Back to Earth: part II

For over a decade previous to the first Earth Day, bestselling books, first in German and then in English, had been warning the people of our world of the consequences of our fevered crusade, not just to humans, but to all of life.  At the same time the youth of the West, or at least the more sensitive, idealistic, inquiring, and vital of them, particularly those of the United States of America, the most advanced, wealthy, and powerful nation ever seen on Earth, this vanguard youth of the West, seeing these Earth-from-outer-space photographs as they had appeared, from ever higher orbits and then from the forays to the Moon, made the connection between these photographic revelations and those of the environmental prophets of doom.  Adults as well as youth were having the same experience, forming the same gestalt, which resulted in a plan to hold a national 'teach-in' about the plight of the earth, scheduled for the end of spring term, 1970, when as it happened, protest against the southeast Asian war threatened to swamp a mere environmental teach-in, but the eco-visionaries still managed to rally enough support, to enlist enough volunteers, and Earth Day events were mounted on many campuses across the nation and even beyond the campuses.  And it was a huge success, and media coverage of it got the essential message out to America, and even beyond it.  As a result, the new consciousness was strengthened and it was being called 'ecological' now, as well as 'environmental' (which to most people, it seemed, meant primarily pollution and resulting cancer).  'Ecology' was now extended from being the name of an obscure specialization of biology, to that of the new consciousness and its movement.  It is telling that the banner designed for Earth Day, the 'earth flag', was a whole-Earth-from-space image, though set against a dark blue background.  And the contemporaneous, wide-theta ecology symbol seems to represent the globe of Earth, likely inspired by the same photographs, both showing then the contribution of these views of our planet to the 'back to Earth' consciousness of the nascent ecology movement.

Back to Earth: part I

In the year before the first Earth Day, a team of American technicians had landed for the first time on the Moon.  And from that other world, Man saw Earth from afar: a starkly glowing jewel set against the spangled black velvet of outer space.  And this is what these lunar astronauts had come so far to discover: Earth.

In five centuries of fevered explorations, geographic and scientific, Western Man had sought to rise from the mucky earth to the splendid heavens.  And now he had left the Earth and touched down on the first way station to the planets and stars beyond.  But on the Moon there was nothing, but a sun-blasted, asteroid-pitted rock incapable of sustaining life in its hyper-frigid vacuum.

But looking back, they saw Earth, Only Home of Life.  It was lovely, precious, a living presence, God, all that mattered, all that is.  And so, 'back to Earth' they then came, having discovered that this latest crusade in Western Man's urge to explore everything, to uncover every secret of the Universe, to conquer Nature, to become God, and having made this impressive technological leap beyond our bounded world, which though a triumph, was also a futility-- except for those famous backward views which satellites and men had been taking from ever further vantages, culminating perhaps in the 'Earth-rise' photo. Around the planet, humans had been captivated by these amazing new photo-views, and some said-- and some knew-- that this would cause an inexorable change in our species' consciousness.

Chthonic Connection

In the depth of the chthonic mind lies Man's connection with Nature.  When Nature speaks through the Deep Mind, Man's selfishness becomes Selfishness-- the survival drives of the organism are turned toward the Organism-- the Biosphere, and a man then becomes the mythic Hero (haleth), the mystic warrior, Savior (haelend) of the Earth, and the survival drives of the Self become in him the power of Ecological Will, to save the Biosphere, to make the Menning on Earth. 

The man who would be hero hears the call from the Deep, and then goes to find the connection.

chthonic (Gk khthon='underground')= the gods and spirits of the underworld (~the Unconscious), as opposed to uranic (Gk ouranos='the heavens').

Menning= ecological culture-civilization.

Conjuring God

I conjure, I evoke, the next God-- I 'as-if'' him in my mind; and in time, he is; what I have conceived becomes real.

I willed him and now I accept and choose him, I assent to his superiority, as he is of the best I can summon in myself.  And he responds, he acts in me and through me.  He steers and sways me, he prompts me.  I trust him and rely on him.  We have an agreement.   

This sounds very well, but God is not just a construction of our willed imagining-- he is 'con-jured' by ego-mind and Unconscious working together in an act of creative imagination.  Unless the Unconscious, the Deep Mind, is aroused by my conscious petitioning, as it is of like mind and responds in like kind, and the conscious then agrees to mediation toward an interactive synthesis, the realized archetypal 'symbol,' the next God, will not live.  And to live, he requires my devotion, my offering of psychic energy, my receptiveness to his influence, and my acting on it.

The Next God is compound of Feorgen, Biospheric God, and the Drygand.  Feorgen is vast and ineffable.  He is too busied with the concerns of the Biosphere to deal directly with us, but the Drygand was meant to, he is the front-man, he is herald, ambassador, agent, of Feorgen, his avatar.  It is the Drygand who is our personal God, with whom we interact.  Feorgen corresponds to the World.  But the Drygand is the Mediator of Unconscious and conscious, of World and Man, he is the Self, the Savior.

Inventing the Necessary God

The de facto, actually-existing God of our world is the Evil Machine, Searuvel, working its doom.

The Gods of the religions don't begin to address this threat, conservative and out-of-date as they are.  And so, since there is no God who is of any use in this catastrophe, we need a new, ecological, God.

That being granted, we can thoroughly work out what kind of God might be fitting and effective-- and then it would just sit there, useless-- because you just can't invent the next God, it has to spontaneously arise from the deep mind as a response to trauma of the organism, that threatens survival.  This is when prophets can appear, presenting new Gods, new religions.  If what they present feels relevant and seems to offer real hope, well, it may eventually prevail and found a new culture.  The trauma can be personal, we feel that our very existence is threatened by external danger and misery leading to despair.  Or in more sensitive, caring individuals, simply the danger and misery of the world, of life itself, can lead to despair.  The existing Gods and their religions are meant to address this kind of trauma as well.  But in the present crisis, they don't serve.  And so, in certain individuals, the conscious mind's dire awareness awakens the survival response of the deep mind, and its drive and creative intelligence are set to work, not just toward the survival of the organism, but of the Organism-- Life-on-Earth itself.  As a result, a change in the 'psychic dominant,' as Jung put it, can come about, a 'change of the gods'.  In our case, it is an exchange of the god Progress for the Ecology God.  Progress in techno-industrial-economic expansion and innovation, seen as good, right, and necessary once upon a time, in our saner, wiser moments, we now see more fully as evil-- the Good God of our world is actually evil.

When the deep mind responds to awareness, either conscious or unconscious, of the threat to survival, personal or transpersonal, we can help in the invention of the new God, by contributing our abilities to learn, reason, decide, organize, and act, in 'co-responding' with the deep mind, harmonizing with it in the work.  Now, this is not the same as the spontaneous shamanic assault of the deep mind on the person that creates the inspired prophet-- but how often was it ever like that?  Prophets, I think, were often seekers and thinkers who contributed to the working-out of the revelation they then received.  Even if we try to work out the necessary God using our conscious abilities, without any apparent response from the deep mind, it doesn't mean that it isn't working in us as well, because ego-mind and Unconscious correspond, are a continuum, so even if we can't seem to interact with the deep mind consciously, we can't assume that corresponding activity isn't going on below.  And for all our personal sense of isolation in a our world of billions, whether we will it or not, human and humanity also correspond in continuum, to an extent.

 And so, the great work if 'inventing' the necessary God, the next God, and its religion and culture, is a work to which each of us can contribute, in whichever way we can.  And it must be done, for the survival of All Life.

Shaggy Myth

In the mythic time, the Frostfyre Eoten, World-Scathe, fought the Urwyrm, sorely hurt it, drove it underground.

Then the smith Velend cunning-crafted armor and weaponry of electro-mechanical gear to equip the Eoten, and now, bristling with devices that penetrated to his very core, he became the even more formidable Searuvel, the Evil Machine, World-Scathe.

And with ever more puissant gear Velend equipped him, until his depredations upon the Earth induced the Wolken, misty Nature-mind, in response to gestate within her the wondrous Lodestone.  And with this magical jewel was dubbed the Wayward Allwight, serial incarnator of all the species of Life, making him the Drygand, World-Haelend, Savior.

The Drygand wears no armor, his only weapon against the Searuvel his trident, his Thrytine, made of wood and tusk.  But with its touch the armor of Searuvel is pierced, he is stabbed in his precious parts, he is penetrated to the core, and his energies spurt and spill to the ground, his toxic electro-ichor bleeds-out and makes a blote, a sacrificial offering to the earth.

And in their incessant battle, with the ancient all-power of the Urwyrm to sustain him, the Drygand weakens the Searuvel's hold on the minds of Men, his grip upon the Earth, bleeds-out his energies to be transformed by the powers of the Urwyrm and the cunning of Feorgen, Life-God, to the Menning-Byzen, scheme of the Menning, ecological culture-civilization, to stand against the monstrous, catastrophic global tyranny of Searuvel. And the Byzen is set in the Lodestone in the Drygand's head.

Eoten(OEng)= giant. ONorse Jotunn.
Urwyrm= the Primordial Serpent.
Thrytine= thry(OEng)--'three' + tine(Eng)--'tooth, antler-prong, tusk', originally.
Blote(OEng,ONorse 'blot')= sacrifice.
Byzen(OEng 'bysen')= pattern, model. 

Nature Ensouled

The experience of Nature ensouled that fortunate children have, a recapitulation of the mode of the animist consciousness of our primitive ancestors, was also experienced later in life by young Romantics such as Wordsworth and Thoreau, and interpreted as a mystical revelation of the Kantian metaphysical concept of the dual monism of Mind and Nature as corresponding aspects of the Cosmos.  A further development occurred when, with the development of ecological science, the interpretation became more precisely of the dual monism of Mind and Biosphere-- deep ecological consciousness, then.

In mythic form, the experience of animist, undifferentiated wholeness of ensouled Nature was symbolized as the Primordial Serpent-- the Dragon in John Boorman's Excalibur, where Merlin says of it to young Arthur,'It is everywhere! It is everything!'  In Eormanz, this 'Pantheos' could be expressed in deep ecological form as 'Ur-wyrm', or 'Eormen-orm'

Ur-(Ger)= primitive, original, great. Eormen-(OEng)= great, vast. Wyrm(OEng)/Ormr(ONorse)=serpent, dragon.