(if you are so inclined)
Revisioning World Soul
It is of great interest and concern to me that historically the decline of our symbolic thought coincides with the demystification of the wilderness. This means that as the gods retreat into the ethers, the wild places of our world become objectified. When a people celebrate nature deep imagination, visioning, song, poetry, ceremony, art and story are valued as legitimate sources of knowledge. Currently, we live in a time when nature is a commercial product, divisible, managed, artificially fertilized (inseminated), cloned—you read the papers and scan the Internet, you know. Subsequently, matter is dead, consciousness is limited to humans, and we bi-peds stand separate from the natural world.
What does not get said is that people have a wilderness as well and our inner wilderness is also divided (by dichotomies), managed (by rational fundamentalism), artificially fertilized (by “reality” TV, infomercials, lip-syncing “stars”) and cloned (shopping malls, and franchise anything).
But keep reading – here and in the media- for we are also living with one foot in our future, the pendulum always swings; gone is the Hero’s journey and chronic expansionism, we are re-membering the pendulum swings. My hair blows as I write. Environmentalism, eco-activism, organic farming, recycling, bamboo clothes…it is in motion. However, it is time to also animate our Wildness as well. Don’t let our Inner Wilderness continue to be colonized by “progressive” thought that relegates deep imagination as “regressive” or exclusive property of the “primitive.” We meet and understand Wilderness best when we are in our own state of wildness–art, ceremony, story, song and vision.
World-Soul Yoga is just such a practice. I use the term “yoga” to emphasize that listening to World Soul is an on-going life practice that constantly unfolds and requires attention and intention. World-Soul is the interiority of things and events, the Story within. Don’t be seduced by the rote power of “anthropomorphism,” for just as we learned planet Earth was not the center of the Universe, ours is not the sole soul in our world either. There is an ecology of Soul (think of it, why would there be one exception isolated from our interdependent existence?) and it thrives in the places of World-Soul, the landscape of totemic, ancestral patterns revealed in art, ceremony, story, song and vision.
To sustain life on our planet, in our culture, and in us we must bolster and bloom Wilderness. To meet Wilderness we must be in our wilderness.
