and no reason you shouldn’t; anything that exists, exists on both sides of the veil, being different as we have said mainly according to the laws of the turf involved) those warring forces will be seen as warring individuals, or groups, because it is too difficult psychologically for you to hold the view of abstracts. Thus the warfare of the good and bad angels. It is all projection: That does not mean it does not exist. It means, merely, you cannot see ultimates.

Find the Dion Fortune quote about “what are the gods” in The Sea Priestess and quote them.

All right, I shall.

So – here is the point we wish to make at this time. Your quest to understand (and by “you” we mean, at this time, all who read this, sharing the quest) is part of society’s work. You are doing invisible mental work that though invisible is not unreal or not important. It is real work and there are few enough to do it. Consider the work, if you will, to be that of creating and infusing with energy a visualization, a new archetype, a container. Your society is tearing itself apart because you are in the time of new birth. Aid that birth!

For clarity – “your society” may now be considered (for the first time in recorded history) all the sub-societies of the planet. You are in a global civilization. Is it a surprise that previous containers are not adequate?

Those who cannot create rely upon those who can. It requires much less to adhere to a new vision than to obtain and co-shape it. your work is to help to shape the vision so that your fellows – many of whom will hate you for the work! – may benefit.

It is a great and rare privilege to participate in the coalescing of a new civilization; rarer to participate in a new form of civilization; rarest of all – your fate – to also participate in the coming to consciousness of a new way of being human.

So. This is a coherent place to pause. Type this and the quotation in, send it off to the winds as before. And as always you have our thanks for participating in the work.

And you know you have mine; this greatly enriches my life.

—

The quotation from pp 172-174 of the 1978 Samuel Weiser paperback edition of The Sea Priestess, by Dion Fortune, originally privately published in England, in 1938. (Fabulous book. She wrote six novels, all very worthwhile, but this and its sequel Moon-Magic are in my view the best.)

Then Morgan le Fay began to tell me about herself, and how things looked from her point of view; it was a curious experience, for I ad never dreamt there could be such a viewpoint for any human being. She told me that those whom the gods chose were dehumanized and semi-deified.

“For that remark,” I said, “you would have been burnt in the good old days, and quite right too.”

“What are the gods?” said she.

“God knows,” said I.

“I think they are natural forces personified,” said she. “So to be made one with the gods is to become the channel of natural forces. And that is not as rare as you might think.:

And she told me that devout men of all faiths had held that it was possible to bring the soul to a single-pointed focus by adoration and meditation and dedication; and that when this took place the god came down and possessed the worshipper, and the power of the god shone out from him like light from a lamp. She told me, too, that the ancients had known things of which we moderns had only touched the fringe.

“When the Priest of the Moon came to me in the crystal,” she said, “he asked me if I would like to learn these things, and I said that I would. And he told me that to do this I must give myself up to them; and I said that I would do this also. Then he said he would teach me, and little by little he has taught me.

“He taught me that there is but one priesthood, which is the service of the One, whence all life proceeds and to which all returns, and It is Unmanifest, and no Man at any time hath known It, or ever shall know It. Only in Its works is It known to us, and from these we deduce Its nature, and Its nature is Nature. Primitive man personified Its powers and called them gods; modern man depersonifies them and calls them forces and factors. Both are true,” said she, “but neither is the whole truth; for the gods are forces, and the forces are intelligent and purposive, being expressions of the nature of the One.

“And as It is, so is creation, for creation is the expression of Its nature; for as the Chaldean Oracles say, `The wise man looketh upon the face of Nature and beholdeth therein the luminous countenance of the Eternal.’ And human nature,” said she, “is a part of Nature, and you learn a lot about both Nature and the gods if you study it.”

Then she told me the idea the ancients had of priesthood—that it was mediumship; but it was not the personified god that spoke through the possessed and inspired priest or pythoness, for the personified god is the form under which man represents those potencies to himself, and the real god is far otherwise—but that the priest, overshadowed by the gods, put forth his powers; that which was latent in him was released, and he became for a time what all men would be when perfected.

“Then that being so,” said I, “what are the gods?”

“God knows,” said she. “But we know that by doing certain things we get certain results.”