Sha Sha Island and the Butterfly Tree

by Elinor Dickson

Georgian Bay l986

A brilliant blue sky shimmered in the clear, crystal waters of the Bay. I sat cross-legged on an old wooden dock waiting for Dan, the Indigenous marina owner, to taxi me to the Island, to Sha Sha, which as legend says, was once a gift to a Kanien'kehà:ka (Mohawk) princess.

Nature’s warm hum lulled me away from city busyness into a deeper, slower rhythm. I was content to wait, adjusting my inner clock to the harmony of nature. I was going to Sha Sha to meet Marion, and her delight in sharing the island became an experience that drew me deeper into work I still feel called to do. The outer clarity and energy of nature would penetrate to an inner clarity and connectedness within me. The island would become a container, a sacred place, that spoke of the origins of consciousness, of mystery, and of power.

From earliest times, convergences of rocks, trees, and water have been regarded as sacred places, the feminine container that calls down the divine spirit. Many Indigenous Canadians call the great glacial rocks that formed the Island the bones of Mother Earth, the moss her yielding flesh. In this place, Her body revealed many sacred spaces, but none riveted me more than the place Marion called “Star Chamber.” I stepped into this untamed space walled by huge vine-covered stones.(1) The ground was blanketed with ferns. Jutting up among the ferns were stone “steps” that sloped up to a large, natural rock altar framed by the roots of a tree. I stood there suddenly aware of my heart pounding, until Marion broke the silence by observing that some people could not stay in this place; it was too overwhelming. The sheer unremitting immensity of nature, even in a tranquil state, was awe inspiring.

In the face of the wild feminine energy of nature and the frenzied masculine energy that had fixed the rocks in place, there was a need to contain, to reveal a gentler meaning of relatedness. I felt a deep need to relate to that place, to clear away the encroaching dead leaves, moss, and vines. The following day, after working three to four hours on the book, I reminded Marion of our decision to return to “Star Chamber.” In silent communion, we labored in the afternoon sun with sticks and a broom, knowing what all ancient peoples instinctively knew, that the Great Mother must be honored.

The end of our concrete service, however, was to reveal the deeper, symbolic story written in the stones—archetypal images that immediately began to weave their own meaning in my mind. As in all sacred groves, the central focus was the altar proclaiming the durability of the divine presence, while the encircling trees revealed the dual nature of the divine in its changing and renewing form. Together they told of the immutable and the transitory, of the order and the chaos inherent in the divine presence. On the steps leading up to the altar was the “great frog rock,” while further down, as if waiting in the wings, was the “Madonna.” These symbols of fertility, chthonic and spiritual, are natural stone metaphors of the power and potential contained in the womb of the Mother. Looking up to the left of the altar were the aniconic symbols of masculine and feminine power, the shield and the great stone axe, the sacred union of sky god and earth goddess. The preserving, sheltering power of the feminine upholds the great axe with which the sun god will cut down the dualistic tree of knowledge. This ancient proclamation has not yet been fulfilled and so on the right, above the altar, it did not surprise me to find a great circular rock smashed and half embedded in the earth. The round table of totality and centeredness is broken. The Grail has not been found. Instead, there is fragmentation and fear.

“Star Chamber” is a sobering place with its silent message. It is to be wrestled with as people have always wrestled with the mystery and power that compels us to look within and beyond our incarnate existence for meaning. It contains the mystery, which both wounds us and calls us to the sacred power within that reveals our true identity.

I returned from the Island full of energy and with massive amounts of material that made perfect sense in my mind. However, it soon became clear to me that I needed an integrating symbol that would allow me to talk about the complex historical roots of the human journey now manifested in the unconscious content of the dreams of modern men and women. Three nights after my return, the Island, as I was to discover, gave me a final gift. That night I had the following dream:

I am in an ancient garden, and there is a tree in the center covered with verdant green leaves. The leaves are fresh, but they are rolled up into a kind of tube. My task is to carefully unroll each leaf and release the gold butterflies inside.

Immediately, I thought of the Tree of Life that permeates nearly all cultures, but after reflection, I knew this dream was about something else. Mythology has trees with flowers, jewels, and fruit, but nowhere did I come across butterflies. Four weeks later, I had an impulse to go into a neighborhood bookstore. I was not looking for anything in particular, but I was startled to come face to face with Lynn Andrew’s recent book, Jaguar Woman and the Wisdom of the Butterfly Tree. Immediately, I knew this was related to my sojourn on Sha Sha as this was an old native legend. The Butterfly Tree was the gift of the Great Spirit. It is the Tree Mother who suckled the first man and woman.

The sisters say that upon the branches of this tree are billions of leaves. Written upon these leaves is the destiny of each new person. So when a person is born, a leaf falls from the butterfly tree. The spirit light descends from one of these leaves and surrounds the egg at conception.

It is a person’s destiny to realize that we are one with the sacred tree. We are not just a leaf. We are light. And we are the light of Butterfly Tree, and all will return to it. All suffering is a result of a loss of knowledge of our origins. When we realize that we are the great tree, our state is happiness.(2)

To be enlightened, a person must climb to the top of the tree. In retelling her own odyssey of entering the void, Lynn tells of having to look into a mirror to face the most hideous reflection of herself, of having to face fear and to make of death an ally. At the top, she encounters Butterfly Woman at whose hands she must die and be reborn.

She dismembered my body, each part floating away, until only my spirit remained looking at this scene. I felt no pain and no fear. Somehow, I knew this was supposed to be. Then she brought the pieces of my body back down out of the sky and took crystals from the spring beside her. I watched her open places in my body and insert crystals in my heart, my head, all over. (3)

Such a myth recognizably speaks of individuation, the journey we must take toward our own inner integration and subsequently our integration into the world around us. This stands alongside all great hero/heroine myths that undertake the night sea journey to their real identity. In rereading Lynn’s journey, aside from obvious delight, I resonated deeply with at least three major insights. In the first place, the journey to the top, or to the core, is always an encounter with Sacred Power, with the Self. This always results in a death. The seeker must be prepared to wrestle with their own fear and darkness to withstand the Sacred Encounter. This is not a pleasant experience as many who are in analysis will attest too. However, it is necessary because only through having encountered ourselves fully do we have the courage to surrender, to let go without danger of being annihilated. The seeker must realize that who they thought they were, the competent, acceptable persona that the ego struggles to maintain, is an illusion.

A second aspect that resonated with my own experience is that in the death experience the body is transformed. In this case crystals are placed within both the heart and the head. Crystals, besides being pure, capture and focus energy. They are the best transmitters and receivers and have long been used as such, for example, in radios. Fear and desire reside in the body, and, until the body is listened to, our perception of ourselves and others is distorted. The crystals purify the feelings and, therefore, can connect us with others. They are the gift of the goddess.

A deep encounter with the Sacred is an experience of our own sacredness. If we become sufficiently empty, we are trusted with sacred power. Such is the turning point in all deep inner journeys. However, it is only the turning point. The seeker must return, must bring the treasure home. Sacred power involves a discerning responsibility towards oneself and consequently towards others. It involves being centered in one’s own life. There is always a temptation to be special in the eyes of others, to be “somebody”, rather than to risk relating from our own unique core.

A third resonance for me in Lynn’s vision is the necessity of establishing a true empowering feminine. The Butterfly Tree myth comes out of an earlier tribal society still closely connected to the earth, and for this reason, it has a particular truth to reveal to us at this time in our history. As Whistling Elk states: “We all come into this earth walk to heal our femaleness. Man or woman, it makes no difference.”

It is our understanding of the feminine container of life that must be transformed. This transformation takes a period of intense and focused awareness as all stories and myths attest. Although feminine and masculine energies constantly reveal each other, a conscious feminine must precede the revelation of a conscious masculine. Our inner sacred masculine must have a viable container within before it can be focused and directed outward in an empowering way. This is what the Grail legend tried to reinstate in the Middle Ages, the need to find and bring back in our culture the conscious feminine container. The wounded masculinity that has laid the earth desolate is urging us once more to go in search of the Grail, the Tree of Life, the Butterfly Tree, to find a conscious feminine power and wisdom centered enough to receive the masculine spirit that can take wisdom out into the world.

Sha Sha and the dream of the Butterfly Tree affirms for me my own task of finding within the verdant green of nature, in the body, the soul essence that needs to be released, not only for myself, but for all those I encounter. Folly would be to think that my ego could make that happen. I can only be aware, open, and surrendered to how that energy wants to work through me. I can only embrace the humility that T.S. Eliot reminds us is endless.

(1) There was a practice, embraced by the Indigenous people, of anyone visiting and tending to this space.
(2) Andrews, Lynn V. Jaquar Woman and the Wisdom of the Butterfly Tree, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1986, p. 192.
(3) Ibid., p. 13.

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Do Trees Have Egos?

by Elinor Dickson

The ego has received a lot of bad press lately and rightly so. It has massively overplayed its hand in human affairs. Since it is a term that I frequently use, I am having one of those, “rethink your assumptions” moments. This task became more urgent while reading Glenn Aparico Perry’s recent book Original Thinking.

Overall, his thesis is cogent, including the thorny, philosophical question as to the existence of an ego. He writes, “The ego may have originally been an illusory abstraction, but it has been invoked so many times by now it has been reified into existence. In other words, it exists because we believe it does. But whether real or not, the corollary effects of our belief in ego—fragmentation, anxiety, separation, loss—are undeniably real. Moreover, they are potentially devastating for self, society, and nature. In short, once we believe in an ego, we build a separate identity. And this identity reinforces the illusion that we are all somehow apart from each other and apart from nature.”(1) Certainly, Perry correctly reflects the current dilemma humanity finds itself in. The news gives us plenty of examples where the ego has totally swallowed the person, depriving them of any morality or any ability to see the bigger picture. Therefore, if we stop believing in an ego, will our problems begin to resolve themselves?

To further examine my assumptions, I went back to Carl Jung’s definition of ego as a complex that represents the conscious mind. It comprises the thoughts, memories, and emotions that we are aware of. Or as his colleague Edward Edinger would say, the ego is not the source of our thoughts, etc., it only notices that they have arrived. Tor Norretranders, in his book The User Illusion, points to the fact that the ego has a very narrow bandwidth in which it operates. Each second we only process sixteen of the eleven million bits of information our senses pass on to the brain. (The rest goes into the body, the carrier of the unconscious). Norretranders takes the word “ego” back to its original meaning from the Greeks, namely the “I”. There is some merit in this, as the “ego – I” is, perhaps, more easily understood as the self-referent point. I am here. I did such and such. It remains, however, that the “ego – I” is not the source of its thoughts or images. It needs to take its place in relationship to the Self, a term used by the Upanishads 3000 years ago and developed by Jung to designate the totality of both conscious and unconscious reality. We have always had a relationship with the Self—the spirit-filled world of our ancient ancestors, the gods and goddesses, carved, painted, and worshipped across millennia. These images became a way of understanding the power invested in Nature and how we could relate to such energy. However, in separating out from Nature to develop a sense of “I”, or ego, as the organ of perception, we became enamored with our own ability. The development of our ego was meant to be a phase, not a destiny. The question becomes, how do we approach the relationship between our ego and our Self today?

It was then that I came across the writings of Stephen Harrod Buhner, herbalist and researcher at the Foundation of Gaian Studies. For Buhner, “The ‘ego’ in its simplest definition is the part of us that monitors our survival. It monitors our environment for safety and initiates behaviors designed to keep us safe in response to what it is perceiving. It is, at root, a healthy and important part of us that wants to keep our self-organization intact. However, it has no morality. It decides behavior and initiates it without regard to consequences. … Underneath its expressions are the desire to protect the self-organized entity of which it is a part.”(2) That is, depending on our internalized values, the ego can present creative choices, or if it sees the world around it as predatory, it will react in kind. Knowing all that could (has) gone wrong by separating ourselves from the processes of Nature, I am currently writing a book that examines patriarchy as evolution’s great gamble.

Realizing that from our earliest beginnings, our experiences, stored in the phylogenetic memory of our species, formed the bedrock of the ego, a further question popped into my mind. Do trees have an ego? My friends rolled their eyes, but in the realm of emergent evolution, there is a case to be made. From light to particles, to atoms, to molecules, to plants and animals, each evolutionary point is taken up to the next level until we arrive at humans. Whatever conscious abilities we have had to be there in an innate capacity from the beginning.

Once, while sailing in the north Pacific, I had the opportunity to listen to recordings of whales in conversation. Whales use their distinct and rhythmic language to track and inform each other of their current position and circumstances. My curiosity about consciousness in nature deepened when, in 2016, I read forester Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel and How They Communicate. I was awed by the fact that “trees evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony.”(3) On May 1, 2024, I opened the Atlantic magazine that featured an article by Zoe Schlanger entitled “The Mysteries of Plant Intelligence.” It is a review of the current studies on the consciousness and memory of plants and how they communicate.

The ego was shaped by our need for survival, but thinking of nature in this way, I’ve come to realize that in the nonhuman realms, the emerging ‘ego’ and its role in survival extend to include 1) community, 2) caring, and 3) play. For example, in terms of community, microscopic fungal filaments join the hair-like root tips of trees to form a mycorrhizal network, sometimes called “the wood-like web.” The biggest, oldest trees have the most fungal connections and are often called the “mother” trees. That is, having deep roots they draw up water and make it available for the young saplings. Often overshadowed, the saplings lack sunlight to photosynthesize so the larger trees “feed” them by pumping sugar into their roots.

In terms of caring, the vast amount of work done on animal interactions and communication, such as the work of Jane Goodall and many others, shows how creatures in the wild care for each other. Elephants will bury a dead newborn or share mothering responsibilities, etc. Of course, the search for food, or other instances of survival can seem aggressive to us, but I have come to the sorry conclusion that only humans slaughter their own species by the millions. Morality is bypassed completely.

Lastly, let’s consider play. Humor that flows into genuine laughter, even at oneself, is the sign of a healthy human. When the source of “laughter” is the ridicule of another, human connection is lost. Animals not only survive, but they also play. One needs only to think of dolphins, or horses, or dogs. Play is often a substitute for aggression or the preparation for survival. Like all tensions, it is, perhaps, the intent within the action that leaves room for survival and “creative” options.

Returning to my assumptions about ego, what I see in these instinctual capacities is a latent ego that acknowledges the Self. For the most part, plants and animals appear to exist with an innate ability to live in a community. Survival is attached to something greater than themselves. That is, as creation evolves, we are seeing throughout nature the roots of a larger circumference that humans have come to recognize as the totality of a person’s identity. From Shamanic times to the 14th century, we believed in a metaphysical background greater than ourselves. Certainty was invested in a transcendent world separate from us. Shaken by the Great Plague and endless religious wars, by the time of the Enlightenment our worldview began to change. The collective ego tightened its grip on the encroaching uncertainty of survival by adopting a position based on scientific materialism, determinism, and fundamentalism.

Since our ego was meant to be the witness to the evolutionary process, the chaos and anxiety many people are feeling today can be seen in two ways—both of which are true. First, we are living through the collapse of the patriarchal paradigm with its largely monotheistic, hierarchal structures based on power as strength. Even as we double down on old “strongman” structures, the current chaos leaves our ego, individually and collectively, feeling numb and out of control. Depression, drugs, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and violence begin to take over.

Inversely, amid the chaos, many people see the immense collective field within us trying to break through to an expanded consciousness. We continue to need our ego, but one that has the humility to open to a greater reality—a healthy ego that is the servant and not the Master. The ego that presents to the brain the images and thoughts that fill our daily lives must risk opening itself to the creative processes of Nature if we are to continue to evolve. That is, it must expand its understanding of “survival.”

What happens in the collective realm creates upheaval in the personal realm. Conversely, how we respond in our personal lives can, in turn, influence our collective reality. This realization led me to frame my own journey within a fresh perspective. I began to look at the major shifts in my life, when they appeared, and what resulted from them. Major shifts or upheavals in life can come in many ways: illness, the death of a loved one, or an unexpected task we are given. Times of chaos and upheaval in our waking world are often countered with an opposing response in our hidden collective world, expressed through unexpected encounters with people, nature, books, or dreams that challenge us to change the way we think and feel. If we can reframe the upheavals in our lives, however they come to us, the results can lead to an expanded and deeper understanding of the meaning of our life. With a new awareness, we can begin to open to the mythical world of the soul, that place where time and timelessness, matter and spirit, intersect. When we do so, the images and ideas that the ego presents to the brain support the language of creative imagination and metaphor. Science and poetry come closer together. Systems and information theory talk of relatedness, co-operation, interdependence, and synergy. Process replaces progress. Duality becomes paradox. Our machine-like, time-bound world gives way to words such as presence and resonating. Decisions about survival are seen in relationship to the whole, not just the individual “I” or the tribe to which they belong. As we move beyond the impasse of our current worldview, we are realizing that this is the expanded, inclusive role the ego was meant to play.

(1) Perry, Glenn Aparico. Original Thinking, North Atlantic Books, California, 2023, P. 223
(2) Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth, Bear & Company, Rochester Vermont and Toronto, Canada, pp. 486-487.
(3) “Do Trees Talk to Each Other?” Smithsonian Magazine, by Richard Grant with photographs by Diane Markosian, March 2018.

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Authentic Dialogue Part 1: Remembering John Howard Griffin

by Elinor Dickson

Aware of the trajectory of my soul’s journey through dreams and deep bodily resonance, I often ask myself: Is there a new consciousness of interrelatedness and love manifesting in the world? On a collective, transpersonal level, has the water begun to flow? Has Yeats’ rough beast reached Bethlehem? While pondering these questions, a memory presented itself dating back to the early summer of l980.

I am sitting in a quiet, dimly lit corner of a large lounge on the farm north of Toronto with writer John Howard Griffin. Watching the sun slip beneath the horizon seemed more than a metaphor as he was very ill and, indeed, died two or three months later at the age of sixty.

Prior to World War II, John, a tall Texan, found himself at the University of Poitiers on a music scholarship. At nineteen he enrolled in the Ecole de Medicine, but his studies were interrupted by the War. As a medic in the French Resistance, John helped smuggle many Austrian Jews to safety. The last 39 months of the war he spent in the U.S. Army Air Corp and was decorated for bravery. Injuries sustained in the war left him blind for ten years and this time of looking inward resulted in his first two novels. Pained by the treatment of black Americans, John thought, as a writer, the best way to bring attention to this horrific injustice, would be to turn himself into a “black man” through dyes and medication. The experiences of violence and degradation he suffered daily in the Southern States during 1959-1960 led to his ground-breaking book, Black Like Me. John’s great empathy for humanity was balanced by a deep spiritual understanding, reflected in his close friendship with the iconic contemplative monk Thomas Merton, whose family asked him to write Merton’s biography. Dismayed by the atrocities of war and the violence around him, John went on to develop a leadership protocol based on “authentic dialogue.” He hoped this process would cut through the posturing and manipulation that so often passes for genuine discussion in the political arena.

The evening we spent together was part of a weeklong gathering to explore the possibility of founding a University of Peace. This was John’s dream, and he thought Canada would be the best place for this to happen. Participants included professors of varying disciplines, social activists, economists, and political and religious leaders from all persuasions. I remember Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s economic advisor being there, and with all the numbers in hand, he demonstrated how we could solve many of the world’s problems. For example, if every country cut 10% of its military spending, trillions could be freed up for new economic and social structures beneficial to everyone. Sadly, the political will is not there—not then, not today.

What captured my imagination at the time was John’s vision for bringing young, potential leaders together to engage in authentic dialogue. With hindsight, I realize that such an endeavor would involve psychology in the form of self-knowledge. Unconscious scripts play an enormous role in our interactions, and I could help in bringing that dimension of his vision to fruition. Such a university was not to be. With wonderful intentions and energy, the social activists turned to specific projects, yet I always felt that John had a broader vision in mind. I hosted one or two meetings at my office with some of the principal participants, but the energy flagged. Looking back, perhaps we did not quite grasp the vision, or we were lacking in commitment to make something more substantial happen. Maybe it was not the right time.

The reason my conversation with John came back to me was because he was truly standing at the edge of time. While I sensed no depression or even any personal concern in John, he was struggling with deep despair about the world and our future, which he poured into his vision of a University of Peace. Despair is not defeat. He asked me why I continued to have hope for the future of human beings or even the earth itself. I remember saying that I had little doubt that the earth would survive and heal, since it is nature, not humanity, who sets the bottom line. The future of humanity was more doubtful. In our very bare bones conversation that evening, I said that my hope for humanity lay in the fact that the night had not become dark enough to force us to change. The light shines in the darkness, but sometimes it must be very dark to see the light both in the night sky and within us.

John had, I believe, come face to face with the demon in the dark recesses of humanity’s psyche many times. He had been blinded in war, spat upon, and persecuted in the streets of the South, having to seek asylum from the Ku Klux Klan for himself and his family in Mexico. On a personal level, John had transformed the demon within because, like Nelson Mandela, he had come out of the dark with love in his heart. This is the journey we all need to make, the responsibility and commitment we need to assume. But there remain huge transpersonal energies to be faced that are particularly dangerous because we do not recognize their presence.

Twelve years ago, I awoke with a dream about Christine Amanpour, a very insightful international correspondent, and decided to do an “experiment” on the bodily impact of reading the Saturday newspaper. Horrible as it was to read about innocent people sacrificed to the age-old tribal gods of war and the naked grasping for power, or the systematic rape of women fleeing with their children from starvation in Somalia, that day it was articles on climate change, the world food supply, and the large-scale displacement of populations reminiscent of the 14th century, that caught my attention. The International Energy Association announced that global greenhouse gas emissions hit a record high that year and threaten to precipitate a further catastrophic rise in temperature. Since that day, we have witnessed extreme flooding, wildfires, drought, and hurricane force winds, often in places where this has rarely occurred before. Another degree rise in temperature and the accelerated melting of the polar ice caps could lead to a twenty-foot rise in the sea level which would be disastrous. Not surprising, the 2010 newspaper contained another article, a report by Oxfam, predicting the food and water shortages that are overtaking us now. In desperation, the environmental scientists had come to the point of urging civil disobedience to shake up governments and industry. This urging may soon be redundant as food and water shortages will spontaneously spark anarchy. With our technological skill, when it comes to finding clean drinking water in forty years, will there be an App for that?

Today, in 2023, I watch the sun retreat and wonder if the world has become dark enough yet? Unless we face the demons that devour us from within, we will, individually or collectively, continue to see the world and each other through the chinks of fear or greed as people grasp for power. We will continue to move along a trajectory toward self-destruction. The poet T.S. Eliot once wrote that “humankind cannot bear very much reality,” and it seems that for many people today, reality has become too much. Those who cannot face reality are easily seduced by the Father of Lies and his minions who feed their fear and grievance with conspiracy theories and illusions. Currently, we watch as any hope of authentic dialogue devolves into a political culture based on lies, hate, and violence to solve differences. Even language is being perverted in the cause of personal gain and vengeance over perceived enemies. Seven years ago, “woke” meant to be awakened, to see the light, intellectually and spiritually. Today, it is used to ban books, prevent action to minimize climate change, pervert common sense health measures and demonize people and culture in general. In totalitarian regimes from Russia to Myanmar, any semblance of truth or authentic dialogue has been shattered. Who will sit on top of the power pyramid is irrelevant. Being a puppet ruler in a divided, poisoned wasteland makes no sense.

Only when we truly learn to love ourselves, to heal the wounds within, will the water begin to flow with the discernment and compassion necessary to bring the world around us into a creative unity. My hope is in the many people across the globe (including politicians who do have a vision) who see that we live in an integral relationship with all of nature, who want to bring a greater unity into the world, but for whom lies and manipulation remain a formidable foe. Since “being awakened” has been bastardized, perhaps, “authentic dialogue” presents itself as a rallying point for those who have the courage and foresight to engage the “other.”

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Authentic Dialogue Part 2: Authenticity and Becoming the Artist of Your Life

by Elinor Dickson

On February 17, 2023, a headline in the New York Post read “America Longing for Authenticity.” On March 14th, Stephanie Ruhle, senior business analyst and host of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, affirmed the way to success. “Authenticity is key. It’s not sustainable to be anybody but yourself. Be excellent and build your relationships.” For a culture increasingly based on manipulation, misinformation, and illusion, in 2023, the need for an antidote was emerging.

Authentic is such a solid word, equally grounding and uplifting. As an adjective we use it to define our most beautiful and treasured things—an authentic Renoir, an authentic diamond, an authentic Ming Dynasty vase. It proclaims something as genuine, original, unduplicated. When we apply it to a person, it has layers of all those meanings. It designates someone who is what they say they are, backed by the consistency of their speech and action over time. We often experience such people as authentic as they resonate with an intrinsic sense of grace and goodness. We all seek to present such a positive image to the world, yet with any degree of self-reflection, we know such a polished mirror has a few cracks in it.

People rarely think of themselves as unique, or as a work of art. In fact, we make a mockery of it. When someone is antagonistic to society, we say “boy, he/she is a work of art.” Or we single out the more ego-driven among us, those who wrap themselves in an aura of being special. Being special is only an authentic state when you are under five years of age. Just being different is not being unique. Real uniqueness, for me, brings up the artistry of Michelangelo. When I first saw the sculpture of David at the Galleria, I was mesmerized by the flow of his lifelike musculature right down to the veins in his hands. My first thought was not, “he must have spent a lot of time at the gym.” The beauty and unassuming power of this sculpture depicts a nobility that comes from disegno, understood in the Renaissance not only as the discipline and skill required to create fine art but as the essence instilled into the work. In his lifetime, Michelangelo’s ability and passion for making the invisible visible, particularly through the human body, was seen as an echo of the divine. His images speak to the beauty and the possibility inherent in human life.

From the beginning of time, we have expressed ourselves through physical alteration and adornment. The modern world is obsessed with appearance, with diet, exercise, creams, dyes, injections, and surgery to look fitter, younger—to project a desired image. All of this can be fine. I confess I only turned grey when Covid made getting to the hairdresser impossible. It is when we base our self-worth on appearance that we miss the whole point.

An authentic human must practice disegno to become the artist of their own life. To recover the essence of who we are requires looking inward to release the fixed, stereotypic ways of thinking and feeling imposed by the world around us. Growing up within a specific culture, family, or peer group shapes our view of the world and, unless examined, becomes an unquestioned way of being. Our beliefs, values, and behavior become less insightful and more habitual—for example, voting liberal or conservative because our parents and grandparents voted that way is a phrase commonly heard. Whether we are raised in a supportive family or immersed in a more traumatic upbringing, our challenge lies in the ability to live our own lives, to feel at home in our own bodies. As the world is rooted in relationship, we are each called to reflect a unique aspect of the whole. It can take a lifetime of reflection and discernment to move away from our childish need to be special and embrace the fullness of our uniqueness. Only then can we open without fear or favor to those around us. Engaging others in authentic dialogue, hearing and exploring their reality without defensiveness is fundamental to building communities, institutions, and economic systems that foster transformation and transparency.

Stemming from his work in theoretical physics, David Bohm came to concern himself with the need for authenticity in human relationships. He is well known for his writing on the explicate and implicate order, the world we see materialized around us and a deeper enfolded source of undivided wholeness. This unseen world is in constant flux, holding all the patterns that give form to our images. Other scientists refer to this hidden source as the quantum plenum or the zero-point-field, while analytic psychologists call it the collective unconscious.

This connection to the unseen world was the foundation of Bohm’s understanding of authenticity. He worked with groups of twenty to forty people, moving them from individual opinions or assumptions to a place of participatory consciousness. Convictions, arguments, and persuasion speak to a win-lose default with no possibility of arriving at a more creative position. In Bohm’s words, “The object of dialogue is not to analyse things, or to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather it is to suspend your opinions and … [then] listen to everybody’s opinions and suspend them. If we can see what all our opinions mean, then we are sharing a common content even if we don’t agree entirely.”(1) The suspension of our currently held opinions allows for something new to come into consciousness, a further unfolding of the implicate realm that can bring in its wake new possibilities for the current impasse. Ideally, this is how any group should proceed, and as Bohm pointed out, it is the way democracy is meant to work.

In the decades since his death, Bohm’s work on authentic dialogue continues and has been taken up in new and extended ways within government, business, and educational structures. My interest in Bohm led me to the writings of Peter Senge and C. Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturers at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Joseph Jaworski, Cofounder of the Global Leadership Initiative; and Betty Sue Flowers, the Director of the Johnson Presidential Library and a distinguished teacher. Their 2004 book Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future is based on a series of conversations between them out of which a model for leadership evolved that they call U Theory. This model invites people to move down one side of the U starting with the need to DOWNLOAD the past patterns that have directed their lives. It recognizes that many people do not really live their own lives but often repeat the stereotypic scripts of their family and/or culture. This first step of becoming aware of ingrained patterns is a big one involving serious self-reflection. The second step, SEEING, encourages people to look with fresh eyes at other possibilities beyond the scripts that have shaped them. These new possibilities lead to a third step, SENSING. Here, deep resonance and imagination within the emerging field allows the participants to embody a new perspective.

In U theory, the first three steps invite the participants to expand their conscious bandwidth to a greater field of possibilities. At the bottom of the U, a two-fold process called PRESENCING, or connecting to Source, occurs. The ego, now able to relinquish its need to control the environment around it can “Let Go,” allowing new ideas and differing perspectives to emerge through an ever-deepening fertilization from the unconscious realms. The participant is now free to “Let Come,” allowing for the infusion of fresh insight and new solutions to emerge from the deeper, archetypal energies within us.

The first upward step called CRYSTALLIZATION is where vision and intention come into play. This greater field of consciousness begins to guide our actions. The second upward step integrates head, heart, and hand and through this embodiment the individual, or group, becomes a vessel allowing a still larger field to emerge. The authors call this PROTOTYPING. The final stage, called PERFORMING, allows our decisions or actions to come from an understanding of the whole.(2)

Over the years, I arrived at the conclusion that if any shift from hierarchical structures to a process-based ecological network is to occur, at least two changes are essential. First, we must reconnect with the greater field of potential creativity within and beyond ourselves. Secondly, the ego, as the organ of consciousness, must become adapted and more flexible to mediate the influx of a greater circumference of consciousness. Emerging from our desire for more authenticity in the world, the introduction of a process that helps bring these changes into our institutional culture is an encouraging development. While using modern language, the authenticity of U Theory resonates within me as it mirrors both the archetypal descent and ascent model at the core of many spiritual traditions and the great evolutionary pattern that science is discovering.

Authentic dialogue, the ability to relate to the other in a creative way, requires that each person must engage in becoming an authentic version of themselves. The river of thought/meaning that Bohm saw flowing between the banks of opinion must include our instinct for life, our feeling, imagination, and both symbolic and critical thinking as the fuel of our evolutionary journey. These are the attributes we must embody to become the artist of our life—to become an authentic presence in the world.

(1) Bohm, David. On Dialogue, PDF, Schouten & Nelissen, p. 7.
(2) Additional references: Otto Scharmer & Katrin Kaufer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies. Applying Theory U to Transforming Business, Society, and Self. Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership and Source: The Inner Path o Knowledge Creation.

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The Plight of Men in a Patriarchal World and Why Men Should Celebrate Women’s Liberation

by Elinor Dickson

Many of the gifts, intellectual and spiritual, that I have received during my lifetime have been from extraordinary men. Yet, fifty years ago, I remember the moment when the rage of millions of women coursed through my body—the release of centuries of suppression and suffering. The misogyny continues, and humanity will never fulfil its destiny as the Wise Species while half of our species is desecrated.

Today, patriarchy as a paradigm with its largely monotheistic, hierarchical power structures seems to be having a resurgence in one moment and collapsing in on itself in the next, leaving many men in a precarious position, oscillating between confusion, shame, and anger. As patriarchy fights through its last breaths, and toxic masculinity tries to revive it, a pathway is opening for men to experience their wholeness—perhaps for the first time.

To say that women will lead the way may strike the reader as sexist, but the fact is that women’s emancipation began over a hundred years ago, while men’s emancipation is only beginning. Just over a hundred years ago women were not considered to be persons and, therefore, did not have the right to vote or own property. In fact, they were seen as property. Now that the educational playing field has levelled, women have excelled. They are exceeding men in university degrees and overtaking them is many professions, including scientists, professors, doctors, politicians, journalists, and community leaders to name a few. Although equality has a way to go, today in North America, almost 50% of women are earning more than the average male.

Beyond the obvious awareness of how technology has changed the traditional job market for men, there are many new, and often better, jobs available based on that same technology. However, even when training is available, men often resist stepping into new roles. In his New York Times article in Sept. 2022, author David Brook, introduced me to the research contained in Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, published that year.(1) What these men propose is that the real problem for men today resides in two, not unrelated, areas. First, there is a huge motivational gap between young men and women, and secondly, there is a relational gap, particularly among men.

Researching the advancement of young women over young men, Reeves found that, across different situations, young men had the same opportunities as women, but they did not take them. When he talked to men about this fact, the men admitted that women are “just more motivated, work harder, and plan ahead better.”

This obvious motivational gap between the sexes recalls studies supporting economic growth in what we call third world countries. Although education for girls was almost nonexistent in their villages, when grants for economic development were given to girls and women, the results were uniformly the same. They became empowered economically, as were their households, their communities, and, ultimately, their governments. It seems that while men may be the maker of tools, women are the makers of community, and in the end, it is a sense of community that motivates. Community at its roots is not only a place of shared gifts and creativity but also a place of shared vulnerability. The feeling that binds people together is rooted in something greater than oneself, an underlying energy that is inclusive of people and nature.

Typically, men, whatever their status, have projected the needs of their souls onto the women around them, as a burden for women to carry both socially and spiritually. Today, many women choose not to bear that burden any longer, leaving men to fill a gap within and between them. Typically, men talk about things ranging from the stock market to sports, depending on their interest, but seldom share inner scenarios, business or social. They seldom challenge each other to look at themselves or embody the higher potential of what it means to be human. The emerging need for more heartfelt relationships between men is the crack that is letting the light in, as many are beginning to reevaluate what it means to be a man.

Alexander Beiner’s Substack article in 2023 entitled “Broken Men in a Broken World” speaks of a deeper level of healing as men begin to see how patriarchy has seduced them. Given its hierarchal structure, the impossible climb to the top brings with it all types of shadow material born of the need to deny our real thoughts and feelings. The creativity that comes from the diversity of our gifts gives way to a mass-produced conformity that undermines us from within. Women in the past 100 years have largely articulated their suppression, while men are only starting to. Men are beginning to realize that under the domination model they have been used, for every Emperor or General there were millions of foot soldiers, for every Grand Duke there were millions of serfs. In a hierarchical model, the carrot held out to men was the dream that they could work their way up the ladder and be rewarded with better material circumstances and/or have power over persons below them. Of course, as head of the household, men ruled over wife and family.

The image of man was idealized in the Greek God of beauty and reason, Apollo, and in Michaelangelo’s David. These commanding images of manhood were described by playwright William Shakespeare: “Man, how noble in reason! Infinite in faculty! in form how moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!”(2) I doubt the man coming off the line at GM thinks of himself in these terms, but it is a whisper that has blown through the vicissitudes of our culture for centuries. Over time women, and now men, are seeing that the hero as we have constructed him is invested in his persona, not in his person. This carefully constructed persona manifested in someone like Donald Trump captures and allows his followers to see themselves in his illusory projection as the superman. On the other hand, if the imposed standards men judge themselves against—money, success, virality—are not met, then suicide, drugs, or violence seems preferable. This choice was captured in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. When Willy Loman commits suicide, at the funeral his oldest son, Biff, says, “He had the wrong dream. He never knew who he was.”

In my experience as a psychologist working with men, the heroic journey required at this time is to finally deal with “mother.” We are bound by what we fear. Rather than face their fear, men have repeatedly poured out their rage against it. The cruelty and violence of men towards their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters is well documented throughout human history to the present day. In a supposedly “civilized” country like the United States, the 45th President has been convicted of sexual abuse, a technical term for rape. He, and seemingly many of his followers, think this is inconsequential as history points to the fact that powerful men have always been able to “grab women by the pussy.” For many men, this is a symbol of power, but as women know, and men are beginning to realize, it is indicative of a mindset that leads to our mutual destruction.

Following women’s emancipation over the past hundred years, the recognition and undertaking of men’s emancipation is vital to establishing a future based on the pulsation of life. Men are beginning to discover the natural man within themselves. This is not the erratic chaos generator sprouting hate and power over others. Rather, it is that part of man that resonates with the laws of nature, including the feminine capacity for weaving community.

As women began to honor their own feminine depths, as a psychologist, I was amazed at the number of dreams in these women that erupted in images of the “natural man.” I have written and spoken about this phenomenon many times. In these dreams, a tree splits open, and a glorious man appears, or a joyous male stranger appears and takes over the boring lecture of a male professor—his words becoming musical notes floating off the page. The brute or the Nazi that used to appear in women’s dreams telling them they are “not good enough” has changed. The inner voice is no longer that of a bully but a lover. When a woman stands in her own truth as a person both loved and capable of loving, she comes into her full power. As her natural instincts are inclusive, she is not vindictive or withholding. This is why men should celebrate the liberation of the feminine. While appearing in their dreams, many women are waiting for this man of strength and compassion to appear in the real world, a man who can meet her face to face.

Working with men in analysis, only a few persevered when it came to dealing with their inner feminine. They would dream of a little girl sitting in a bin behind the furnace, or a young girl they threw into the trash can or buried in the woods. In dreams, these images of the young feminine symbolize an image of their neglected soul. When men get in touch with their unconscious misogyny, it is often so at odds with their image of themselves that they can’t accept it. “This is silly,” they say on the way out the door. Those who have the courage to persevere in the Grail search to recover the lost feminine container of regeneration begin to experience a rich vitality and connectedness to the life around them. Today, many men are working in groups with other men to get in touch with this “wild” side of themselves—to become whole again.

Masculinity and patriarchy are not the same thing. Women who have evolved beyond patriarchy are those who honor their own feelings and intellect, their feminine and their masculine energy. They are compassionate with themselves and with all around them. They are also assertive without being aggressive. Similarly, you can recognize the men who have embraced this wholeness by their clarity of purpose and their rootedness and care for nature, for women, and life itself.

The configuration of a more conscious relationship within and between women and men is not fully manifest, but it is essential in making the radical leap to a consciousness that transcends gender, organized religion, or any hierarchical structure used to divide us. Kamala Harris, a woman of strength, intellect, and compassion emerged as a candidate for President of the United States and was joyfully embraced by large numbers of both men and women. Due to the inclusive nature of her values, she remains a symbol of the possibility for a new relationship between women and men beyond all the old stereotypes that, for centuries, have underlined so much hatred and self-serving oppression. However, as it became clear that the full potential of her candidacy would go unfulfilled, I could feel the contraction in my body, as did many others. It seems the fear of community and equality has once more given way to a toxic masculinity in both men and women who cling to the old power structures patched together with lies, hate, and greed.

Centuries ago, the ancient yin-yang symbol gave us an image of the complementarity of masculine and feminine energies essential in the creative process of bringing life into the world. Given that as a species we are on the brink of extinction, the urgency for women and men in this moment is to bring the feminine attributes for building community back into psychic awareness. If that happens, individually and collectively, the creative, empowering energy will be right there!

(1) Richard Reeves is a fellow at the Brookings Institute and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
(2) Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2. Of course, having stated this, Hamlet goes back to his brooding, nihilistic stance.

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Sacred Masculinity

by Elinor Dickson

Sacred masculinity is a term gaining relevance in the 21st century, perhaps as an antidote to the spreading toxicity made evident by a crumbling patriarchal world order. Masculinity and patriarchy are not identical concepts and to understand what masculinity was meant to be, and how we got to our current impasse, we must start at the beginning—with the mythic 4000-year-old tale of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh, the King of Urek, has a recurring dream that he takes to his mother to interpret. The dream, she tells her son, says that he will meet a stranger, a man from the wilderness equal to himself. They will become fast friends and together they will do great things. Enkidu, protector of the natural world and the feminine, hearing of the excesses of the King, particularly when it came to women, enters the city and forces a meeting. The fight is fierce but, respecting the opposites they possess, the two become fast friends. Eventually, by cultivating Enkidu’s ego, Gilgamesh convinces Enkidu to abandon his instinctual connection to life and to help him kill the Spirit of Nature and cut down the forest.

To preserve the matrilinear world rooted in nature, the Goddess Inanna presents herself to Gilgamesh in all Her beauty. She tries to seduce him but, by this time, both men rebel against the life–death–rebirth cycles of nature. The Bull of Heaven, Inanna’s powerful consort, comes to her rescue only to be killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The men throw its genitals into Her face while keeping the horns, the symbol of battle, for themselves. This scene captures the great mutation from a matriarchal world to a patriarchal one. While both men free themselves from the recurring cycles of nature, fertility is exchanged for aggression. This act of separation from nature and the feminine cycle of regeneration has, however, an unexpected consequence: the death of Enkidu. With the death of Enkidu, the man of nature, Gilgamesh, and humanity, come face to face with their own mortality. Having stepped out of the natural, cyclical world and into a linear, causal world, we are left to struggle with the dualistic nature of life and death, good and evil—all the tension of opposites. Separated from our instinctual identity represented by Enkidu, Gilgamesh, in his desperate search for immortality, undertakes a journey to find the wise old couple, the survivors of the Great Flood. As they are initiating him into the spiritual realm through meditation, unfortunately, this man of action falls asleep. Still unawakened, we have not found a way to transform the dualistic world we find within ourselves. Projection has become the major method of dealing with good and evil, life and death. The differences we conjure up between “us and them” lies at the heart of all wars, and, over millennia, nature and women have carried the weight of our unresolved evil.

We can only speculate what course history might have taken if Gilgamesh and Enkidu had become integrated, if the balance with nature and feminine energy had been retained as part of the new paradigm that was taking shape. The paradox remains. While we had to step out of the unconscious pull of nature to develop a sense of our individuality, today, we realize that without consciously embracing nature’s innate force of regeneration, we have created an inner wasteland, a dry, cracked desert comprised of all the repressed vitality that connects us to life. Denied its creative expression, this repressed energy gives birth to the beast or monster that undermines us from within.

In the dreams of women who have struggled to find their true voice and break free from a male-dominated worldview, the long-repressed natural man is rising out of the dark, rich earth bringing motion and fluidity into a world thirsting for new life.

A woman dreams:

I am standing in an ancient forest grove when my eyes are drawn to a huge moss-covered stone. Suddenly, the ground begins to shake under my feet, and the stone slowly moves aside. Like coming out of a tomb, a large, earthy, man arises. I am transfixed by his numinosity.

In the dreams of other women, this archetypal male energy comes out of a deep well or from within a cave, or an earthquake splits the earth open. He emerges as from the birth canal. The dreamer is transformed by the light in his eyes, or he takes her into an embrace, and she feels all her energy being released out into the world.

This embodied masculinity, so needed in our day, is also being born in men who have honored their own feminine capacity to receive life. A middle-aged businessman having confronted his mother complex, his inner Inanna, dreams he is standing alone on a hill overlooking the village below. While at peace, he feels cut off from any real vitality. A large man whose singing seems to float in the air, comes up the path toward him. He invites the dreamer to join the vibrant life below.

Nobel prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli had dreams of a dark-skinned stranger, that he called the Persian, who wants to be admitted into the University. This Dionysian-like masculine energy wants to teach him the music, the interconnected flow of life, not just the notes. Pauli knew eros and logos belonged together, but in his day, in the face of scientific materialism, he was afraid of harm to his reputation. Now this repressed eros vitality is bursting forth.

A woman university professor dreams:

Out of a cast of thousands singing and dancing, a larger-than-life man emerges and begins to sing all the bravura bass arias from Messiah. “Let us break their bonds asunder,” “for he is like a refiner’s fire.” He is glorious!

Enkidu, the man of nature, is once more approaching with the possibility of making the masculine energy whole. The 12th century mystic Hildegard of Bingen saw Adam’s fall as a failure of eros—a failure to embrace the beauty and grace of creation.(1) When eros is not cultivated and honored, it turns to lust, anarchy, and all forms of chaos. Reason is easily undermined by irrational energy. From Enkidu to Dionysius, the return of this vital energy, aligned with the earth and the laws of nature, is a necessary step needed to reestablish the intersection of eros and logos, sexuality and spirituality. From the depths of the unconscious, the stage is being set for the sacred masculine to emerge.

Archetypal, sacred energy, presented as either masculine or feminine, goes beyond race or gender. It belongs to an inner reality in each of us where it must find its proper expression if we are to escape the 4000-year cycle of violence that is always ready to consume us.

Free from listening to the totalitarian voices within or without, after 4000 years, women are beginning to consciously honor their sovereign role as the creative matrix of the world and the source of regeneration. Embodied in their feminine energy, women can set aside the negative voice whispering from within, telling them they are “not equal,” and receive the sacred energy of an integrated masculine that can take their creativity and healing ability out into the world.

Equally, men are beginning to work with deep psychic courage to face their unresolved mother complex and their own repressed feminine. After centuries of being told “it’s a man’s world,” it is often difficult for men to recognize and confront the unconscious wound the hierarchical, patriarchal worldview has left in their souls. In March 2022, we witnessed this patriarchal worldview projected into the reality of mothers and babies bombed and terrorized in Ukraine—where once more, as in past centuries of war, authoritarian male energy lives out its deep-seated hatred of life itself.

The call for a sacred masculine has never been more urgent. We can imagine the qualities we want from our inner/outer masculine: strength, decisiveness, action, and empathy, qualities that support the feminine creative matrix, the interconnected vibration of love needed to move into a unified worldview. To embody this new way of relating is the challenge of humanity in our time.

In 2023, I glimpsed this service to life reflected in the face of a Ukrainian soldier evacuating elderly, frail women from a bombed-out nursing home. Respect and love were tangible in his face and in his touch. I saw women coming together and risking their lives to stand against male repression in India, Saudi Arabi, Iran, and Afghanistan. This is not only about their right to life, but these women’s voices are also pointing the way for men to embrace a more life-giving worldview. Over the past several decades, we have witnessed competent and compassionate women and men who had found their authentic voice, taking positions of leadership, ready to speak truth to power in the service of all life. Wherever you find action rooted in love you are witnessing the sacred masculine.

(1) Fox, Matthew. Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times. Namaste Publishing, Vancouver, Canada, 2012.

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Medusa and the Post-Modern World

by Elinor Dickson

In 1758, we proclaimed ourselves Homo Sapiens, The Wise Species, and 265 years later we are facing possible extinction. What happened to bring about this drastic change of fortune?

Following the Great Plague in the 14th century, humanity slowly lost its connection to the dynamic pulse of creation. It seems we wandered into the cave of Medusa with her crown of writhing snakes, and she turned us into stone. Physicians like Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey dissected corpses leading to the view of humans as machines with pumping hearts and miles of blood vessels along with miles of “wiring” that governed our reflexes and all movement. Isaac Newton proposed a universe designed like a giant clock, that once set in motion would operate on its own. Inevitably the Machine Age blossomed into the Industrial Revolution and a worldview rooted in scientific materialism and dogmatic ideologies. Our limited consciousness performed with great efficiency within the parameters of a defined and literal world. In search of equilibrium, the Industrial Revolution constellated the Romantic Movement and a return to nature, but from stone axes to quantum computers, to a small machine that in 2023 created a star, our prevailing role as toolmakers has prevailed.

Influenced by the brutality of two World Wars, during 1960-1970 French philosopher, Michel Foucault, wrote three books that would establish him as a pillar of postmodernism. Foucault recognized that we had lost our connection to the natural, timeless world and that human beings needed to be liberated. In a recent essay in The Atlantic, January/February 2023, poet, and literary critic Adam Kirsch links “liberation” in Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) to two current movements on the future of the human species who see liberation as extinction.

Today, the Wise Species, is looking more like an aspirational term than a reality. Underneath all our achievements, a hidden pathology has been constellating a trajectory towards death. Images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain locked in our memory and leave us anxious when impotent leaders like Putin, and Kim Jong Un threaten the world with their phallic missiles.

Beyond the looming shadow of nuclearism, another apocalyptic scenario is already upon us: the collapse of earth’s ecological systems upon which we depend. While many people have dedicated themselves to reversing this course, for others it looks more and more hopeless. One response to this deep, pervasive crisis gave rise to the Anthropocene anti-humanism movement. Such a movement, in the words of Kirsch, concludes “that our self-destruction is now inevitable and that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves.” Even if some people survive, human civilization on this earth is justly doomed.

A second movement, transhumanism, champions our separation from nature, our reasoning ability, and our technological progress. Nanotechnology and molecular engineering hold out the promise of a new “species” in the face of humanity’s demise. Molecular biologist, Dr. Alan Goldstein and his colleagues point out that by integrating living material and non-living materials at a molecular level, non-material substances are already able to talk to cells in a language they understand. Goldstein writes, “After 4 billion years of evolution, carbon-based life on Earth has learnt to make use of only a few dozen chemical reactions. But Homo technicus, with the whole periodic table of elements and an array of biological molecules at his disposal for nanofabrication, would be able to exploit trillions of chemical reactions to produce the desired result.” At this point, Goldstein feels justified in stating that human evolution will come to an end and this possibility should be part of our public discourse. The Transhumanists and the Anthropocene anti-humanists agree that humanity’s disappearance is to be welcomed. The transhumanists worry that we won’t have the technology in place before our extinction happens.

A hundred years ago a new Copernican Revolution took place, but only now are we beginning to grasp its power to change our worldview. Between 1903-1913 an image of two young men of genius in deep discussion, Carl Jung and Albert Einstein, symbolizes the discovery of an unknown portal to our future. By the 1930’s psychology and physics would lead us into strange new landscapes both within and without. Physics revealed a world of complementarity, entanglement, non-local causality, and the Zero Point Field. Psychology revealed the complementary world of the psychoid archetype, of matter and spirit, of acausality, and a collective unconscious field comprising the totality of the psyche, the sine qua non of all knowledge.

Having uncovered this portal to our future potential, it became evident that humanity had barely reached the midpoint of its evolutionary journey. Although we are slow to recognize it, scientific materialism, and indeed, the hierarchical paradigm of a patriarchy based on power was laid to rest with the discovery of an inner/outer, time and timeless world beyond our current reality. The great revolution of our age rests, not on our limited, illusory ego-consciousness, but on the unknown, unexplored depths both within humanity and the cosmos. Overwhelmed by our recent inventions, we are only beginning to realize that we can invent quantum computers because, like Nature itself, we are quantum beings.

A Buddhist sutra tells of the dancing god Indra and the fabulous net that spreads endlessly over the cosmos in every direction—a net that has a jewel at every knot so brilliant and polished that it reflects all the others. Or the ancient Anglo-Saxon Web of Wyrd in which everything is connected beyond space and time. Quantum physics from the Bell Theory to the work of Alain Aspect speaks to an invisible cosmic web in which one event can affect another across the universe at the speed of light. Psychology re-discovered this non-causal world as part of our everyday reality and labelled it synchronicity. The World Wide Web has always been a pattern within our psyche, but under the influence of Medusa it is no longer an organic reality in which we participate. Our computer-generated world wide web processes incredible amounts of information and knowledge derived from the synthesis of facts at a speed our brains cannot achieve, but locked in the duality of our psyche, the web we create serves to throw a spotlight on humanity’s unredeemed battle between good and evil.

Instead of entering the paradoxical world of wisdom, we turned our disembodied intellect to design supercomputers. If we could transform all the matter and energy in the accessible universe into a computronium the flow of data would be everywhere, and we would merge into it. The Grail search to transform the wasteland now rests on the construction of a computer capable of replicating itself. Each replication would increase its ability to think faster and deeper and each version would improve itself until it becomes a “singularity” more capable than all human beings put together. The goal behind the transhuman movement is to arrive at a world guided by a superior intelligence rendering the role of homo sapiens redundant. The consolation prize: humanity could achieve immortality through nanotechnology and/or silicon-based transistors.

Both the anti-human and transhuman movements speak of human inferiority yet, rely on unevolved humans to design computers that will make the effort to grow exponentially into better and better versions of themselves. Meanwhile, we abandon our own evolution. Do we risk the folly of Dr. Frankenstein who had the intention of giving humanity immortality but in putting the pieces together, unconsciously gave birth to an imperfect version of himself? The result was an ambivalent monster.

Despondent about our collective future, my exploration went deeper into the evolutionary structures of consciousness. Diving into the deep instinctual patterns of nature, I realized that psyche and matter are one. Embodiment is not the enemy; the enemy of our continuing evolution is our failure to understand what embodiment means. Where once we worked on dead bodies and saw them as machines, science has now penetrated matter to its quantum reality. Einstein discovered that “matter is energy and energy is light” and this was brought home when biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp found biophotons (light) emissions stored in our DNA. Given that 100,000 chemical reactions occur in a single cell every second and this repeats itself billions of times simultaneously across every cell in the body, Popp concluded that DNA must be like a master tuning fork in the body.

This research was enhanced by Herbert Frohlich who found that a liquid crystalline substance [phospholipids] just below the cell membrane vibrates at certain frequencies and at certain energy thresholds. When they vibrate in unison, they reach a high level of coherence and take on certain qualities of quantum mechanics including non-local causality with its instantaneous communication throughout the body and beyond. Further research has found that every organ of our body is encased within a connective tissue system which also functions as a liquid crystal semi-conductive network capable of operating at 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light. In a very real sense, we are beings of light in which everything within the body—cells, tissue and organs—are connected. The web of life to which we belong is far greater than we have imagined.

In holding the tension between matter and energy physicist David Bohm discovered the transformational third—active information—information that gives form to energy. In neurobiology Candace Pert discovered that emotions are “cellular signals involved in the process of translating information into physical reality, literally transforming mind into matter” and vice versa. In psychology, Carl Jung talked of two cones that meet and do not meet allowing the free flow of energy between mind and body. In this gap consciousness operates and grows. If the mind becomes disembodied, or the body traumatized, the gap becomes an abyss and madness ensues. If we wonder why the much-vaulted age of reason devolved into a nihilistic nightmare, we need only look to the split between matter and energy that underlies the dualism of our current worldview.

Researchers such as Bohm, Pert, and Jung recognized that their descriptions of the transforming power between matter and energy was, until the 17th century, called soul. In our current period of darkness, the metaphysical background of the world is becoming visible once more. In physics, the microscopic vibrations in the space between things was seen as background noise. Perceived as a constant, these vibrations were subtracted from calculations until thirty plus years ago when it was discovered that this noise was really a quantum sea of light called the zero-point-field. In explaining this sea of light, astrophysicist Bernard Haisch writes, “We see things by way of contrast. The eye works by letting light fall on the otherwise dark retina. But if the eye was filled with light, there would be no darkness to afford a contrast. The zero-point-field is such a blinding light. Since it is everywhere, inside and outside of us, permeating every atom in our bodies, we are effectively blind to it … It blinds us to its presence. The world of light that we do not see is all the rest over and above the zero-point-field.”

Or, in the Old Testament, “Wisdom is more mobile than any motion because of her pureness, she pervades and penetrates all things … a refulgence of eternal light … and while remaining in herself she renews and pervades all things.” (Wisdom 7:24-27) Scripture and science appear to agree that Wisdom, as the creative matrix of the universe, is not just a concept. She is everywhere, within and without, permeating every atom in our bodies and in all creation.

In the late 20th century, we began to understand the body as a quantum system intimately connected to the world around it. On the cusp of the 21st century, Tor Norretranders internationally best-selling book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, envisions a new humanity. “Inside us, in the person who carries consciousness around, cognitive and mental processes take place that are far richer than consciousness can know or describe. Our bodies contain a fellowship with the surrounding world that passes right through us but is hidden from our consciousness. The body is part of a mighty living system, which totally forms and manages a planet that has caught fire.”

In our carbon-based world research at the quantum level shows interfering vacuum torsion waves recording and carrying information on atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, even organisms and populations and ecologies of organisms, in fact, on the whole state of the universe. As we bring to consciousness the metaphysical background of the world of our ancestors, we realize that our destiny is to stand at the still point where time and the timeless intersect. The limited bandwidth of our ego consciousness must learn to surrender to a greater circumference of consciousness. Learning to access this knowledge, new leadership, educational, and economic systems are being proposed based on tapping into this hidden reality.

Whether we envision a silicon-based future or a carbon-based future the crucial factor may truly be one of time. Do we have time to invent a new species called homo technicus or do we break the bonds of Medusa and mature beyond our current level of consciousness? Do we have time to explore inner space; to develop our empathy and authenticity as the basis for community and justice. Do we have time to leave behind our need to establish conformity and bring our diversity into unity. Do we have time to become the Wise Species?

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The Return of Homo Mysticus

by Elinor Dickson

The fact that our civilization has not yet totally failed may be because, over the millennia, shamans, sages, and mystics have always appeared in both the East and the West. They remind us of a deeper, more numinous world beyond the ego-generated images of our ordinary perception.

Given the ecological and spiritual wasteland facing us today, it is not surprising that the desire for a renewed unity between immanence and transcendence has resurfaced. While often submerged in our psyche, there has always been a mystic within us. Instinctively, we know how to live from the space between time and timelessness, but today that knowledge is consciously being brought to the fore.

Our ancient ancestors were natural mystics living in a spirit-filled world. In our recorded history, mysticism was often aligned with religious traditions, requiring a rigorous discipline unattainable for most people. Authentic mystics, regardless of their many outward forms, illuminate the height and depth of a cosmic reality that continues to envelope us in its mystery today.

In my youthful idealism, I discovered the prominent Catholic scholar Karl Rahner, who felt that theology should be based on mysticism, because dogmatic doctrine had eliminated the mystery and power at the core of religious experience. For many years, I carried his words within me: “We will either become mystics or cease to be anything at all.” Recently, I found a similar yearning expressed by political and cultural commentator David Brooks in the New York Times International, May 24-25, 2024. In an article on the struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism that the world is currently engaged in, Brooks celebrates liberalism while acknowledging its limits. “Liberalism cannot be the ultimate purpose in life. We need to … subscribe to transcendent loyalties in the depth of our being. … People need to feel connected to a transcendent order; nice rules don’t satisfy that yearning.” He names certain philosophical positions, or creeds, but I would go further and say that no creed be it religious, political, humanist, or atheist, will suffice for the future of humanity. “We need to subscribe to transcendent loyalties in the depth of our being.”

In the late 1970s, I wrote my doctoral thesis on Core Religious Experience in the Process of Human Self-Actualization. I managed to defend it successfully, while showing my credentials in experimental design and statistical analysis—a necessary ritual in those days. The groundwork that made my subject matter acceptable in a University Psychology Department was William James’ enduring book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902. Following the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, psychology, inspired by James’ writing, began to throw off the restraints of behaviorism and psychopathology. Contemporary psychologists looked for an expanded understanding of the individual in the Human Potential Movement. New techniques based on imagination, the arts, and psychodrama expanded our understanding of healthy individual development. It also stimulated an interest in Eastern spirituality and transpersonal experience, including those from chemical experiments. Abraham Maslow’s book The Further Reaches of Human Nature: Towards a Psychology of Being provided the theory in which I could ground my thesis.

Since those days, mysticism found its way down from the mountain and out of the monastery. The way to a mystic perception of the world starts very simply. “I require no more of you than to look.” These are the instructions the 16th century Mystical Doctor of the Church, Teresa of Avila, gave to those seeking to enter the contemplative process. The first step to transcendence is to look at the reality around us as a subject rather than an object, as something connected intimately to ourselves.

We may think of mysticism as something that takes us out of our body, whereas it is rooted in the body. At this moment in our history, the old metaphor, body as machine, is dissolving in the quantum reality of a more subtle body that has become conscious of its own soul essence. For this reason, we find the mystics of today among physicists, biologists, botanists, paleontologists, mathematicians, and in many other walks of life.(1)

Science penetrates the world with microscopes, telescopes, or mathematical equations, but unless we bring in the feeling resonance of the senses, we have not fully acknowledged our part in the equation. Our knowledge remains separate and limited. Only when we see creation through our purified senses do we experience our embodiment in the numinous metaphysical world of being.

When the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon jungle first encountered modern explorers and scientists, they were asked about their knowledge of plants. How did they know which plants were good for certain conditions? Their answer was simply, “the plants told us.” In the Middle Ages, the physician Paracelsus, known as the father of modern chemistry, instructed his colleagues to sit in the meadow among the plants and to tap into their dual energy derived from the sun and the earth. Evelyn Underhill, whose work The Cloud of Unknowing is a spiritual classic, encourages us to turn away from the labels of our everyday perception and surrender to the thing before us and receive its energy. She writes, “This experience will be, in the very highest sense, the experience of sensation (resonance) without thought. … in this total surrender of you to the impress of things, you are using to the full the sacred powers of sense.”(2) This is the first step in the journey from immanence to transcendence that she called becoming a nature mystic. Albert Einstein, in his personal writings, called this “essential mysticism,” as opposed to a fixation on the supernatural. Through this contemplative attitude toward nature, all the senses combine to bring you to the metaphysical background of the world. Through the resonance of the body, we move into the diversity of creation toward the unifying essence of Source.

The poet William Blake wrote, “Man has no body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”(3) Our senses, meant to connect us to the transcendent through the duration of time and space, have been traumatized, not only by our limited bandwidth of consciousness but, in our day, by a polluted environment, both physical and spiritual. This makes seeing the world through the eyes of the soul increasingly difficult. Yet, in the past one hundred years, many people have penetrated their opaque surroundings, slowly thinning the veil of illusion that keeps us separated from our interrelatedness with the community of creation to which we belong.

Starved for meaning, there is an ongoing revival of indigenous wisdom, both East and West. From the Tao of the sages to the life and visions of Black Elk, a Lakota Sioux healer, we are learning to dance in the realm between two worlds. Mysticism begins with seeing the light in matter, the nuances that ripple on the surface of a world that is a manifestation of the World Soul, or Wisdom. Modern biology, in discovering our quantum body of light, can be said to have caught a glimpse of Soul/Wisdom at work, “the refulgence of eternal light,”(4) that is everywhere—including our DNA. The resonance of quantum wave theory gave us an assurance and vocabulary through which we can articulate the consciousness of all creation that we partake in. Consciousness is the driving force behind creation, and its fullness resides in every aspect of our being from light to particles, to atoms, to molecules, to plants and animals. As we learn the language of whales and trees, we are beginning to experience the world of becoming from within. We become conscious of ourselves as conscious beings in a world that is conscious! This is the resonance that connects us with our destiny as the incarnation of an evolving timeless mystery.

The soul resonance of our body is rooted in our instincts, the biologically generated life force that through experience and memory creates a subtle, intuitive body. This feeling sensation botanist Stephen Harrod Buhner calls the secret kinesis of the world. Everything has its own feeling aspect, and in Buhner’s words, “reclaiming the feeling sense, and developing it as a primary sensing tool, is one of the main ways to begin to enter more deeply into the metaphysical background of the world.”(5) The manifest world becomes a portal to the numinous essence of a transcendence that leads to Source. We begin to see the world with “immortal eyes” leading to a relationship based on love. Nature has much to teach us about the community of belonging, if we can learn the art of listening.

Having let go of the ego’s need to control, the mystic is one who lives in the flow of their soul’s continuous creative energy between immanence and transcendence, matter and spirit. Today, I rejoice in the fact that we, as the Wise Species, have begun to train our senses to embrace the soul essence of the world we live in. To pursue this course leads us away from the situational, transactional world that is on a trajectory toward extinction and, instead, allows us to embrace a relational world that is the basis for a new, universal vision.

(1) In a previous essay entitled “Medusa and the Post-Modern Age,” I wrote of the struggle between “homo technicus” and “homo mysticus.” Is our future identity in AI and robotics or in reaching a deeper understanding of our humanity as the Wise Species?
(2) Underhill, Evelyn. Practical Mysticism, Renaissance Classics, 2012, p. 55.
(3) Blake, Poems and Letters, ed. by J. Bronowski, Penguin Books, England & New York, 1958, p. 94.
(4) Old Testament, Book of Wisdom 7:26. Catholic edition.
(5) Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, Bear & Company, Vermont, 2014, p. 268.

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