I have wondered what the nature of this earth is as an essential unique entity in the galaxy. What is its essential nature, its purpose, and its symbolic self-expression? What is the dynamic of its very nature that plays out through all things, and all time? Of course, this is the kind of question that cannot ever be fully known. Especially as a human being that is still striving to inhabit a truly relational ontology in which my interrelatedness does not occur consciously, but is instead enacted unconsciously, as an integrated reality.
What I have been able to gather in a rudimentary way, through observing inner and outer landscapes, is that Earth presents binaries, dualities, and polarities. There is night and day with the fast orbit around the sun and moon, all living beings operate in a rhythm of expansion and contraction, there are literal poles which hold the globe onto a delicate axis. These opposites seem to manifest into matter and psychological material in all spaces and cross-culturally. Although, how it may be understood and interacted with is certainly with diversity across the human world. Perhaps Earth shows us what is, so that we can dream into what could be, or perhaps is just outside our view. A co-creation toward something new that is alive in the possibility. An emergence of a non-dualistic phenomena and interbeingness. In this way, Earth needs us, and our participation in this joining toward a shared becoming.
I have been shedding many models lately and seem to be in yet another disentanglement. My way of thinking and engaging with the concept of non-duality may have been leading me back to the familiar because I am unconsciously driven by striving for something different with the hope of making something new. It is a kind of disassociation from reality and a fragmentation of self. I sense that this linear way of looking at connection and transmutation would lead most of us back into the tension of opposites. Although my practices intend to establish inner balance, I am now wondering if my efforting towards non-duality consciousness leads me back into an endless tethering to duality. This way of interacting with non-duality I believe is described well by Marita Deleany as “one sidedness” and “caused by the overreliance on the extraverted thinking function” (2009, p. 79).
If it is as Delaney says that “we are essential binary creatures destined to live internally and externally at the same time” and with Mary-Louise von Franz noting that “we must relate to the inner and outer world simultaneously”, then there is no way to fragment from one world in seeking the possibility of the other. This attempted bypass is a familiar process to many of us located and living in the global north and in westernized culture. No doubt an impression from imperial capitalism and the severing from ancestral ways. Reassociation to the reality of the inner and outer occurring at once, requires us to be willing to be impacted. More than that, it may ask of us a sacrifice.
Delany describes the relationship of hunter and animal hunted for sustenance as requiring a sacrifice on both human and more than human beings (2009, p. 79). This ritual of offering something sacred to the sacred is common indigenous knowledge and a core system in many indigenous cosmologies. Sacrifice in this way gives way to relationship and the possibility of balance. Coloniality maintained by capitalism gives permission to avoid the sacrifice in the pursuit of materiality and possession. A larger significance of this severing of the relationship is that human beings act without awareness of their acts of destruction and therefore do not register the consequences.
In reckoning with the human pathology of disconnection, from ourselves and the Earth, from climate destruction and disastrous imbalances, we may need to move out of dissociation and toward a sacrifice of the familiar and comfortable. As I slowly wake up from my dissociation, I notice grief which is both mine own and that of the non-human world. Inviting this into embodied experience and knowing, creates an opportunity for inhabiting interconnection. Practices need to support the entry into the internal landscape through the reality that we already exist in an inter-related world, and non-symbolically. However, the process of awakening to relationship can be painful, and the dethawing of dissociation reveals unhealed and unacknowledged wounding. We must have the courage to feel this, without moving back into the consciousness split. A reoccurrence which the colonial matrix thrives upon. As Delany says, “the work required of human consciousness is in part a continual attempt to integrate our dissociated parts” (2009, p. 82). The Earth is waiting to be known and for the knowing to be awakened from within us. In times when this dream is not visible in conscious realities because we are out of balance and have split ourselves into two, we can seek the collective unconscious and the ancestral practices that open portals into new modes of being.