Naturalistic Paganism
A Pedagogy of Gaia: by Bart Everson: “Always Beginning Again”
Today we conclude our our early winter theme, Beginnings, and looking forward to Imbolc/Candlemas with an essay by columnist, Bart Everson: “Always Beginning Again”.
My daughter reminded me of something important, something profound, something I once knew but had forgotten, something I can’t put into words but that nevertheless changed my life. She accomplished this feat not by saying or doing anything in particular, but by coming into the world, by being born, and by simply being.
As a new parent I found myself looking at the world through her eyes, and everything was new. The familiar seemed strange. A sense of wonder and awe pervaded. The world was full of mystery, and that mystery was full of value, and that value contained mystery within it, unending. And this experience did not feel like a purely subjective feeling. It had the character of deep truth.
Yet of course this way of looking at the world, this seeing with new eyes, was in fact nothing new. It was something very old. It did not feel, to me, like a new truth revealed. It felt like an old truth rediscovered. I had known this before. I had been here before. I had seen the world this way, once upon a time. And now here I was again.
I wondered to myself: Now that I’m back, can I find some way to stay here? How did this happen? How did I forget? It seemed like it shouldn’t be possible, to forget something so important, so crucial, so intrinsic to the nature of being alive and being human.
We are constantly forgetting. We must forget in order to function. We simply can’t hold all our experience in working memory. We’re constantly shuffling experiences off to other parts of our mind for long-term storage, and if we don’t call them back, they get harder to access and may even become lost.
We are constantly forgetting trivial experiences. What did lunch taste like last Tuesday? Strangely enough, we can also forget important experiences. We can, in fact, forget the most important experiences of all. We can and do lose touch with the most profound truths of existence.
I want a reminder. I want to be nudged, shoved if need be, back to the truth. This is the trick of living, or one of the tricks anyhow. It’s easy to pay lip service to love and wonder, but I want to know it, to live it, to feel it in my bones.
It’s great to get such reminders randomly, out of the blue, by surprise, such as happened when I became a father. I was ambushed by reality, so to speak. There’s really no substitute for these spontaneous experiences. They are a blessing, a gift, and if I am open to the possibilities inherent in life they may happen more often.
I wished to take a more proactive approach, to cultivate openness, to embark intentionally on the journey. I wished to constantly remind myself us of basic mysteries which I tend to forget.
Meditation can serve this purpose. My daily practice is like hitting a reset button. (Well, you know, sometimes.) In sitting silently, I get back to basics. I recall who I am, what I love, how I want to live, and what I have to offer.
The cycle of seasonal celebrations also serves this purpose. The holidays enshrined in the Wheel of the Year bring us back, again and again, to certain themes. These themes are diverse and varied, but one constant that runs through them all is renewal. They are all about beginning, each in their own way; because the Wheel is a cycle, any point can be taken as a beginning. Through my observance of any given holiday, I renew and refresh my perspective on life.
In all things I seek to see again through new eyes, to encounter the world with a freshness of perspective, to hold on to that sense of awe and wonder I knew sometimes as a child, to remember that which I already know.
For discussion in the comments below: How do you remind yourself of those experiences which are most important to you? How do you reconnect with a sense of wonder at life?
The Author
In addition to writing the A Pedagogy of Gaia column here at HumanisticPaganism, Bart Everson is a writer, a photographer, a baker of bread, a husband and a father. An award-winning videographer, he is co-creator of ROX, the first TV show on the internet. As a media artist and an advocate for faculty development in higher education, he is interested in current and emerging trends in social media, blogging, podcasting, et cetera, as well as contemplative pedagogy and integrative learning. He is a founding member of the Green Party of Louisiana, past president of Friends of Lafitte Corridor, sometime contributor to Rising Tide, and a participant in New Orleans Lamplight Circle.
Next Month
Stages of (My) Faith, a review by John Halstead
Today we continue our early winter theme, Beginnings, with a discussion of James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, by John Halstead.
Is human spiritual development like a road? Do we progress from one stage to another, like leaving one town and moving to another?
Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man …
— “The Human Seasons” by John Keats
Stages of Spiritual Maturity
When I was transitioning out of my religion of origin (Mormonism), Alan Watts’ book, Behold the Spirit, had a profound influence on the course of my subsequent spiritual development. Watts is best known for being a popular translator of Eastern spirituality for Western audiences. One of the quotes that stood out to me and which I copied into my little book of favorite quotations was this:
“In the stage of infancy, the church’s moral teaching is of necessity authoritarian and legalistic. In adolescence, intensely earnest and self-consciously heroic, following after extremely lofty ideals. In maturity, we return somewhat to earth, and find the source of morality neither in external authority, nor in remote ideals, but in the consciousness of God himself in the heart.”
As with many quotes that captured my attention at the time, I did not fully understand its meaning when I first read its, and I would only grow to understand it, sometimes years later, as I lived out that meaning in my own life. In the quote above, Watts identifies three stages of faith* development. These corresponded with the course of my own spiritual development. At the time I read the quote, I was leaving the first stage. My own literalistic understanding of religion had come into conflict with my intellectual explorations and my expanding sphere of personal experience. “Self-conciously heroic” would be an apt description of my departure from the Mormon church as I moved into Watts’ second stage. I saw myself as struggling against the powers of ignorance and fear, both personal and collective. At the time, I had only a vague sense of an internal God-consciousness, which is a quality of Watts’ third stage, but I longed for it. A couple of years later, Neo-Paganism helped me to “return somewhat to earth”, as Watts says, and develop that inner divinity, which I am still attempting to do.
One of my role models from contemporary Paganism has been Aidan Kelly, the founder of the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn, a West Coast Neo-Pagan tradition organized in 1967. In his book, Crafting the Art of Magic, Kelly describes the same three stages in the development of an individual’s religious maturity identified by Alan Watts:
“The first is the stage of childhood, during which the myths of religion, learned from parents and others, are believed implicitly. The second stage is the stage of adolescence, during which the critical intellect develops, and the objective facts of ordinary history are taken as the criteria by which to judge the plausibility or possibility of the myths, which are normally rejected as being simply false during this stage, which can last into the late twenties. The third stage is the beginnings of true maturity, in which the person realizes that the facts of ordinary history, being value-free, provide no basis for making decisions about life problems. At this stage the adult can begin to reappropriate the myths, recognizing that they are intended to be primarily statements of value, not statements of fact or history, and recognizing also that an interpretation of the myths which is much more sophisticated than that of a child must be possible; else these myths would hardly have survived for millenia as the basis for the value systems of world civilizations. One mark of true maturity is therefor the ability to tolerate the ambiguous tension between myth and history.”
Kelly does a good job here of describing the third stage. At the time, I understood my own embrace of Neo-Paganism as the kind of “reappropriation” of mythology which Kelly describes as part of the third stage.
James Fowler’s Stages of Faith
A few years later, my brother-in-law gave me a copy of James Fowler’s book, Stages of Faith, which turned out to be a godsend. In Stages of Faith, Fowler describes this same process as Watts and Kelly above, but in much more detail, drawing on the theories of psychologists Piaget, Kohlberg, Erickson, and others. Fowler describes 6 stages of spiritual development. Fowler’s Stages 2/3, 4, and 5 correspond roughly to the three stages described by Watts and Kelly above: a mythologizing stage, a de-mythologizing stage, and a reconstructive stage. It’s these stages that I will be discussing below. (Fowler’s Stage 1 corresponds to early childhood, of which most of us have little memory, and Stage 6 essentially corresponds to what might be called “enlightenment”, which few of us will ever experience.)
Late Childhood Spirituality (Mythologizing Stage)
Fowler’s Stage 2, which he called “Mythic-Literal Faith” (and which I call the Mythologizing Stage), is the stage most common in school children. It is characterized by one-dimensional and literalistic interpretations of the stories and beliefs of one’s community. Experience is structured largely by means of linear narrative or story. The actors in the cosmic story are anthropomorphic. Individuals in this stage do not naturally step back to reflect on the meaning of the story. The world is understood to operate on a principle of reciprocal fairness and justice. Fowler warns that the literalness and excessive reliance on cosmic reciprocity at this stage can lead to “an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism” (“works righteousness”) on the one hand or “an abasing sense of badness” on the other (or, as in my personal case, both). A person begins to move out of this stage as they become aware of the contradictions in the stories they have inherited and begin to reflect on the meanings of those stories.
Adolescent Spirituality (Constructive Stage)
Fowler’s Stage 3, which he calls “Synthetic-Conventional Faith” (and I call the Constructive Stage), typically develops in adolescence. In this stage, the individual seeks to construct a coherent worldview that will orient them in their increasingly complex environment. While we tend to think of adolescents as independence-seeking, Fowler calls this a “conformist stage”. Individuals in this stage are “acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others” and do not have a sure enough grasp on their own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective. Authority is located in traditional authority roles, if they are perceived as personally worthy, or in the “consensus of a valued, face-to-face group”. According to Fowler, at this stage, beliefs and values may be deeply felt, but they are tacitly held. The individual “dwells” in their beliefs, rather than reflecting on them objectively:
“There has not been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically. [In this stage,] a person has an ‘ideology,’ a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but he or she has not objectified it for examination and in a sense is unaware of having it. Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in ‘kind’ of person.”
According to Fowler, one of the dangers of this stage is that “[t]he expectations and evaluations of others can be so compellingly internalized (and sacralized) that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized”.
Young Adult Spirituality (Demythologizing/Deconstructive Stage)
Numerous factors can lead to a transition to the next stage, including:
“serious clashes or contradictions between valued authority sources; marked changes, by officially sanctioned leaders, or policies or practices previously deemed sacred and unbreachable; the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical reflection on how one’s beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how ‘relative’ they are to one’s particular group or background”;
or the experience of “leaving home” — emotionally, physically, or both — which precipitates the kind of self-examination that leads to a transition to the next stage. All of these factors played a role in my own disillusionment with Mormonism: contradictions of authorities, changes in doctrines, exposure to a world not so easily encapsulated in the Mormon paradigm, insight into my own personal history and idiosyncrasies that led me to embrace Mormonism at a young age, and so on.
Fowler’s Stage 4, which he calls “Individuative-Reflective Faith”, may begin in young adulthood for many, but for some it only emerges in the mid-thirties or forties. The individual begins to define him- or herself as distinct from group membership and social roles. The individual begins to take seriously their personal responsibility to examine their feelings and reflect critically on their beliefs. Fowler calls this the “demythologizing” stage. This is the stage, which many of my readers are undoubtedly familiar with, of deconstructing the dogma of one’s previously-held faith. Individuals in this stage tend to have “an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought”. It also can breed a kind of narcissism. This certainly applied to me when I left the Mormon church. I believed that my rational mind would provide me with everything my spirit needed, and I was convinced I could do it alone. The danger of this stage is that it will lead to nihilism, but even nihilism can be a precursor to transformation.
An individual begins to move out of this stage as he or she begins to acknowledge in the influence of unconscious factors influencing their judgment and behavior, what Fowler calls “images and energies from a deeper self”. An individual may also develop “a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves”. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one’s own old tradition or from other traditions develop a new appeal. One begins to recognize that life is more complex than the “logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend” and begins to move toward “a more dialectical and multileveled approach to life truth.”
Adult Spirituality (Remythologizing/Reconstructive Stage)
Fowler’s calls his Stage 5 “Conjunctive Faith”. According to Fowler, this stage is rare before mid-life, but I have found elements of it in people much younger. This stage involves the integration of spiritual elements that were either suppressed or unrecognized in the previous stage. It brings together the power of symbolic truths of Stage 3 with the critical awareness of Stage 4. This is a re-mythologizing stage; individuals in this stage can (re-)embrace symbols, myths and rituals — either those previously rejected or new ones — because they are no longer empty formalities; the individual has now experienced the “depth of reality” to which they refer.
This stage involves a “reclaiming and reworking of one’s past” and “an opening to the voices of one’s ‘deeper self.'”
“What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes porous and permeable. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience. It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are ‘other.’ Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelation) […]”
The strength of this stage comes from what Fowler calls “a capacity to see and be in one’s or one’s group’s most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality.”
Limitations of Fowler’s Stages
There are some obvious limitations to understanding spiritual development in this linear way. First, the stages can occur at nearly any point in a person’s life. I have known adults who seem to be in Fowler’s Stage 3 and teenagers who seem to be Fowler’s Stage 4. Second, not everyone seems to go through these stages. Fowler’s stages may be common or even predominant among American Christians, but not even everyone in that group fits this model. My wife is an example of one such exception. As far as I can tell, she moved smoothly from Stage 3 right past Stage 4 and into Stage 5. In spite of apparently not going through a deconstructive stage, she developed the tentativity and ambiguity-tolerance in religious matters which is characteristic of Stage 5. For as long as I have known her (her early 20s), she has had what Fowler described as “a capacity to see and be in one’s or one’s group’s most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality.”
Third, as UU minister Carl Gregg points out in his review of Fowler’s book, spiritual development is less like a conveyer belt and more like spiral, meaning that a person can experience aspects of two stages at once. This was certainly true in my case. I more often felt like I was straddling two of Fowler’s stages than standing firmly in any one of them. Even now, while I identify myself as being in Fowler’s Stage 5, I have a foot dragging along in Stage 4 behind me.
Another one of the problems with Fowler’s linear approach is the temptation it creates to view ourselves as farther along the path than we are and to view other as farther back than they are. When I was given Fowler’s book, I would have said that I was transitioning from Stage 4 to Stage 5. Looking back, 10 years later, I would now say that I had (at least) a foot in Stage 3, was straddling Stage 4, and had a toe in Stage 5. And then there is the problem of how one views others. For instance, when I was in the deconstructive Stage 4, it was practically impossible for me to tell the difference between others who were in Stage 3 and Stage 5. They all looked the same to me, because most of them participated in religious community and spoke the language of religious symbols. My default was to “condemn” them all to Stage 3, because I really had no experience of Stage 5 to make sense of other kinds of religious participation. In my case, that meant that I thought I had moved “beyond” my wife when I left the Mormon church, only to find out years later that I was actually “catching up” to her.
Why I Still Like Fowler’s Stages
I know there will be some who object to the whole idea of stages of spiritual development because it inevitably leads to comparisons of individuals which can be unflattering and breeds a kind of spiritual elitism. Nobody would want to hear that they are in Stage 3 at mid-life. And those in Stage 4 may resent the suggestion that their hard-fought-for religious independence is not the end of the road. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that there is a general pattern in American spiritual development, which involves a mythologizing phase, a de-mythologizing phase, and a reconstructive phase. Perhaps there would be less stigma attached to the earlier phases if we did not tie them to specific age groups. In any case, Fowler’s stages fit my own personal history pretty well.
And in spite of the limitations discussed above, I have still found Fowler’s stages to be personally helpful to understanding my own life. When I left the Mormon faith, transitioning from the adolescent Stage 3 stage to the young adult Stage 4, I was hurt and angry. I felt that I had been lied to. I wanted nothing to do with organized religion at all. As I (very) gradually transitioned from Stage 4 to Stage 5, I realized that much of my anger at my religion of origin was really anger that I felt toward myself which I had projected outward. I realized that I was not so much angry that I had been lied to, as I was angry at myself for being deceived (or for lying to myself). Healing from that wound was less about forgiving others, as it was about forgiving myself. And a critical part of forgiving myself was realizing that the adolescent stage of spirituality was normal and healthy. We cannot be born into the world with an adult spirituality, any more than we can be born into the world with an adult body or adult cognitive faculties. (That’s not to say that there are not young individuals who are exceptional.) Reading Fowler’s Stages of Faith was invaluable in realizing the truth that spirituality is developed over time and forgiving myself essentially for being human. Eventually, it helped me feel more empathy for those for whom the Mormon church was still fulfilling a spiritual function.
Fowler’s book also helped me from getting stuck in the spirituality of young adulthood. It would have been easy to get stuck in the negativity of Fowler’s Stage 4. Realizing that there was something beyond the deconstructive stage of faith helped me to be open to a re-constructive kind of spirituality that I eventually found in Neo-Paganism. It is something I still am striving toward. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest here that Mormonism is necessarily associated with Stage 3 or that Neo-Paganism is necessarily associated with Stage 5. (That’s a question for another day.) A person going from Neo-Paganism to Mormonism could till be moving from Stage 3 to Stage 5. It’s just the direction it occurred for me. And in the process, Fowler’s schema for spiritual development helped me make peace with my past and also gave me an inkling of what I wanted to move toward.
More information on Fowler’s stages can be found here and here.
Notes:
* I use the word “faith” here, not in the sense of belief, but in the sense of one’s general relation to religious questions.
For discussion: Has your own religious development followed a similar pattern? Has it followed another pattern? Do you think it is helpful to think of spiritual development in terms of stages? Why or why not?
The Author
John Halstead is a former Mormon, now eclectic Neopagan with an interest in ritual as an art form, ecopsychology, theopoetics, Jungian theory, and the idea of death as an act of creation (palingenesis). He blogs at The Allergic Pagan at Patheos Pagan and Dreaming the Myth Forward at PaganSquare. John currently serves at the managing editor at HP.
See John Halstead’s other posts.
Next Sunday
Next Sunday: A Pedagogy of Gaia: by Bart Everson: “Always Beginning Again”.
Musings of a Pagan Mythicist by Maggie Jay Lee: “Step to the Right: Religion and the Divided Mind”
Today we hear from columnist, Maggie Jay Lee, as she discusses Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight, and invites us to “step to the right”.
I recently finished Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, and I think her insight has a lot of relevance for naturalistic pagans. Many of you are probably familiar with Taylor’s story, which she also shared in a TED talk. Being a neuroanatomist, Taylor has a unique vantage point from which to tell her story, but ultimately her story is not really about the brain. It is the story of a life transforming spiritual awakening, a story which is completely grounded in the natural world.
The Left Brain on Vacation
At the age of 37, Taylor had a massive stroke centered in her left cerebral hemisphere. This stroke affected her ability to move and to sense her physical boundaries in space and time, as well as her ability to speak and understand language. With her left hemisphere severely damaged, Taylor relied much more heavily on her right hemisphere, and she found a lot of difference in the way the two hemispheres experience the world.
When her left brain went mostly off-line, Taylor experienced herself as a fluid, one with the Universe, and felt a sense of deep inner peace.
“My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow. I was no longer isolated and alone. My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea.” (Taylor, page 69)
For me Taylor articulates so well what I think of as the very heart of spirituality. Spiritual practices set out to awaken our sense of deep inner wellbeing and connectedness with everything, out of which friendly loving kindness to all naturally flows. It is knowing, as Taylor puts it, that: “I am a part of it all. We are brothers and sisters on this planet. We are here to help make this world a more peaceful and kinder place.”
Stories of spiritual awakening are almost always packaged with a metaphysical worldview that is not naturalistic. However, Taylor is a neuroanatomist, and she explains her experience completely in terms of brain anatomy and function without reference to any kind of supernatural being or dimension. According to Taylor, this awareness of deep inner wellbeing and connectedness is present in each of us right now, and we can access it if we can “silence the voice of our dominating left mind.”
“I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind”
I find Taylor’s story so compelling, not only because it is an inspiring tale of resurrection, of human determination and the body’s incredible ability to heal, but because what she says about our minds resonates with so much of my understanding of human nature and my own less dramatic experience of myself. The idea that our two hemispheres, while being intimately linked and mutually influential, have essentially different personalities, different perspectives, different goals and values, brings to mind the idea of the divided self which is such a perennial part of philosophy and psychology.
“It appears that many of us struggle regularly with polar opposite characters holding court inside our heads. In fact, just about everyone I speak with is keenly aware that they have conflicting parts of their personality. Many of us speak about how our head (left hemisphere) is telling us to do one thing while our heart (right hemisphere) is telling us to do the exact opposite. Some of us distinguish between what we think (left hemisphere) and what we feel (right hemisphere). Others communicate about our mind consciousness (left hemisphere) versus our body’s instinctive consciousness (right hemisphere). Some of us talk about our small ego mind (left hemisphere) compared with our capital ego mind (right hemisphere), or our small self (left hemisphere) versus our inner or authentic self (right hemisphere). Some of us delineate between our work mind (left hemisphere) and our vacation mind (right hemisphere), while others refer to their researcher mind (left hemisphere) versus their diplomatic mind (right hemisphere). . . . And if you are a Carl Jung fan, then there’s our sensing mind (left hemisphere) versus our intuitive mind (right hemisphere), and our judging mind (left hemisphere) versus our perceiving mind (right hemisphere). Whatever language you use to describe your two parts, based upon my experience, I believe they stem anatomically from the two very distinct hemispheres inside your head.” (Taylor page 133-134)
I see this dichotomy of perspectives play out all around me. I see it here in our discussions of terms like spirit and energy. I see it in the different ways naturalists talk about nature and religion. We naturalists spend a lot of time judging and evaluating religion from the outside, from the left hemisphere, but I think ultimately religion is a right hemisphere awareness that the left just doesn’t get.
Good fences make good neighbors
But hasn’t science already debunked all this right verses left brain stuff as a neuromyth of pop psychology? Well as with so many things that all depends on how you look at it. The theory of right and left hemispheric specialization really took shape following the split brain studies done in the 1950s and 60s on epilepsy patients who had their corpus callosum, the massive band of nerve fibers that joins the two hemispheres, severed to stop debilitating seizures. Since each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body, it was possible with these patients to engage exclusively with one hemisphere or the other. These split brain studies (and later studies using other methods to temporarily “turn-off” parts of the brain) found significant differences in the perception and capabilities of the two hemispheres. The differences in the hemispheres are also dramatically demonstrated in people like Taylor who have had a stroke or other damage to one hemisphere.
This led to a model of the brain as being composed of parts that specialize exclusively in one activity or another. The left hemisphere was thought to exclusively do language and verbal reasoning, and the right to do visual processing and intuition. However, when researchers stuck people in MRI machines they found both hemispheres lighting up for virtually every activity. It is now well established that both hemispheres are involved in language, imagery, reason, emotion and just about every thought and action, but still, as even the detractors admit, the two hemispheres make very different contributions to all these activities. Take language for example, the left hemisphere understands the details of sentence structure and semantics and the meaning of individual words, but it is the right hemisphere that comprehends implied meaning and plays a major role in understanding and producing verbal metaphors and humor, not to mention picking up on all the non-verbal clues that are such an important part of face-to-face communication.
All vertebrates, not just humans, have two asymmetrical cerebral hemispheres. According to Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World, our distant ancestors evolved two separate hemispheres in order to simultaneously give the world two different kinds of attention. To find one’s dinner or catch one’s prey, attention to specific task related details is needed, but to prevent becoming someone else’s dinner, a broad open attention is needed. The left hemisphere provides the narrow-beam, while the right hemisphere is the wide angle lens. This difference in attention is also present in humans, and in many ways forms the basis for the different character of each hemisphere.
Jill Bolte Taylor put in eight years of hard work to fully regain the skills of her left hemisphere. These skills are essential to our ability to effectively and efficiently accomplish our goals, but an unbalanced over-reliance on the left hemisphere can lead to a reductionistic view that misses the big picture and the meaningfulness contained between. As can be seen in experiments with split brain patients and people with right hemisphere damage, the left hemisphere thinks in a black and white sort of way often with a kind of closed-minded certainty in its own correctness. The left hemisphere’s tendency to simplify complexity into graspable abstracted categories helps us effectively manipulate the world, but it can also create a world that is static, fragmented, decontextualized and lifeless.
The title of McGilchrist’s book, “The Master and his Emissary”, refers to a story told by Nietzsche about a wise spiritual king who is usurped by his clever and ambitious but shortsighted vizier, which leads to the demise of a once large and prosperous kingdom. Both McGilchrist and Taylor believe that we as individuals and as a society would be better off if the left hemisphere stuck to its role as emissary and servant to the more farsighted, more relational right hemisphere, or as Taylor puts it, “we should stem from the peaceful consciousness of our right mind and use the skills of our left mind to interact with the external world.”
Spirituality as a Step to the Right
If I had to guess, I’d say Taylor probably fits the “spiritual but not religious” category. She recommends cultivating mindfulness to achieve a more right hemisphere centered way of being and doesn’t talk much about conventional religious practices, but for me it is primarily through my religious practices – my prayers and ceremonies – that I most strongly feel what she describes as her right hemisphere awareness, a sense of deep inner peace and connectedness with the Universe, a Universe full of dynamic vitality. I think awakening and deepening this right hemisphere awareness is at the heart of not just my religion, but all religions.
Religious rituals with their art, music and poetry invite participants to become fully present and open themselves up to the feelings of the moment, and because so much of the scaffolding of religion is already an expression of a right hemisphere sense of things, to me religious practice is one of the most powerful ways to engage the right hemisphere and transcend the limiting perspective of the left hemisphere. This is certainly true of my experience with practicing the meditations and ceremonies of PaGaian Cosmology.
To some, understanding and explaining spirituality and religious practice in terms of brain anatomy and function may seem like left brain reductionism and to an extent it is, but for me it gives a physical grounding to spiritual experience and religious practice that helps my left brain get on-board and explain to other lefts brains the value of “stepping to the right”.
The Author
Maggie Jay Lee is interested in growing a new religious culture grounded in the everyday shared world and the public revelations of science, that celebrates our relationship with Cosmos, Earth and each other, and strives to bring us into right relationship with the Nature inside and outside of us. She draws inspiration from modern cosmology, evolutionary psychology, and the myths and wisdom traditions of ancient Hellas. M. Jay is a member of the Universal Pantheists Society and the Spiritual Naturalist Society, and she has studied with Glenys Livingston author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. She celebrates the creative unfolding of Gaia in west Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, two dogs and cat.
See Musings of a Pagan Mythicist posts.
See all of Maggie Jay Lee’s Posts.
This Wednesday
This Wednesday, John Halstead reviews James Fowler’s Book, Stages of Faith and shares part of the story of his personal spiritual evolution: “Stages of (My) Faith Development”.
Ouroboros Pantheus, by Annika Garratt
Today we continue our early winter theme, “Beginnings”, with Annika Garratt as she explores the history and meaning of the symbol of the Oroboros. For discussion in the comments: What role does the concept of perpetual cyclic renewal of life play in your Naturalistic Paganism? How is this concept related to monism or pantheism for you? What symbols do you employ to express this concept?
- Ouroboros, by Annika Garratt
The Ouroboros represents the perpetual cyclic renewal of life and infinity, the concept of eternity and the cycle of life, death and rebirth. It can also represent the idea of primordial unity. In the Book of the Dead, which was still current in the Graeco-Roman period, the self-begetting sun god, Atum, is said to have ascended from chaos-waters with the appearance of a snake, the animal renewing itself every morning. Plato described a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe. The famous Ouroboros drawing from the early alchemical text The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra dating to 2nd century Alexandria encloses the words hen to pan, “one is the all”. In Norse mythology, it appears as the serpent Jörmungandr, one of the three children of Loki and Angrboda, who grew so large that it could encircle the world and grasp its tail in its teeth. The Ouroboros symbol appears in both 14th- and 15th-century Albigensian-printing watermarks and tarot cards. The Ouroboros is displayed on numerous Masonic seals, frontispieces and other imagery, especially during the 17th century. The Ouroboros is featured in the seal of Theosophy, along with other traditional symbols. Carl Jung interpreted the Ouroboros as having an archetypal significance to the human psyche. The Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of it as a representation of the pre-ego “dawn state”.
The Egyptian god Atum was known as the “complete one”. As creator of the Universe he was seen as the underlying substance of the world, the deities and all things being made of his flesh or his ka. In the Heliopolitan creation myth, Atum was considered to be the first god, having created himself. He is the self-creating and self-sustaining Universe; he is the Totality of Being. The Gnostic Basilides called the “Great Archon” ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ. The name occurs in the Refutation of all Heresies (vii. 26) by Hippolytus, who says that “their great archon” is Abrasax, because his name contains the number 365, the number of the days in the year. Epiphanius designates Abrasax more distinctly as “the power above all, and First Principle,” “the cause and first archetype” of all things. E. A. Wallis Budge describes Abrasax “as a Pantheus, i.e. All-God,” in Amulets and Superstitions (1930).
“A curious evidence of the consciousness of the unity of the divine is afforded by the amalgamation of different deities into a ‘Theos pantheus’, or ‘Thea pantheus’, which might be regarded either as an abstract conception or a new deity according to the fluidity of pagan theology. Usually one deity was chosen, prominent for his merits in the votary’s estimation, and the epithet ‘pantheus’ (‘all-God’) added to the personal name as representative of the totality of the divine. Thus we find in Latin inscriptions ‘Serapis Pantheus’ ….” S. Angus, The Mystery Religions, Dover Publications, 1975.
The Ouroboros represents the Pantheus, the All-God of Pantheism. H.P. Owen (197) wrote that “Pantheists are ‘monists’…they believe that there is only one Being, and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it.” The process of uniting all to a single “oneness” (hen) as a form of salvation is called “henosis”. Plotinus defined henosis in his works as a reversing of the ontological process of consciousness via meditation. Plotinus words his teachings to reconcile not only Plato with Aristotle but also various world religions that he had personal contact with during his various travels. In Neoplatonic henology, the individual is absorbed back into the primordial substance and returned to the infinite non-sentient force—the Source or One—and reamalgamated back into the Universe. Since consciousness is an emanation and is not created, Neoplatonism takes the concept of primordial unity (henosis) as rational and deterministic emanating from an uncaused cause. According to the Pythagoreans, “Monad” was a term for Divinity or the first being, or the totality of all being. Some Gnostics also used the word “Monad” for God, the Supreme Being, The Absolute. The 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza referred to the oneness of reality as Deus sive Natura, “God as Nature”.
The author
Annika is an artist/illustrator from Bournemouth UK. She produces colourful mixed media artwork on canvas as well as fluid ink illustrations, often based on folklore and mythological themes. Annika sells original paintings on canvas as well as fine art prints. If you have any questions about Annika’s work, feel free to contact her by email. You can also find Annika at:
This Wednesday
This Wednesday, Musings of a Pagan Mythicist by Maggie Jay Lee: “Step to the right: religion and the divided mind”.
Mid-Month Meditation: “American History” by Ken Apple
Editor’s note: We encourage our readers to take these mid-month meditations as an opportunity to take a short break from everything else. Rather than treating these posts the way you would any other post, set aside 10 minutes someplace quiet and semi-private to have an experience. Take a minute to relax first. After reading the post, take a few minutes to let the experience sink in. If it feels right, leave a comment.
A European is someone who thinks
that one hundred miles is a long way.
An American is someone who thinks
that one hundred years is a long time.
It’s not that we don’t have a history.
History stretches as far back from here
as anywhere in the vast universe.
But the history here was built of wood
and sinew by men with brown skin.
We’ve done our best to buy it, pave it
and forget it, but it’s still there, asleep
In the soil and the wind and the water
reaching into the mist as it always has
all the way back the very beginning.
The Author
My name is Ken Apple. I am fifty years old, I live in Puyallup Washington with my wife and youngest son. I attend the Tahoma UU congregation in Tacoma, WA. I have worked in book sales for almost twenty years, because I can’t imagine trying to sell anyone something else.
Next Sunday
Next Sunday, “Oroboros Pantheus” by Annika Garratt.
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