The human spirit dances in celebration not just of life, but also death. The psychic realm of the human experience has explored furthest into territory of the unknown, and subsequently so has the physical play of our collective endeavors.
However, it is not without its consequences. Much of suffering is that of the human mind losing its orientation to the known, lost in chaos, unable to ground or anchor to the once familiar, safe, and predictable world.
This is a universal challenge for any human: for we are both simultaneously evolved to desire the unknown as well as to preserve our life and well being in the present state of what is known. Too often than not, negative phenomenological experiences encase the mind’s processing of the subjective environment into perpetual hyper alertness.
Culture after culture have created elaborate stories that “tell us how to presume and how to act to maintain the determinate, shared, and restricted values that compose our familiar worlds.” These stories allow the traumatized mind to navigate back towards the psychic realm of novelty-driven exploration: where the spirit may once again dance freely between the tides of life and death.
Quote from Maps of Meaning
#symbolichealing #orderandchaos
Ancestral Knowledge and the Transpersonal.
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Carl Jung argued for the psychological justification of ancestral experience as the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious. The child in this regard is understood as the living reality of expression still derived from the prenatal experience - a possession of experience that is transpersonal - not yet acquired personally, but rather acquired from “over there.” The child then, whose life as a prepersonal entity (not yet developed by the present social constructs), is largely determined by the collective unconscious, is the living carrier of this ancestral experience.
When viewed as such, the child becomes the center of great importance and respect. Society is as much centered around those born from the prenatal world as the teachings and wisdoms in which any society is founded upon, because symbolically viewed they are one in the same, or rather came from the same place.
And so of course, as is often the case, a question remains: why do we rush to construct the development of our children? Why does our modern society value controlling as many variables in a child’s development as possible? What happens to the way we treat children if we begin to see them as carriers of all the wisdom that came before us?
It seems there is a strong correlation between the way we treat our children and the way we treat our elders that cuts out the societal “man” from being consciously connected to the creative inspiration of life.
#carljung #erichneumann #ancestralknowledge #transpersonal #child #uroboros #prenatal #unconscious
Conservation Psychologists spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the problem of how to engage people in authentic interactions with nature. It is not that there is debate about whether such interactions are beneficial: the science is quite solid in this department. The trouble is over how to get people to enact activities that engage with nature on their own accord.
The problem can possibly be found in the realm of meaningful interaction: divorce the activity from an original context of meaning, and it no longer is desirable. It isn’t just about exposure.
Last year, on a cold breezy day in December, I joined my friend for a canoe ride in the calm protected waters of the Dungeness Spit along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We were, in all intensive purposes, enacting an interaction pattern with nature from which we understood would bring us great joy and serenity. The feeling of gliding across the glassy water. The buoyancy of our vessel keeping us dry as we travelled upon the frigid, salty sea. The refreshing change of visual perspective from our usual view from the land. But for us, we grew up as children with parents who exposed us to such interactions - we were raised culturally to value these relationships, and in turn bring meaning into them. We learned to fish, how to catch food from the sea, prepare it, cook it, and feed ourselves and others. We learned meaning through survival. We gained respect and a sacredness for the land and sea because we experienced how it nourishes us, but also how, if not careful and attuned to its forces, it could harm or kill us. But this is a sub-culture. Access to such interactions are limited for most populations, secluded in their relatively safe, urban environments. And even when such activities are made accessible for all, to engage in wild settings, the uninitiated choose not to.
How do we make something so vital for our human well-being just as desirable as what is culturally popular today? How do we instill meaning back into our interactions with Nature? If we no longer rely on survival to instill reverence and meaning, what can?
#natureinteractions #modernproblems #humanwellbeing
There is not much that is different between you and I yet it is the differences which make all the difference.
The ocean is made up of condensed particles of water, and the sky of expanded particles of water. The ocean rains upon the sky in vapors and the sky upon the ocean in liquid. Same molecule, different states, all essential for life as we know it.
Unification is not the celebration of sameness, it is the dance of opposites. Freeing the mind is not emptying it of thoughts, it is accepting all thoughts, all sensations indiscriminately. Pain and joy. Troubles and Pleasures.
Celebrate your differences. It is the most natural thing you can do. Care for yourself over everything else. It is the most natural thing you can do. It does no make you less compassionate of a person. It does not make you a selfish person. It is merely what you are inherently meant to do, in every sense of the meaning. Love for the world around you will naturally follow. Whether using the scientific language of genetics, or the more traditional concept of ancestors - preserving the well-being of your life, your unique composition of matter infused with energy, will surely lead you through to a profound conclusion of unity, like ocean and sky.
#uniqueyou #meditation #ocean #sky #ecopsychology #differences
Ocean people experience the sun setting into the ocean, and symbolically this imagery is instilled with cosmological meaning of waters as a void in which the day disappears into, only to be birthed again and again. The ocean consumes the light, revealing the cosmos, but it also births the light. This motion and pattern and rhythm plays out its cyclical drama of death and renewal without fail that it becomes dependent upon, worshipped, mesmerized into the working memory and security of the mind. Meaning impressed within which then is externalized as knowledge that guides the forces of behavior of all conscious activity.
The psyche internalizes experience as symbols: sensory input encoded with meaning. As creatures of nature, we live out our felt experience, never fully able to separate our subjective sense from an objective reality. Our perception is based in interactions which have enfolded countless times, immemorially, patterns of survival dictating our behavior. The subjective experience is one in which everything is an action, a process, constantly moving and changing, responding and reacting. And so consciousness is less so born from awareness of self, rather it is the self, or the mind, making room for consciousness to be heard through our self experiencing.
Is it the emptiness of space, the quietness, the setting of the sun, the ending of a day, in which consciousness collects in fullness, like the universe, waiting to be realized beyond the veil of light?
Visiting the #hokulea with #lpcscommunity middle school and elementary. The crew of the world-voyage were present to speak of their experience and share their message to the next generation: where will you go?
Keeping the connection between the ancestors and the next generation has been a crisis of the modern world, yet cultures around the world are able to preserver despite all the challenges. The Hōkūleʻa voyaging canoe of Hawaiʻi represents theLāhui - the nation of Hawaiʻi - after spending three years sailing around the world using only traditional navigational means (no modern technology) and visiting the ports and people of places along the way sharing their message of Aloha for people and Aloha for the Earth. They have returned to make that connection strong with the Children of Hawaiʻi; for the identity of individual is rooted in the identity of its people. And the identity of the people is rooted in the place we live upon, breathe, drink, eat, and consume. That which feeds us: ʻĀina
Understanding how to resolve conflict requires understanding human nature, which is not easy to do, it turns out.
The reason for the mystery of our nature has to do with the simple yet profound capability of all humans: we can speak truth, and we can speak a lie. Within the spectrum of these two opposing yet attracting forces exists the human imagination.
It is the human imagination that allows us to resolve the very real conflicts that inflict our friends, family, our people, our world. Ourself. It’s the force which bends and distorts reality, but can also bend it back into place.
Every culture has developed its own practice of how to resolve conflict. These practices stand at the heart of any community. They put the unity in community. For it is these practices that create the metaphysical space in which its “matter” is made up of protocol for addressing the conflict at hand.
Being creatures that operate on an abstracted level of reality (symbolic: the internalization of experiences abstracted into conscious thought), we have taken this ability of creating metaphysical spaces a step further; projecting it back out onto our shared reality that we collectively agree upon will direct our behavior.
This is called ceremony, and is often needed in addressing conflict so that every voice is heard, all the way through, instead of a primal urge to react through fight, freeze, or flight. Whether this is conflict inside of you or all around you.
Structures like these ceremonial spaces are necessary for humans to exist harmoniously. We should not mistaken order for tyranny. We should not confuse hierarchy with oppression.
Children thrive in environments that provide the structure necessary for freedom of thought, which is essential for the development of a healthy individual and consequently the sustainability of any society.
Human nature is built upon the organization we see through the chaos of the universe. We harness it, possess it, tweak it, and enact it so that it may be learned by those born into the world new and unknowing. This is the role of every Educator, every teacher. You do not command the learner, only the space.
Although we speak of cultural evolution as differing from biological evolution, the process of change is still quite similar. In fact it seems that culture, a natural phenomenon that humans began to rely on heavily for advantageous purposes, splits into myriad of variants, some that experience rapid change over a short period time, and some that might experience hardly any over a long period of time. This pattern of change is found to be true in our observance of speciation in biology; the process of a proto species radiating into multiple ascending species.
One such cultural “radiation” is the inception of the divine individual.
A curious thing about consciousness is something psychologists like to describe as phenomenology: the study of how experience becomes embodied. The most important understanding that has come from this field of study is real clues into consciousness. These clues are the observance of how human understanding is first embodied and then only secondarily is it understood abstractly in the form of thought. When something is understood in its primary form as embodied but not yet articulated by the mind, we call this the subconscious.
The idea of the divine individual brings forth a powerful recognition that consciousness then is not something that exists within the mind, but actually somehow permeates through the body as a process, action, or exchange amongst other entities in our universe. That is to say, consciousness is embodied within the individual, but it exists only through the constant interaction of all life.
Culture, it seems, is the human conduit of consciousness reaching towards the ideal way of life through each individual living soul.
So love yourself by being merciful of your faults yet judging of your character so that you may be responsible for a life in which your suffering is given meaning and your existence is given significance.
#phenomenology #ecopsychology #consciousness #divineindividual #mythology #culture #evolution #goodfriday
Humans are creatures of abstraction. We are also creatures of social order. Our individual lives depends on the group. Our current world is grappling with the mistakes of the past and also the compiling of human perspectives, trying to sort out how to create a new world of order from a tangle of broken spirits. But that order will always be predicated upon our abstracted understanding from chaotic potential: as does all of life as it struggles to maintain its significance in a ever-changing universe, or perhaps multiverse... We inherent a world from the dead, and must make do with the lessons of knowledge passed down to us from the non-living to keep life going. How interesting. From death comes life. From the cold the seed awaits for the sun: the spark of consciousness.
Spring has once again arrived to the northern hemisphere, and thus our minds, our vessel for the self, is informed by our bodies - the vessel for the soul - to remark on the illumination of the next cycle: the birth of order from the chaotic potential as it rests in the darkness of the winter’s stillness and unknown.
The mind, which functions on symbolic form, observes the unraveling of the fronds within our multidimensional reality and is inspired, renewed with hope and vigor: a vision towards a balanced world. Equinox. Our sun is our deity, plotting the course of our cyclical nature, and the mind is that which deifies our sun. Our star. The source of life and energy in which our earth travels around on which we creatures traverse our entire life upon: seeking the connection between the manifold of constitutions to the fragile balance of life. For now, we celebrate the miracle of life has once again survived solely on the faith that our planet will continue along its same pattern of motion.
The question remains: will our fabricated abstractions of reality that dictate our individual behavior align with the so called patterns of existence? We shall see.
#equinox #renewyourself #themindofreligion #springequinox
The answer to why life exists is located within a storied universe continually retelling itself.
The crisis of life is the journey from separateness to unification. We come into the world being ripped from our creator, our mother, exposed to the cold fragility of life, and we spend the rest of our life in this mysterious paradox both simultaneously trying to return to that state of unification and trying to become our own individual self through self-preservation and survival.
Life exists by cheating death, by tricking death. It does this through creativity: not by the rule, but by the exception to the rule. It is the exceptional who survive, who live on, who pass on the key to life.
This is a group of sandpipers flying across the glassy water in apparent chaos, yet holding true to their form and nature. They are a paradox of surviving together yet only for ones own means. It is an agreement amongst life.
We must never lose our appreciation for the order in which our ancestors established before us to allow us to exist. We must never forget that it is our responsibility to uphold that order and bring something exceptional to it, less death catches us all.
Lonoikamakahiki. We celebrate the season of Lono, a time of abundance as the rain brings to us that which sustains life.
Hāpuʻu is the tree fern. It translates as Breath of the Hill.
The hāpuʻu grows upward until it is too heavy to support the weight of its own fronds, at which point it cracks, splits, and falls. New shoots spring and again it grows towards the sun. Again, gravity pulls it back to the ground, and so on... the cycle continues, like long slow breathing.
We grow, and we fall. We climb the Puʻu, the hill, and reach its top, and the wind that blows across its peak breathes with us. The breath of the hill. Hāpuʻu.
When the rain comes down fast and heavy, it is not to dampen your spirit. It is to cleanse your soul. It is to feed the forest. It lays heavy on our branches, our limbs, our bodies, but we soak it in, let it feed us, nourish us.
Do not be burdened by the tears your cry that go unnoticed in the rain. Let them fall and quench the earth, for they are a gift of your love for that which hurts, dried and brittle. Soothe your gaze and walk along the path softened with rain. Breathe out your tightly wound fronds and cast the ease of shade onto those who wander beneath your canopy. Share the abundance you have gained, but do not give away your life to darkness and peril in deep caves where no light may shine your way. Do not frighten your roots from reaching out and intertwining with the forest, the other ferns are here for you for when you fall, breathing life into the forest, that sits upon the hill, calling upon the rains.
#fearanddesire #lono #laka #rainforest #treefern #hapuu #followyourfears
A wave of egrets return to waipi’o valley during the first light of the day.
I sit and watch their silent flight amongst the sounds of the valley awakening.
This valley is no stranger to housing life. It is deep, and ancient. The erosion of the oldest Volcano of Hawai’i island: Kohala.
When life returns to its home for rest, the cycle completes and begins again, rejuvenated. The motion of tides, the migration of birds. When we face conflicts in our human communities, is it because we are no longer observing our environment?
Sit. Watch. Listen. Answers await all around. Then do. Action. Karma. Perform.
#ecopsychology #taketimetolisten #egret #heron #migration #birdtheme
