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Last updated on: January 15, 2015 at 10:56 am By John Halstead

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Panentheism: The Dancer and the Dance

Last updated on: April 20, 2013 at 2:44 pm By John Halstead

How can we know the dancer from the dance?
— W.B. Yeats

Theism, Pantheism, and Panetheism

In his latest effort to tell the Pagan world why everyone is wrong and he is right, Sam Webster has taken aim an panentheism, the belief that God is both transcendent and immanent. Webster dispatches panentheism in one paragraph explaining that it is “logically untenable” for God to be All and then some.

Panentheism represents one of three logical possibilities for describing the nature of God’s (you can substitute “Being” or the “Ground of Being” for “God” here) relation to the world. Either God is “wholly other” than the world (transcendental theism), God is the world (pantheism), or God is both other and the world (panentheism). (Incidentally, polytheists and “pluralist” Mormons don’t really fit any of these categories because the gods they worship are not ultimate Being, but rather particular beings in the universe of beings.) Webster tries to make the case for pantheism in his post.

Each of these options — transcendental theism, pantheism, and panentheism — have their problems. In his rush to get to the one-and-only Truth, Webster overlooks these. What I have come to believe is that each of these options is both right and wrong. Or rather, they each tell us something about the nature of God-Being-Ground.

Transcendental theism tells us that God is “wholly other”, A≠B — i.e., the Creator is a completely separate ontological category from creation. The problem this creates is: how does the one interact with the other? The logical outcome of transcendental theism is either a fundamental dualism in which God and the world are radically separate and, consequently, nature (including humankind) is alienated from God, or a monism which sees the world as unreal or illusion. Christianity is an example of the former, and it tries to overcome this problem (mythologically) with the Incarnation. Some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism are examples of a monism which sees the world as maya. Both of these propositions — world as separate from divinity and world as illusion — are unacceptable to most contemporary Pagans, who view the world as neither fallen nor illusory.

Pantheism has its own problems, namely, if the World is God, then why do we need two different words for the same thing. What does it mean logically to say that A=B? In addition, pantheism may imply determinism, to the extent that past, present, and future are seen as one. Finally, pantheism does not explain the human experience of alienation that gives rise to transcendental theisms.

Pan-en-theism is the third option. According to David Ray Griffen, in Sacred Interconnections (1990), panentheism means that “God is not remote and separate from nature, but immanent within it. Yet at the same time God is the unity which transcends it.” Panentheism has been espoused (in various forms) by as diverse thinkers as the Spinoza, Hegel, Meister Eckhart, the Transcendentalists, Teilhard de Chardin, Heidegger, the Process Theologians, contemporary Goddess Thealogians, and many more. See John Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers. Recognizing the logical problems of both a God that is wholly transcendent and a God that is wholly immanent, panentheism tries to strike a balance between the two. Or, if you are feeling less charitable, you might say that it doubles down on the logical inconsistency by not taking a position: A=B≠B.

Panentheism and pantheism both share the proposition and the world and God are in some sense “one”. However, panenthism differs from pantheism and resembles transcendental theism in that it preserves the “otherness” of God. It is significant that pantheists often (mis-)understand panentheism as collapsing into transcendental theism, while transcendental theists see panentheism as just another form of pantheism. However, panentheism is distinguishable from both philosophies, even as it tries to preserve the insights of both.

Panentheism affirms that, the world is “in” God, but God is not entirely identical with the world. That is, God is not limited to the world; God is also the wholeness which transcends the world. This wholeness includes not only the manifest world, but the “unmanifest” or latent potentialities which have not been real-ized in nature. The philosopher Hegel illustrates this through analogy to the growth of a plant in his opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit:

“The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant and the fruit now emerges as the truth instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.”

In this analogy, the world is the blossom/fruit and God is the “life of the whole” which includes both the blossom and the fruit. Thus, panentheism thus tries to preserve the concept of the “otherness”, but transforms it into an otherness which, paradoxically, does not exclude, but includes.

I’m not going to argue that panentheism is superior to transcendental theism or pantheism. Here’s what I want to say about these three options: People have been arguing about this question for literally millennia, and will continue to do so. The history of Christianity can be seen as a pendulum swinging between the poles of transcendence and immanence. See Stanley Grenz & Roger Olsen, 20th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (1992). And Indian philosophy is at least as rich in nuance on this issue. And while I lean in the direction of panenthism (and pantheism when in a pinch), I think all three deserve some respect.

But I do want to try to explain here how I understand panentheism and why I think it is a beautiful idea. I will be speaking here, primarily in mythological, not logical, terms, so this is not a direct response to Webster. If the issue could have been resolved logically, I think we would have done it in 2000 years of Christianity and 3000 years of Indian philosophy, not to mention other traditions. (Ancient Western paganisms seem to have been more concerned with worshiping a multiplicity of gods beings rather than Being as such. Although there were exceptions, like the Stoics and Neoplatonists.) If you’d like a more logical explication of panentheism, I recommend Philip Clayton’s In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on the Presence of God in a Scientific World (2004).

Panentheism in Paganism: The Dancer and the Dance

For me, panentheism finds mythological expression in the Neopagan Goddess, who represents the Sacred Whole, and her consort, the god, who represents nature in all its particularity, which includes you, me, the sun, the trees, the rocks, all in this given moment. The relationship between Goddess* and her consort expresses the mystery of diversity within unity. In Joseph Campbell’s words, the Great Goddess is

“the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies, configurator of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead. And everything having form or name—including God personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful—was her child, within her womb.”

Masks of God, Vol 3: Occidental Mythology (1964).

Robert Graves’ mythology provides a historical starting point for the panentheistic Neopagan divinity. Graves’ Triple Goddess is an ever-changing, but never-dying Great Goddess of the cosmos. Quoting Apuleius, Graves’ Goddess declares: “I am she that is the natural mother of all things […] manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses.” Graves’ god-consort is the son, lover, and ultimately the sacrificial victim of Goddess. The god is born and dies, but Goddess — while she changes from maiden, to mother, to crone, and then to maiden again — is never born and never dies.

Graves’ mythology was adopted by Starhawk and popularized in her book, The Spiral Dance, the title of which is a metaphor for Goddess herself:

“The Goddess is the Encircler, the Ground of Being; the God is That-Which-Is-Brought-Forth, her mirror image, her other pole. She is the earth; He is the grain. She is the all encompassing sky; He is the sun, her fireball. She is the Wheel; He is the traveler. He is the sacrifice of life to death that life may go on. She is the Mother and Destroyer; He is all that is born and is destroyed.”

According to Starhawk’s model, the god is the mortal dancer and Goddess is the immortal Dance.

As John Cooper explains, Starhawk

“locates transcendence in the depths of an immanence in the world. Transcendence in her theology is the primordial unity, the ‘unbroken cycle,’ the Life Force beyond sexual differentiation. This basic reality is ontologically deeper that the polarity of forces that generate all the creatures in the world. It is their source and the context in within which they exist. […] Thus Starhawk affirms all the essential ingredients of panentheism.”

Starhawk likely borrowed the name of her book from the Spiral Dance (also called the “Meeting Dance”) originally performed by the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn (NROODG) tradition of Neo-Wicca, with which she associated. Interestingly, in 1972, the original NROOGD coven (the Full Moon Coven) hived off the “Spiral Dance Coven”. Later, another coven hived off called “The Dancer and the Dance Coven”. The NROODG was itself heavily influenced by Robert Graves’ The White Goddess.

Starhawk may also have borrowed the panentheistic conception of Goddess from Frederick Adams. According to Margot Adler, Adams’ (unfortunately-named) “Nameless Maiden” (Adams had a less-than-avuncular preoccupation with divine maidens) “spins a cosmic dance from which all things come into existence, each of them unique and particular.” She is the

“‘transcendent unique,’ the creatrix of all uniqueness. All entities she creates interrelate with her, but never lose their individual essence. Thus she represents polytheistic wholeness as opposed to monotheistic unity. An analogy to this might be a symphony, where each note is differentiated, but the whole is something beyond a ‘unity’.“

Subsumed within pantheistic “transcendental unique” are what Adams calls “the Goddess-given Gods”, which include the Mother, “the Source and Center”, the Son, “creative separation”, the Father, full “particularization”, and the Daughter, “creative return”. Over this four-step movement, or dance, is Adams’ Nameless Maiden who is “the Mysterious Wholeness of the Four which consist in their dynamic separation.” (Unfortunately, I have not been able to corroborate Adler on this point. According to Hans Holzer, Adam’s theology includes a Great Goddess, her son and daughter, Kouros and Kore, seven planetary gods, and lesser spirits, arranged hierarchically.)

Another possible source of of the panentheistic conception of Goddess is the McFarland Dianic tradition, which also was influenced by Robert Graves, and may have influenced Starhawk in turn. The Dianic witchcraft tradition, now called the McFarland Dianic tradition (MDT) to distinguish it from Z. Budapest’s feminist Dianic tradition, was created in 1971 by Morgan McFarland and Mark Roberts. Unlike both traditional British Wicca, which viewed divinity as essentially a polarity of male and female divinities, and feminist Dianic witchcraft, which viewed divinity monotheistically as a parthenogenic female, the McFarland Dianics occupied a middle ground, viewing divinity in terms of an immortal Creatrix and her mortal male consort.

Margot Adler describes the group’s beliefs thus:

“The Goddess is seen as having three aspects: Maiden[…], Great Mother, and Old Crone, who holds the door to death and rebirth. It is in her second aspect that the Goddess takes a male consort, who is as Osiris to Isis. To show this relationship, [McFarland] Dianics quote a phrase attributed to Bachofen: ‘Immortal is Isis, mortal her husband, like the earthly creation he represents.’ Thus there is a place for the God, but the female as Creatrix is primary.”

From the no longer active McFarland Dianic website [http://crystalillumination2012.org/]:

“In the McFarland Dianic Tradition the Goddess was never born, and She never dies. She always was, is, and always will be. She is the fertile Void at the Center from which the universe is born. Another important concept is Immanence. The Goddess is immanent in Her creation. She is not separate from Her creation, she is Her creation. … Her Son and Consort is the Mortal principle that is born, dies and is reborn in an ever-repeating cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The God also is of the Goddess. You could say that He is Her male aspect.”

One of the most common forms of the Neopagan Goddess is the Triple Goddess who is Maiden, Mother, and Crone (Wise Woman) in one and who is symbolized by the phases of the moon: waxing, full, and waning. (Some people add a fourth, dark phase for the new moon, which represents death.) Paul Reid-Bowen explains in his book, Goddess as Nature: Towards a Philosophical Thealogy, how the Neopagan Triple Goddess represents the Cycle of which her aspects are only parts:

“[T]he three aspects of the Goddess, Maiden-Mother-Crone, are theaologically understood not only to be pre- and post-patriarchal models of female identity, but also a dynamic whole: three aspects of a unity. And, while extensive thealogical energy has been invested into charting the character and meaning of each of these different aspects of the Triple Goddess, I am concerned with how the model functions as a dynamic whole. Notably, the model of the Triple Goddess is understood to have metaphysical significance because it is thealogically understood to illuminate broader patterns occurring within the whole construed as nature. The Triple Goddess emphasizes not only changes, cycles and transitions in terms of a female life-pattern, but also with respect to cosmology and ecology (lunar and seasonal cycles) and existential and metaphysical processes and states (birth/emergency, growth/generation, decay/degeneration and rebirth/regeneration).”

“[…] the model of the Goddess as Triple introduces themes relating to transitional change (both in women and nature) and also cyclical recurrence within a unified whole (understood as the Goddess as nature). The Goddess, according to this model, may be viewed as always changing, while at the same time manifest within recurrent patterns.”

“Thus, the triplicity of the Triple Goddess evokes a notion of diversity and difference within nature, while the unity of the Triple Goddess symbolizes the Sacred Whole, the unity of nature, expressed in the cycle of birth-growth-decay-regeneration.”

Zoe and bios: the unity of Life

In their book, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1993), Anne Baring and Jules Cashford illustrate the relationship of Goddess to the world using Karl Kerenyi’s distinction between the two Greek words for “life”: Zoe** and bios. According to Baring and Cashford, Zoe signifies the eternal and the infinite, while bios referrs to the finite and individual life, the latter being a manifestation of the former. Together they reveal the two facets of existence: eternal and transitory, latent and manifest, potential and actual, invisible and visible.

“[…] two different Greek words for life, zoe and bios, as the embodiment of two dimensions co-existing in life. Zoe is eternal and infinite life; bios is finite and individual life. Zoe is infinite ‘being’; bios is the living and dying manifestation of the eternal world in time.”

Baring and Cashford explain that bios represents the “manifesting” or epiphany (the “showing forth”) of the unmanifest Zoe, which both transcends and gives rise to bios. “Zoe is then both transcendent and immanent, and bios is the immanent form of zoe.”

Baring and Cashford use the image of the moon to explain the relationship between Zoe and bios:

“The moon was an image in the sky that was always changing yet was always the same. What endured was the cycle, whose totality could never be seen at any one moment. All that was visible was the constant interplay between light and dark in an ever-recurring sequence. […] The whole was invisible, an enduring and unchanging circle […] Symbolically, it was as if the visible ‘came from’ and ‘returned to’ the invisible – like being born and dying, and being born again.”

Cashford elaborates on this theme in her book The Moon: Myth and Image: “Zoe is an image of the cycle, and bios is an image of the individual phases: bios is born from zoe, dies back into zoe and is reborn from zoe, as the phases follow each other in the pattern of the cycle.”

Baring and Cashford also find this dynamic expressed in matrifocal myths of the Bronze Age about a “Great Mother” and her son-lover or her daughter:

“[…] the Goddess may be understood as the eternal cycle of the whole: the unity of life and death as a single process. The young goddess or god is her mortal form in time, which, as manifested life […] is subject to a cyclical process of birth, flowering, decay, death and rebirth.”

“In the goddess culture the conception of the relation between creator and creation was expressed in the image of the Mother as zoe, the eternal source, giving birth to the son as bios, the created life in time which lives and dies back into the source. The son was the part that emerged from the whole, through which the whole might come to know itself.”

“[…] the familiar drama of zoe and bios, in which the son-lover must accept death – as the image of incarnate being that falls back, like the seed, into the source – while the goddess, here the continuous principle of life, endures to bring forth new forms from the inexhaustible store.”

In this view, the hierosgamos, the sacred marriage, of the Mother Goddess with her lover takes on added meaning: it represents the mysterious connection between Zoe and bios. “The sacred marriage, in which the Mother Goddess as bride is united with her son as lover, reconnects symbolically the two ‘worlds’ of zoe and bios, and it is this union that regenerates the earth.” From this perspective, ancient pagan and contemporary Neopagan rituals are mythic dramas in which celebrants become reconciled to death and reaffirm their trust in the eternal Life (Zoe) which promises that, as darkness is always followed by the light, so death is followed by rebirth — albeit in a different form. The re-connection of Zoe (eternity) to bios (time) through myth and ritual permits a shift of consciousness from the particular life of the individual to the supra-individual life of the cosmos. Cashford explains:

“Then what, at the level of bios, appears as dismemberment, appears, at the level of zoe, as transformation. The challenge of the Mystery rituals was to shift the consciousness of the participants from bios to zoe, from looking at life in pieces to experiencing life as one complete whole.“

This is the mystery that the Presocractic philosopher Heraclitus sought to express in here:

athánatoi thnetoí
thnetoì athántatoi
zôntes tòn ekeínon thánaton
tòn dè ekeínon bíon tethneôtes

Mortals are immortals
and immortals are mortals,
living each other’s death
and dying the other’s life.

According to Baring and Cashford, the patriarchal solar god-culture severed the connection between Zoe and bios. Mythologically, the god refuses the hierosgamos with Goddess that is both consummation and death (see the Epic of Gilgamesh). The god’s origin in Goddess is forgotten and the god becomes Creator of a creation from which he is separate and which he orders from without. And with the changes in myth a new psychology and a new social order prevails. Nature and the sacred are split. The divine is “othered” and placed beyond the reach of humankind in a transcendent realm. Nature becomes an object over which the disembodied rational spirit exercises its dominion. Darkness (the unmanifest) is no longer seen as part of the cosmic cycle; it becomes mere absence, something negative, to be fought rather than embraced. Eternity is no longer the cycle of death and rebirth, but an unending life which can only be hoped for by the individual.

Through a panentheistic understanding of divinity, Neopaganism seeks to unite Zoe and bios again, to reconnect the divine and nature, the eternal cycle of Life with all of our particular lives and deaths. This union is not a static identification, as in pantheism, but a dynamic dance between the two, Zoe and bios, Goddess and god. As Harry Byngham, Chief of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, wrote so eloquently in 1923:

“Life springs out of the star-tissued womb of Nature as the virile son of the all-Mother. Life seeks reunion or religion with Nature, his mother, not however, by falling back into her arms and surrendering once more to some primordial slumber and dream, but by striving away from and with her, searching her, playing with her, dancing before her, wooing her, overcoming her, until she, who is eternally young as well as eternally old, responds like a maiden to his life and will and power, and, in the transfiguring ecstasy of union a new cosmic consciousness is conceived.”

There’s still some patriarchal “power-over” language in this quote, but I still like the imagery of striving, searching, playing, dancing, and wooing to express the mystery of the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent.

* Note: I use “Goddess” intentionally here without the definite article “the”, to emphasize the nature of Goddess as Be-ing, as opposed to a being. Indeed, it would be appropriate to understand “Goddess” not as a noun, but as a verb (i.e., Goddess-ing). I also defend the gendering of “Goddess” as (1) a necessary counterpoint to the traditional gendering of the transcendental God and (2) as an appropriate metaphor for the the source, ground, or womb of manifest existence.

** I capitalize Zoe to emphasize its supraordinate nature.

Home Is Where You Find Your Gods

Last updated on: April 13, 2013 at 7:18 pm By John Halstead

There are many ways to define one’s religious identity. It might be defined in terms of shared values. Or the expression of those shared values in group practices. Yvonne Aburrow’s recent series on dual-faith practice drew my attention to a 2007 post by Peter Bishop published @ Quaker Pagan Reflections where he defines religious identity in terms of having received divine communication in that setting:

“God (the Divine, the Gods…whatever you want to call Him/Her/It/Them) calls to us. Divinity “bleeds through” from the realm of the Divine into our world. Pagans invoke it loudly, Quakers listen for it quietly, both have to work at discernment but can usually recognize sooner or later when it whacks them upside the head. And both groups have formed enduring, vibrant communities centered on the experience of the Divine. Like all communities, Quakers and Pagans have social norms and expectations, and they each have their interplay between the group’s values and the values that individual members bring. But Pagans and Quakers also share direct input from Outside, and this changes EVERYTHING.”

Peter then relates his experience of divinity in a Quaker context that, for him, constituted his conversion. He concludes:

“When I say I am a Quaker, it is because I have been a conduit for the Divine in that context. Once I’d had the experience of…well, call it “drawing down the Light,” the rest was just a formality. My clearness committee tested that leading and concurred, but I’m not a Quaker because they said so. I’m a Quaker because I listened for the presence of Spirit in the silence, and It spoke through me, and that’s what Quakers do. Just like I’m Wiccan because I invoked the presence of the God in circle and He came to me, and that’s what Wiccans do.“

I really liked this understanding of identity in terms of the context of the experience of the divine, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while, but something held me back: it was the possible implication that, in order for one to be a Pagan, one must have a certain kind of experience of the divine. I don’t think that Peter meant that at all, but his post could be taken that way by some.

I’ve confessed here before that the most powerful religious/mystical experiences of my life occurred when I was Christian, not when I was a Pagan. But Christianity is no longer my spiritual home. In fact, I felt saved by Jesus before becoming Pagan. Ironically, that experience marked the end, not the beginning, of my commitment to Christianity. (Maybe a powerful transformative experience in a Pagan context will mark the end of my association with Paganism.)

Since becoming Pagan, by spiritual experiences have been more subtle than spectacular. While, like Wordsworth in his poem “The World is Too Much With Us”, I would rather be a Pagan “standing on this pleasant lea […] Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn”, the truth is that my experience of divinity now is more like his poem “Tintern Abbey”:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

I don’t mean to downplay the value of these experiences. I recently had two exhilarating spiritual experiences during a trip to California, one in the Muir National Forest:

and another on the Route 1 coastline:

I just kept thinking, “This is it. I can’t forget this. This is it! This is being alive.”

In Pagan circles, though, such pantheistic/naturalistic experiences can seem to pale in comparison to the more spectacular experiences of polytheistic Pagans, in much the same way that the experiences of many Unitarians I attend church with seem to pale in comparison to the the charisma (χάρις) of Evangelical Christian experience. (Or perhaps it is that Naturalistic Pagans and Unitarians alike are more shy about sharing their personal spiritual experiences, preferring instead to intellectualize.)

Many Polytheists leave no doubt that they consider a direct encounter with a deity (not divinity, but a personal deity) to be a prerequisite of Pagan/Polytheist identity, and look down their noses at those of a more pantheistic persuasion. For this reason, I have been reluctant to Peter Bishop’s post above.

But then I came across this post, “Paganism, Litmus Tests, Validity, and the Internet”, by The Druid in the Swamp. “The Druid” explains how a “selection bias” on the Internet can create the impression that a higher percentage of Pagans have had powerful mystical experiences than actually have:

“There are lots of people on the internet – on blogs, forums, and mailing lists – who like to talk about their mystical experiences. This is pretty natural. For one thing, when you’re first encountering something new and exciting (much like when you’re in the first, budding, exciting stages of a relationship) you want to talk about it all the time! You want to share how wonderful it is! […] It becomes self-perpetuating as well, as everyone struggles to talk about THEIR mystical experiences, and the impression given is that everyone has these deep and powerful religious experiences (and frequently!) and that somehow you’re not “in” the group if you’re not having them. […]

“[…] our natural proclivity to talk about things that are happening to us (especially things that we think are special) – and to keep silent in discussions where we don’t have anything to add – gives the impression that *everyone* in ADF has all these amazing mystical experiences all the time (since someone is regularly talking about it on the lists) and that part of being a Druid is having a deeply personal, deeply mystical relationship with the Kindreds.”

“The Druid” does on to explain that while many Druids and Pagans have these personal relationships with spirit beings that may talk in their ear sometimes,”many OTHER Druids and Pagans (equally as many, I’d guess, if not more) are there because the act of devotion is what centers and grounds their practice.” (emphasis original). I would probably fall within this description, since I derive intrinsic value from my practices. “The Druid” goes on to say that there is a place for both kinds of Pagans: “the quiet, every day, ground-and-center, worship on their landbase, remember the High Day Pagans” and “the devoted spirit workers, the god-touched, and the deeply mystical”. In short, there is no litmus test. (Also worth checking out are the links that “The Druid” includes: here and here and here.)

While I admit I am a little suspicious of those those who claim to have regular and dramatic interactions with their deities, I will not, as a rule, deny the validity of such experiences just because I have not had them or not had them with the same frequency or intensity. On the other hand, neither will I accept the proposition that an absence of such experiences necessarily constitutes a failure . . . of will, of imagination, or of devotion. There is the question of being open to an experience, but plenty of people are broadsided by spiritual experiences they were not open to. Mostly, I think whether someone has a certain type of spiritual experience is more a function of personal psychology and fate (or accident).

In any case, whether I ever have such experiences in a Pagan context, I know that there is something that I can learn from those who have. I have been powerfully moved by those brave enough to share such personal experiences publicly. My own spiritual horizon has been broadened by hearing the experiences of others — especially the experiences of polytheists, whose experiences are more foreign to me, who emphasize the transcendence or otherness of divinity more than the pantheists with whom I relate more, who emphasize the immanence of divinity. And I hope that others have benefited from my sharing of my own experiences. Whether we believe that the worship of the gods is the quintessence of Paganism or whether we believe Paganism is about something else, the fact is that both sides of the discussion have something to teach each other.

And to bring this full circle, I still relate with Peter Bishop’s way of defining his Pagan identity, though I have not experienced divinity in any public Pagan ritual. But I call myself Pagan because I have found God/dess in the dark recess of my soul and in the living world around me. And the desire to unlock the mystery of the connection between these two temples drives me forward:

“The mystery of the cosmos before which our mind stands in awe becomes one with the mystery within us by which we ethically strive; and both come together in the sense that somehow, in a way inexpressible to us, it is all meaningful.” – William Barrett

Making my career serve my vocation

Last updated on: March 12, 2013 at 8:46 pm By John Halstead

I awoke this morning to the sound of a bird chirping for the first time this year. I’ve seen a few wild geese returning in the past week. And when I walked into my office today, I just caught sight of a red-breasted robin outside my window. Spring is around the corner, but there are no blossoms on the trees yet.

Yesterday was a cold, gloomy Monday, and my mood suffered accordingly. I also had a setback at work, and a disproportionate emotional setback in response. But this morning, the sun broke through the clouds like a revelation, bathing my office in warm yellow light, and I stretched my arms open to receive it. All felt well with the world again. I’m hoping to see a few buds come before out spring equinox celebration next week.

Spring is a time for new beginnings. And I’m going through one right now. I’ve been in a funk for a while, and I’ve posted about it recently. Part of it is the lingering winter, I know. But it is also that season of my life.

I’ve been reading recently Jungian James Hollis’ book The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife. (He has another book on the same topic for a more general audience: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up.) Jung believed that, generally speaking, the life-task in the second half of life differed from the task of the first. In the first half of life, one struggles to attain ego differentiation, separation from the unconscious source. But in the second half, the task is to return to the unconscious and (re-)discover the Self.

In his book, Hollis tackles “mid-life crises”, marriage, children, and work from a Jungian perspective, and does so in a compelling and eloquent manner. I’ll probably be writing more about it in the near future, but I wanted to mention one statement in particular that stood out to me. While discussing the fact that pursuing one’s “vocation” or calling may often require the sacrifice of material security, he also says this is not always the case: “One can spend one’s life and economic servitude, or one can say, ‘There is how I earn my living, a necessary trade-off with the creditors, but here is where my soul is replenished.'” (paraphrased). Hollis gives the example of a philosopher friend that spends half his day delivering newspapers and the other half pursuing his vocation as a philosopher. He concludes about his friend, “He found a balance between work and vocation and was served by both.”

For a long time I have struggled with the question of career versus vocation. I excel at my job as a lawyer and I am well-suited to it. It provides me and my family with a relatively comfortable material life. But spiritually, it provides me with no sustenance. I have often fantasized about working as a college professor, teaching history or religious studies – a career path than I consciously chose not to follow when I was an undergraduate for purely financial reasons. I have felt torn by this decision ever since I began my career as a lawyer.

But Hollis’ statement above made me realize that I had set up a false dichotomy. My career need not be my vocation. In fact, my career provides me with both the material wherewithal and the leisure time to pursue my spiritual vocation. This is a privilege that most people do not enjoy and I am grateful for it. I need not look to my job for spiritual satisfaction; my job provides me with material satisfaction that frees me to seek spiritual satisfaction elsewhere. There is where I earn my living, but here is where my soul is replenished. I do envy those people who are able to find both in one place, but my current arrangement is still pretty nice.

So, when I read Hollis’ statement, I seized on it, and my mind immediately turned to making plans to do those things that I have wanted to do for some time, but for some reason seemed unattainable. I don’t know what kept me from doing them in the past, some illusion that my career needed to be my vocation, and since I was unwilling to give up my career, I could not pursue my vocation. But in fact, far from being an obstacle to doing those things I have wanted to do, my job makes those things possible by giving me both the financial means and the leisure time to pursue them.

One of them is a 2-week “burro-supported” trek in Peru to the ruins Choquequirao and then on to Machu Pichu. I’ve felt called to do this for about a year now, ever since I saw an article in a magazine about discovering the Inca ruins the “hard way”. I’ve already started making plans to go these with my father, brother, and son next year. The trip will be expensive, so it is my job that makes it possible (without having to sacrifice much else).

Another dream is to get involved again in academia — which is where I was the happiest — either in a Religious Studies program and/or a Jungian studies program. So, I signed up for Jung and Spirituality series of classes at the Jungian Institute of Chicago. This past Sunday I went to my first class. It was invigorating being in a room with people with a similar love of all things Jung. The class is somewhat expensive, so again it is my job that makes this possible.

These are both small steps, but they feel monumental for me, because the seemingly monumental obstacle that had been standing in the way of me doing them has suddenly disappeared. I’m excited about where this will take me. I know there may be sacrifices I have to make in the future, hard choices between vocation and career. But for the first time in a long while, I am grateful for my career. I finally feel that my career is serving me, not by itself being my vocation, but by making my vocation possible.

The Sun Also Riseth: The limits of objectivity (UPDATED)

Last updated on: March 3, 2013 at 9:43 pm By John Halstead

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. But the earth abideth for ever.

— Ecclesiastes 1

So last night I was going through blog posts that I had saved up to read later and came across this one by Rua Lupa at No Unsacred Place: Colloquial Quandaries: Referencing the Sun. Reading Rua’s posts for me is sometimes like banging my head against the wall. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Rua or her writing, of course. She intelligent and articulate. It’s just that our minds work very differently. (Here is another good example at Humanistic Paganism.) In this particular post which got me all riled up, Rua suggests that we need to stop saying that the sun “rises” and “sets”, because it is the earth that is moving, not the sun. Now some people might just dismiss this as linguistic gerrymandering. But one thing Rua and I can agree on is that this is a serious question, because it reflects a certain paradigm.

I was still debating whether to engage this issue, when I walked into my UU discussion group this morning a few minutes late, and what are they talking about? The fact that the sun does not rise and set! I sh*t you not! I’m not sure how that discussion started — I think it had something to do with transcendent experiences — but, as it typical of the group, it quickly got off on a tangent. And then one person after another proceeded to say in effect that our experience of the world is not “real” or “accurate”. Even the people who seemed to value subjective experience took it for granted that their subjective experience was less real than an objective account.

I’ve come across this idea in many forms over the years. I remember being told by someone that we don’t ever really touch anything, because the atoms of our flesh and the atoms of the objects we think we are basic are not actually colliding. In one fell swoop, one of the most powerful human experiences — touch — was reduced to unreality. Or what about the notion that our brains “see” everything upside down because out eyes send an inverted image to our brain and then our brain reverses it. Or how about the time somebody told me that I wasn’t really dreaming in color. My mind was just adding the color. Huh? And then another one I heard today in the group: The sun isn’t really setting when we think it is, because it takes the light 7 minutes to travel to earth. There’s something all of these ideas have in common: the notion that our experience is not real. This denigration of sensory experience is now so common, it is just assumed.

Take for example the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. We laugh at the thought that anyone would think the sun was revolving around the earth. But, in point of fact, that is our most immediate experience of the world: The sun rises east, moves over our heads, sets in the west, and then rises again in the east. But we say that what is “really” happening is the earth is rotating and revolving around the sun. That explanation is the most mathematically parsimonious, because is most easily accounts for the movement of the earth, the sun, and the other celestial spheres. But is it the most “accurate” one? Accurate to what? Certainly not accurate to our everyday experience.

If you read about the history of astronomy, you’ll see that people did have mathematical models that were geocentric. And they worked — for 1500 years people predicted the movement of the planets with the geocentric model. But the Ptolemaic model was complicated.

Ptolemaic model of retrograde planetary motion

The helio-centric model was better for scientists, not because it made better predictions (it didn’t), but because it was simpler. But why should mathematical simplicity be given preference over sensory experience when we are deciding what is “real”?

This preference for scientific explanations over our own experience is part and parcel of what Theodore Roszak calls “the myth of objective consciousness”. This myth (meant in the pejorative sense) posits that we get closer to reality the more we remove ourselves from the equation. This myth has given us incredible predictive power and technological control over our environment. But is has also laid waste to our natural and psychological landscapes. According to Roszak, the myth of objective consciousness “raise alienation to its apotheosis as our only means of achieving a valid relationship to reality.”

This is not an anti-science rant. In fact, modern science teaches us about the limits of objectivity. The theory of relativity, for example, supports the view that the earth doesn’t really revolve around the sun any more than the sun revolves around the earth; it all depends on your perspective. If I was standing on the moon neither of those would be consistent with my experience. There is no Archimedean point of objectivity. In addition, subatomic physics has been educating us for some time about the lack of objectivity of our observations. Objectivity is a myth. It is a good myth and it functions well for many things. But it is a myth nonetheless.

Back in Rua’s post, Alison Leigh Lilly responded:

Acknowledging that humans have a particular perspective and that human language will reflect that perspective is not inherently anthropocentric.

Artificially trying to suppress our natural, intuitive relationship with our surroundings by adopting constrained language is unlikely to fix the problem, either, in my opinion.

And that’s my point, Rua’s perspective tries to “suppress our natural, intuitive relationship with our surroundings” in favor of what Rua calls “a better understanding of how the world works”. Although she does not say so, Rua’s use of the phrase “how the world works” here presumes the possibility of an objective account, one which removes us as participants in the act of perception. This is ironic because so much of the writing on the No Unsacred Place blog seems geared toward affirming our participation in the world, even in the very act of perceiving it. See for example Alison Leigh Lilly’s post on earth-centered polytheism here and Lupa’s (not Rua Lupa) post on ecopsychology here.

Rua argues that the geo-centric account of the sunrise and sunset is “ego-centric”. But, actually, I would argue that it is the notion that we can remove ourselves from our situational perspective and achieve Archimedean objectivity that is ego-centric; or at least it is a conceit of the ego. Rua is concerned about human action that neglects other species, but it is the ego that believes it is removed from its natural situation that is more likely to harm the environment than one that is aware of its radical interconnectedness with the world around it.

David Abram puts it well:

“Our civilized distrust of the senses and of the body engenders a metaphysical detachment from the sensible world — it fosters the illusion that we ourselves are not a part of the world that we study, that we can objectively stand apart from that world, as spectators, and can thus determine its workings from outside. A renewed attentiveness to bodily experience, however, enables us to recognize and affirm our inevitable involvement in that which we observe, our corporeal immersion in the depths of a breathing Body much larger than our own.” (David Abram, “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth”).

“The belief in a purely objective comprehension of nature, in a clear and complete understanding of how the world works, is the belief in an entirely flat world seen from above, a world without depth, a nature that we are not a part of but that we look at from outside — like a God, or like a person staring at a computer screen.” (David Abram, “Depth Ecology”).

For once I would love to hear someone say, “Oh, that’s just objective“, instead of, “Oh, that’s just subjective.” Subjectivity is not less than objectivity. In fact, I think objectivity is a less complete account of the world that the subjective one. We gain a certain power to control our environment when we attempt to bracket our subjectivity; but we also lose something. We lose the reality of our own experience, and we lose the sense of our own participation in that reality.

Jung wrote, “What most overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real.” (CW 11, P 751, emphasis original). Jung argued that our subjective experience should be treated as real as objective accounts of the world. This is not the same thing as saying that we should replace objectivity with subjectivity. My experience of the sun rising and setting would probably not help a scientist who was trying to predict the movement of Mars in relation to the Earth. In contrast, I think the scientist’s mathematical calculations might help me to experience to the beauty and transcendence of the sunrise, as I contemplate how the earth is turning with me in the direction of the sun. But it can also get in the way, if in doing so, I imagine myself floating disembodied in outer space, rather than on the very real earth on which I am standing.

Over at Humanistic Paganism, you can find an excerpt of Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature in which she describes how her scientific understanding of the universe ruined the night sky for her by reducing it to mere facts and drove her to nihilism, until later, when she rediscovered a sense of wonder at the mystery of it all and the universe became a sacred place to her again. The discoveries produced by scientific objectivity can reveal to us the wondrous depths of nature. But if we value the objectivity of the scientific method over our own experience, then it can diminish that experience, transforming mystery into mechanism. And we are impoverished for it.

ADDENDUM:

In light of Rua’s follow-up post, her response to my original comment on her original post, and some of the comments below, I think it is import for me to emphasize here that I am not at all suggesting that objectivity and science do not have their place, an incredibly important place. They just don’t tell us everything about the world that we are a part of. “Objectivity” has come to be equated in our modern parlance with “true”, while “subjectivity” is equated with “untrue”, and this is unfortunate.

Rua makes the point that, when we expand our perspective above our immediate and local situation, then we perceive both ourselves and the earth in a way that is more ecologically-aware. I absolutely agree. The 1968 “Earthrise photo” taken from Apollo 8 and the subsequent 1972 “Blue Marble” photo from the Apollo 17 mission are credited with helping to launch the environmental movement. There is a reason for this. (Check out this video documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from orbit — a perspective-altering experience often described as the “Overview Effect”.)

As “Zendo Deb” points out in the comments below, without objective science, we would be unaware of global warming. But I think we sometimes need to connect that global perspective with the local appreciation of our destructive way of life on our immediate environment, in our very own backyards. It’s important to experience both perspectives: the global and the local. Perhaps the term “glocal” is appropriate here.

I really have no objection to “Dayturning” and “Nightturning” or any of the other terms that Rua suggests. But I don’t think we should do away with “Sunrise” and “Sunset” because there are not objectively accurate. They are subjectively accurate, and they have value for that reason.

Along these lines, check out this video which includes an excerpt from “A Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan. While Sagan’s point is to emphasize our insignificance (by taking the very, very wide perspective), watching the video (which also shows human life up close) one cannot help but be impressed by our significance, because of our uniqueness (so far as we know). Both are truths that we should always be conscious of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I

Obituaries that I missed: Roszak and Hillman

Last updated on: March 2, 2013 at 11:38 am By John Halstead

This is not news, but I just came across these two obituaries for men that both died in 2011, around the time I began this blog, men whose ideas are very important to my vision of life.

Theodore Roszak (November 15, 1933 – July 5, 2011)

Theodore Roszak died in 2011 at the age of 77. Roszak was the author of The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness (1975), and more recently The Voice of the Earth (1992). He is credited with coining the terms “counterculture” and “ecopsychology“. I have quoted Roszak on this blog several times and you can read my post about his notion of “the myth of objective consciousness” here. I first encountered Roszak through his book, The Making of a Counter Culture, in my high school library, and my world was forever changed. The book was like a Bible for my in my college years, full of fiery vision and terrible prophecy fulfilled:

“[The counterculture] looks to me like all we have to hold against the final consolidation of a technocratic totalitarianism in which we shall find ourselves ingeniously adapted to an existence wholly estranged from everything that has ever made the life of man an interesting adventure.

“If the resistance of the counter culture fails, I think there will be nothing in store for us but what anti-utopians like Huxley and Orwell have forecast–though I have no doubt that these dismal despotisms will be far more stable and effective than their prophets have foreseen. For they will be equipped with techniques of inner-manipulation as unobtrusively fine as gossamer. Above all, the capacity of our emerging technocratic paradise to denature the imagination by appropriating to itself the whole meaning of Reason, Reality, Progress, and Knowledge will render it impossible for men to give any name to their bothersomely unfulfilled potentialities but that of madness. And for such madness, humanitarian therapies will be generously provided. […]

“The question therefore arises: ‘If the technocracy in its grand procession through history is indeed pursuing to the satisfaction of so many such universally ratified values as The Quest for Truth, The Conquest of Nature, The Abundant Society, The Creative Leisure, The Well-Adjusted Life, why not settle back and enjoy the trip?’

“The answer is, I guess, that I find myself unable to see anything at the end of the road we are following with such self-assured momentum but Samuel Beckett’s two sad tramps forever waiting under that wilted tree for their lives to begin. Except that I think the tree isn’t even going to be real, but a plastic counterfeit. In fact, even the tramps may turn out to be automatons . . . though of course there will be great, programmed grins on their faces.”

You can read complete the Preface to The Making of a Counter Culture here.

Theodore Roszak talks about ecopsychology:

James Hillman (April 12, 1926 – October 27, 2011)

James Hillman died in 2001 at 85. Hillman was a Zurich-trained Jungian psychologist and analyst. He was the founder of “archetypal psychology” and one of the leaders of “post-Jungian” theory. He was the author of Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992), We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — and the World’s Getting Worse (1993), and The Soul’s Code (1997). He was a controversial figure in the Jungian world, not least for his deconstruction of the monistic conception of the Jungian self, and he was a leader, with Robert Bly, in the archetypal Men’s Movement. I have quoted Hillman numerous times, most often for his notion of “a psyche the size of the earth”.

“Man exists in the midst of psyche; it is not the other way around. Therefore, soul is not confined by man, and there is much of psyche that extends beyond the nature of man. The soul has inhuman reaches.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology).

He is probably best known to Pagans through Margot’s Adler’s work Drawing Down the Moon in which she cites Hillman in the context of discussing polytheistic belief.

James Hillman discusses archetypal psychology: