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The Return of the Primordial Spirituality and the Emergence of the Next Religion.
At the beginning of this month’s column, I would like to take the opportunity to offer my ‘seasoned greetings’ as well as a very merry Christmas to all as we move through the holiday season and into 2007. I wish the best for all of you in all the areas of your lives.
As I watch these words appear on my laptop screen, I turn my attention toward the many colored winds, just there beyond the window, and I hear them murmur in the birch tree, a good sign.
In rereading the first paragraph above, I see I have used the word “all” three times. The Greek word for “all” is pan, a term that literally means “the all.” As we are all aware, I’m sure, the Greek god Pan was the great spiritual force or essence found in the All, in Nature… He was and is The All.
And as we discussed in last month’s column, the primordial spirituality that is re-emerging in our own time expresses an indigenous perspective that was held for tens of thousands of years by our distant ancestors. They knew with absolute certainty that Nature is god.
I am also quite certain that we are all aware that we live in interesting times. As 2006 winds down with the approach of a new year, the challenges we are facing on this beautiful world are becoming truly monumental, revealing as never before the importance of the spiritual reawakening in the Western world.
With your permission, I would like to address this in more detail, exploring a more expanded view of what may be coming into being for our meditations and for our moment to moment contemplation.
In our previous column (11/06), we provided broad outlines of the recurrent cycles that have produced Western civilization across the past 8000 to 10,000 years. One of the most interesting features involved in this ongoing continuum has been the appearance of a “new religion” at the end of each cycle.
The religious view during the first cycle (the Neolithic Period) was wholly animistic--a belief that professed everything to be invested with its own personal supernatural essence or soul. During this cycle, and during the tens of thousand of years that came before that, the religious practitioner was the shaman, the gifted visionary who used his or her own body and mind as the bridge between the worlds—between the sacred realms of the spirits on the one hand, and the everyday world of objective physical reality on the other.
At the end of that first long cycle, stratified city-states arose among the Sumerians of Mesopotamia about 5000 years ago, and a new kind of religion came into being—polytheism: the belief in many high goddesses and gods above and beyond Nature.
It was among the Sumerians that the perception of cosmic dualism appeared, recorded in their cuneiform writings pressed into clay tablets and carved into stone, accounts that can still be read today. Their polytheistic perspective then became the predominant religious expression in the cultures that appeared during the next cycle--the Akkadians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Hittites, Phoenicians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, the Greeks and the Romans, whose stratified polytheistic religions were run by full-time hierarchical priesthoods. This period lasted for about 3000 years.
With the collapse of the Roman civilization, this cycle came to an end, and as before, a new kind of religion emerged: monotheism.
The three major expressions of monotheism in the West during the current cycle have been Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which profess belief in a singular almighty creator—variously called YHWH, Jehovah, Allah or simply God. We may talk more about these traditions as well as where monotheism originated in a future column.
But of interest to us here is that we are now coming to the end of our current cycle, one that has lasted for 2000 years. Seen from this perspective, the progressive unraveling of our political, corporate, and even social and religious institutions may in fact reflect the beginning of the collapse of Western Civilization.
Now no one really wants to talk about this or admit that the collapse seems to be in progress. The whole idea of it is a bummer, and I have to confess that I have killed a lot of dinner parties discussing the hypothetical collapse scenario suggested in Spiritwalker.
Yet of more that just passing interest is something I brought up last month as well.
A cultural revitalization movement is very much in progress in the West, one that is associated with a new emerging spiritual complex, much in the same manner that Christianity took form as a new religion at the end of the last cycle.
It is not surprising that this new spiritual impulse seems to be integral in nature, drawing on all the world's wisdom traditions, from the East to the West, from Animism to Zen.
What is surprising is that right at its core can be found a cluster of principles that were embraced at one time by the world's indigenous peoples—principles that constitute the foundation of the primordial spirituality.
It must be acknowledged here that the religions of the traditional peoples were as diverse and varied as they themselves once were, with each region of the world encompassing hundreds of cultural groups and subgroups, some large, some small, each devoted to their own unique spiritual ways that could differ markedly from those of their neighbors.
In approaching the idea that principles of indigenous wisdom are involved in the genesis of the new spiritual complex in the West, it is not necessary to compile yet one more academic stockpile of esoteric minutia of interest only to scholars and theologians. Rather, we are broadly concerned with the general mystical insights that were once held in common by virtually all of the traditional peoples and are thus the birthright of all.
I should hasten to add once more that modern spiritual seekers do not seem to be retreating into archaic belief systems, nor, with rare exceptions, are they interested in playing Indian or becoming born-again Aboriginals.
To the contrary, members of the Transformational Community are seriously reconsidering the core beliefs and values once held by the traditional peoples, and it is this reflection, this focus, that heralds the reemergence of the primordial spirituality in our own time, just as was predicted by Black Elk, the old Oglala shaman and medicine man more than 50 years ago.
In the process, a new kind of religion appears to be taking form.
This new religion has no name as yet, nor is it focused on the teachings of some new charismatic prophet, guru, or holy person. Its singular, distinguishing feature involves the realization that each of us can acquire spiritual knowledge and power ourselves, making direct, transpersonal contact with the sacred realms, without the need for any religious specialist or intermediary organization to do it for us.
This was the centerpiece of the primordial spirituality—a feature that may still be found in the inner mystic sides of its descendants, including Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and others.
Through this individualist practice, each person acquires the freedom to become their own teacher, their own priest, their own prophet, receiving their revelations directly from the highest sources themselves.
This is the direct path of the mystic at its absolute best, one that leads the spiritual seeker into the experience of self-realization and empowerment.
At its inception, this quest is intensely personal. Yet as it progresses, it leads inevitably toward a universal and ultimately altruistic perspective, one that takes the seeker straight into the irreversible vortex of personal transformation.
This advance, once begun, changes us profoundly and forever because it conveys to each of us the experience of authentic initiation.
As we experience this initiation, each of us inevitably discovers sooner or later that our personal consciousness is part of a greater field of consciousness at large. And as this discovery has gained momentum, tens of millions of spiritual seekers have had the direct experience of the divine field—or as some call it, the unitive or unified field--and it is here, precisely here, that we have all come to understand something with great clarity.
The new story that we are writing, the new cultural mythos, will require a new upgraded perception of how we see ourselves and our relationship to the cosmos, and in response, a new profile of the divinity will also come into being.
That Old Testament version of an alternately wrathful, alternately beneficent father god who is sitting up in Heaven, listening to our prayers, working in mysterious ways, and sending occasional messengers to Earth who usually get treated very badly, is no longer serving us. In fact, that archetype was borrowed from the old Greek religion. It was none other than Zeus himself, upgraded and given a new name!
The time has now come to upgrade that archetype, something we shall discuss further in future columns, but at this point in time, the beginning of the Third Millennium, just how might we in the transformational community categorize ourselves?
We could begin by observing that modern spiritual seekers usually tend to develop in isolation, becoming deeply immersed in personal, spiritual studies that are often triggered by spontaneous visionary experiences that society at large has taught them to conceal.
An oft-cited Gallup Poll revealed more than a decade ago that as many as 43% of the general population in the United States has had such experiences, revealing that this pool may be even deeper than the demographer Paul H. Ray has suggested (see last month’s column and his book The Cultural Creatives.)
Modern seekers tend to be individualists, people with very full lives who like to gather in local meetings or spend their vacation time attending workshops in which they can acquire direct experience of such practically useful subjects as qigong and reiki, psychic healing and shamanism, meditation and yoga, to name only a few. They then tend to disperse back into the wider society where they utilize what they have learned to benefit themselves, their networks of family and friends, and their communities.
The growing body of social research reveals that this “modern mystical movement” exists as an ever-expanding set of overlapping networks, one that extends across North America and into the international community. Beyond these general contours, it is easier to describe what modern mystics are not, rather than to accurately define what they are, and perhaps this is just as it should be because it is much in keeping with the nature of transitional, evolutionary events.
For example, most of these individualist seekers are not religious ascetics, shutting themselves away in monasteries, ashrams, or remote mountain caves. They are not involved in practicing austerities and enduring endless periods of deep meditation.
They are not religious extremists, invoking archaic fundamentalist belief systems in search of their own exclusive connection with the godhead. Nor are they outright religious wackos, embracing recently-uncovered secret doctrines, hidden away for ages and proclaimed as divine revelation by some smooth-talking New Age charismatic.
Modern mystics are not involved in cults, nor with some exceptions are they the least bit interested in turning power over to some holy so-and-so or self-proclaimed guru who claims to have the inside corner on the market of spiritual truth.
Quite the contrary.
Contemporary spiritual seekers are interested in spiritual liberation, not repressive or rigid dogma, and they tend to be deeply distrustful of any organized religious hierarchy.
Because of this, steadily increasing numbers are leaving our mainstream religions in droves. In their search for authenticity, they are quietly, yet definitively, gaining a level of spiritual freedom and power that has not been experienced in the West for almost 2000 years.
Although these seekers may achieve a relatively higher density in the large urban centers and in certain geographic regions like California, Paul Ray's research reveals that they are evenly distributed throughout the general population, suggesting that they are everywhere, in every community, and at every level of society.
In short, this quietly and steadily escalating social phenomenon has all the appearances of a spiritual revolution.
In summation, it could be observed that the emergence of the new spiritual complex, as well as the awareness that it is engendering, offers an unprecedented promise of hope for all human beings everywhere--as well as a firm guarantee of sweeping changes to come.
Next month we will have a closer look at the modern mystics in the transformational community, examining their belief systems in particular. And as we do, we must keep in mind that the individuals carrying their values and beliefs may well be the seed people who will determine the shape of the world's spiritual orientation and practice for much of the next 2000 years.
Until then, allow me to invoke the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, the Kahuna Nui Hale Kealohalani Makua, and with his blessing, I extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.
With warm thoughts—Dr Hank
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