The Web of Connectedness

by Ross Bishop

We might consider the universe as consisting of two fundamental states of being. They are separation and connectedness. We know them as compassion and fear, or heaven and hell. We can also think of them in terms of freedom and order. Our schooling persuades us to see these states as opposites, but they are not. Although each has individual characteristics, it could not exist, in life or in our minds, without the other. We call them complementarities.

The ancient Norsemen saw the universe through these fundamental values. The Vikings recognized one force as the force of contraction, of withdrawal. They saw this force in the rigid contraction of ice (they called it Isa), and in the withdrawal of the embryo from the world in the egg. Isa was a separating, disruptive and sometimes nurturing force that drew things away from their normal associations. The other force, Sowilo, was the energy of relationship. Sowilo was the sign of the sun. It was a nurturing, expansive, connecting force that brought things together and allowed them to interconnect. When we write about these forces they seem different because our words create artificial boundaries between them. Sowilo and Isa are parts of a seamless whole, vitally interconnected and dependent upon each other for their existence. One could say that a day consists of darkness and light, yet defining a clear boundary between them is impossible. Any demarcation is arbitrary.

There is a very close relationship between the Viking view of the universe and the traditional Yin and Yang that have guided the Orient for centuries. Yin, like Isa, is a contractive force. Yang, like Sowilo, is expansive. These are not unlike two other forces, the Buddhist siddhi and shakti. It is notable that Western man's roots began in the same fertile and balanced soil of complimentary concepts as did the Orient and the Nordic north. Much our culture comes from Viking origins. Yet, Western rationality turned its back on this fundamental and balancing of all ideas because it was "pagan." The significantly advanced societies of the Orient were pagan as well. What incredible arrogance! How fearful the Christian men of old must have been of competing beliefs.

Myth, ceremony, love, soul, compassion, mystery and prayer exist in the domain of relationship. They bring the warmth and joy of the sun into our hearts. They speak of the interconnectedness and interdependency of all things. Thomas Moore comments:

The infinite inner space of a story, whether from religion or from daily life, is its soul. If we deprive sacred stories of their mystery, we are left with the brittle shell of fact, the literalism of a single meaning. But when we allow a story its soul, we can discover our own depths through it.

In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote that poetry is superior to history in that the latter is confined to events that happened, but tragedy may also record what might have happened or what could happen. It represents the triumph of imagination over reality. Gregory Bateson used to tell the story of a man who wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in a large computer. So he found the largest, most advanced computer he could and asked it, "Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?" The machine set furiously to work analyzing this and that . . . and (since it was a computer considerably advanced from those of today) it actually came up with an answer. It said to the man, "That reminds me of a story." It has been said that God made man because he loves stories.

Rationality and science dwell in the land of separation. Things are examined and disassembled in isolation, separated from their natural relationships. This separation allows a certain sense of order to descend over the seeming chaos of the universe. Seeing things as existing in and of themselves, separated from others, allows us to study them in detail. However, we must remember that this is not reality. Rationality is an artifice created by man to allow him to study the universe and gain a certain understanding of it. Science cannot substitute for reality. By its own definitions it excludes huge portions of the conscious and unconscious universes.

There is nothing inherently wrong or inferior about either science or mythology. But, it is the web of relationships between the ebb and flow of expansion and contraction, between fear and compassion, between day and night, between as Lao Tsu says "the ten thousand things" that allow the universe to exist and gives it its vitality. When we totally disregard one in favor of the other we create a serious imbalance in society and put it at certain risk of serious illness. Emphasizing only one aspect of a complimentarity will cause a person, a family or a culture to die. Living in separation and contraction moves us into the realms of isolation and fear. This is what has happened today. We need both science and myth. We need the relational qualities along with the separating ones. Consider these words from The Gnostic Gospel of Phillip:

Faith receives, love gives. No one will be able to receive without faith. No one will be able to give without love. Therefore, in order to truly receive, we have faith, but this is so that we may love and give, since if one does not give in love, he has no profit from what he has given.
In advanced societies the web of connectedness between people and between man and nature is maintained by prayer and ceremony. This keeps spirituality intact and the society healthy. Unfortunately we are not so advanced or wise. Kat Duff comments:

When God is not acknowledged, egomania develops, and out of this mania comes sickness . . . As we forgot the sacred dimension of life, we also lost much of our sense of awe, respect, and humility before all things, which normally place restraints upon our so-human tendency to explore, manipulate and control. So, as Jung explained, egomania develops, a false sense of pride, supremacy, and omnipotence that has lead to all manner of excesses . . .

To take things a step farther, liberation is not freedom from the negative or the positive, but freedom from pairs altogether. The idea of no-opposites, the transcendence of duality, is the essence of Advaita Hinduism and of Mahayana Buddhism. This idea, more than any other, is what separates the industrialized West from the traditions of the spiritual East. They fear our greed, we fear their truth. In the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita it is written:

Content with getting what arrives of itself
Passed beyond the pairs, free from envy,
Not attached to success nor failure,
Even acting, he is not bound.
He is to be recognized as eternally free
Who neither loathes nor craves;
For he that is freed from the pairs,
Is easily freed from conflict.

Being "freed from pairs" is not alien to the West. We just do not often think about things in these terms. However, according to the Gospel of St. Thomas it is the key to the Kingdom of Heaven on earth:

They said to Him: Shall we then, being children,
enter the Kingdom?
Jesus said to them:
When you make the two one,
and when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner
and the above as the below,
and when you make the male and female into a single one,
then you shall enter the Kingdom.

As he drew close to his death, William Butler Yeats moved toward a new understanding of the dialectic of opposites. He found a new state of peace after all the battles of his life. In a letter to a friend he wrote,

It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, "Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it." I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence. A Sufi leader teaches his students to regard all the negativity in their lives as a gift from God, to observe and ask. "What is there in this that returns to me because it comes from me?"

Because everything in the universal mind is experiential, universal wisdom cannot fit into scientifically precise categories. Because it is mostly experiential, contradictions and confusing metaphors appear. Its lack of tidiness is discomforting for compulsive people. The humbling thing is universal truth's incredible simplicity. The real rules of life are obvious and absurdly simple, and because of this we mistrust them. It has been postulated that simplicity may be too complex for the human brain to understand. The Creator urges us to "do no harm," to "care for each other," and "fill our hearts with compassion," but these virtues get swept away in the headlong rush for money, lust and power to quench our compulsive, man-created, insecurities.

In The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Gibbon wrote of "the gentle and powerful influence of law and manners" in human society, and that the alternative to the cultivation of reason and civility is "fanaticism" or "zeal." In the 1960's we had the Black Panthers, SDS, Malcolm X, the KKK, and Barry Goldwater proclaiming that, "Extremism in the pursuit of freedom is no vice." Today we have Skinheads, Lewis Farrakhan, Islamic fundamentalists, Pat Robertson and Jesse Helms. We have watched the Middle East hemorrhage and have suffered through the bombings and kidnappings of terrorists, 9/11 and the new war on Iraq. "Fanaticism" and "zeal" have replaced reason and civility because people's hearts are filled with pain. They have nowhere else to turn.

John Donne wrote in his Devotions, "No man is an island. Every man is a piece of the continent. If a clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less . . . Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Therefore never send (to know) for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Although the bell tolls for each of us, it is very difficult to hear it over the din of sirens, media hype, drive-by shootings and MTV. These pressures can become so intense that they overcome individual character. Sheldon Kopp points to the power of this pressure using an important lesson from another culture:

Settings as ensnaring as these can redefine the self-image of individuals caught in their web. The most obvious episodes of individually overwhelming upset occur at times of radical social-political upheaval. One stunning example is that if the Ik, a Ugandan hunting and gathering tribe who not long ago were a decent, generous, stable society. The contingencies of African nationalistic politics moved these people from their familiar comfortably nourishing hunting ground to a barren waterless, game-free mountain territory. The government transported them to this new land with the mandate that they become farmers.

Less that three generations later, living in this alien, inhospitable, punitive setting has left the Ik culture in ruins and their generous, easygoing ambiance nonexistent. The mountain villages turned out to be far from livable and the food uneatable (there was not any). Soon the people became as unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable, and generally as mean as any people can be. Love, compassion, and community feeling virtually disappeared. Family life deteriorated to the point where children were abandoned at age three and forced to fend for themselves as best they could.

Those children that survived to adulthood turned out to be devious, dishonest, sneaky characters who laughed sadistically at the pain of fellow tribes people. Hardly any survived beyond the age of twenty-five. Those that did were ravaged and deserted by the younger hardier offspring. Grown children could be found robbing their own parents of whatever meager possessions they still had, even forcing half-chewed food from desperately clinched mouths . . .

Western man's rationally driven hubris, unfettered by his natural sense of shame, has mutilated the web of natural connectedness between all things. He has replaced it with materialism, control and manipulation, competition and domination, institutionalization and unbridled self-importance. This combination has led to the incredible narcissistic self-absorption of the later half of the 20th century, the age of "Me-ism." Whether it is junk bond criminals, rock stars, the financial hustlers who created the Wall Street scandals, wealthy spoiled athletes, or business people, politicians and lawyers of limitless egos, our age reeks with "notice me" narcissism and a lack of morality that will push that narcissism to almost any ends.

©2003 Blue Lotus Press.
Reproduction is permitted with attribution.