Living in a Larger Story introduces one chapter in Letters to the River. In the book, the writing below is followed by a collection of letters on the themes explained herein.
The old stories of religion and science have left us fractured and fearful, alienated from our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and disconnected from the earth and those who inhabit it with us. The epidemic of anger, anxiety, and depression is not an accident, but a direct consequence of the way we see the world and live.
We have not been created and put upon the earth by someone somewhere else. To be precise, we do not even live on the earth. The biosphere surrounds us, and we live within it and its ongoing development. It is not secondary, a prop or set for the human drama. The earth is primary, the ground of being, not a background to these beings -- us -- who are the special ones, and it will continue to be here long after we are gone. The truly magnificent and important story is not about us.
This larger chronicle is a saga of the earth and universe, a cosmology in which we have evolved out of a living planet. It has the potential to inspire and renew our vision, to return us to our proper place. Participating in this other narrative requires us to reduce our self-importance and challenge the fables of religion that god is in a better place somewhere else, and those of science that say the world is dead. And we must experience other ways of being to test the assumptions of our language that imply the world is made up of separate and unchanging objects.
We are neither nouns (or knowns) nor separate objects. Each moment we are dancing with the universe in infinite movements above and below the bandwidth of our consciousness. We are breathing, feeling, perceiving, changing, and interacting with other fields of energy at levels ranging from the molecular to the magnificent.
How we interact can be ecstatic, inspiring, draining, or depressing. The old myths limit our potential for perception, engagement, connection and communion. They turn the sacred into the secular, reduce the profound into something petty or profane, and eliminate the magical for the sake of the mundane, diminishing our potential to participate in a larger community in a much greater universe.
We are Storytellers:
In many stories of the past, some god or myth has deemed a particular religion, culture, or belief system -- Jews, Communists, capitalists, Christians, Nazis -- most favored, advanced, or special. These parochial and arrogant assertions have always led to wars, aggression, and atrocities against those considered less developed, evil, or inferior, whether they be other species or our own. For thousands of years people have asserted "us-against-them" tales and theologies that justified the unjustifiable with divine or enlightened inspiration.
As one’s gaze expands to see the whole planet floating in inky and infinite space, these claims appear stupid and dangerous. In a continually evolving universe, where galaxies, stars, and species wink out and die, what is our role or destiny? What is our "medicine," our gift, our contribution to this new narrative that's far longer and larger than us?
Most likely it is our creative imagination, our ability to tell “stories.” Of all our capacities, it seems to be the one most particularly human. Many creatures are stronger, see better, live longer, or have capacities of sensing and perceiving that we can barely imagine. But we have a unique magic in the ability to make pictures and weave webs of words that describe the intricate workings of large and small or span infinite distances of time and space. Our tales speak of the breadth and depth of creation, bringing past, present, and future, the forces inside an atom, the creation of galaxies, the evolution of species, and processes underlying mind and perception together for consideration in this very moment. We possess the power and the possibility of telling the universe's story.
This is great magic and powerful medicine. This is the miracle that has been developed in us. Fifteen billion years of evolution has led to the beautiful, flowering earth, but it has also created poetry, science, and art. A painting now adorns the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where the landscape once held nothing but rock. We have inherited and been entrusted with the power of vision, a remarkable aptitude to perceive, gather, and weave all these strands together. It is a sacred gift, and it is our responsibility to use it well, to create images that make us feel at home and hopeful, connected to all life, to tell stories that open us to the wonder of it all.
Our myths need to be large enough for our souls. If we wear a size six shoe on a size ten foot, we’ll hobble around in pain. If we have size ten spirits, and our portrayals of success offer us a petty life -- competing to beat out the other guy and buy more stuff, going to war or destroying the last wilderness so we can consume more resources -- we too will be root-bound and live as emotional-spiritual cripples. And mostly we do. Open any newspaper and read the reports.
We were made for more than the drab dreams of materialistic life, but we need perspectives that will open our hearts, imagination, and perceptions to who we are and might become. We are more than consumers and larger than any of the self-centered ideologies that would make one proud to be an American, Christian, Californian, or college graduate. We are part of and surrounded by the miraculous; we live within it. But the old descriptions and dogmas have shrunk our landscapes and leave us small, ashamed, and scared.
We are born from this earth, children of the sun, a miracle of the universe's creation. Life could be a grand adventure, a wonderful journey, a celebration.... a dream worth living. We’re co-creators along with many other relatives in this great family of life. As dreamers within this dream, storytellers within the story, we play an important part in an evolving drama. And if we are to play our part well, to truly live this grand dream and be at home within our family, we must begin to tell it like it is.
Tragedy and Comedy: Laughter in the Catastrophe
There’s great healing potential in expanding our ideas about personal identity as well as our vision of our place in the cosmos.
We are on a stage and all the world’s a play….
For the ancient Greeks there were two primary forms of theater, tragedy and comedy. Tragedy expresses the truth that -- as Buddha said -- life is suffering. This core insight can not be denied or avoided. We won’t escape this drama without enduring pain. Everything we love and are fond of will one day be taken away from us. It’s the price of admission, part of what we must accept in being here. Everyone and everything dies, and we must eventually say goodbye to all we care about.
Fame, wealth, status, comfort, health.... are all fleeting and impermanent. The more we cling to anyone, anything, or any way of being, the more we will ache when it is removed. Suffering is unavoidable. Our effort to hold onto what we love or fiercely defend some value we desire often increases our own pain and inflicts it on others. Tragedy mourns the human tendency to identify with and become attached to life’s relationships and modes of expression, and the unavoidable suffering as they change, are taken away, or die.
Comedy -- to the Greeks a higher art -- takes a seemingly opposite point of view. It recognizes that our true essence is beyond the roles we play, and though we must experience life through its many forms, it celebrates the possibility of connection with something larger behind and beyond them.
A light bulb (the form) burns out, but light, as energy, lasts forever. Identifying with something greater than our bodies and attractions to the ways and means of the moment allows us to lighten. We begin to see the play in the ebb and flow, the shifting images of existence; see the beauty and humor in the arising and falling away of things.
Like weather, seasons, and circumstances, we recognize we can change and have before. We have been children, adolescents, adults; in love, divorced, sick and healthy. We have been many selves, had many identities. There are multitudes of other ways of being in and interacting with the world, each with their gifts, beauty, and lessons, and we don't need to cling to this moment so desperately or take things so personally.
We are spiritually rich, greater than our own story, more than we are now. We are not just consumers, vacuum cleaners with our collection of attachments. (And life doesn’t have to suck.) We are creative, can embrace new possibilities; we can choose another path, change. The self, circumscribed by its comfort zone and its assortment of habits, routines, and desires of the moment, ceases to be at the center of the world, and we laugh, for the larger being laughing has detachment and distance from the one being laughed at. There’s no reason to be unhappy.
Making Ourselves in God’s Image:
We can know a different, more unified self, one in relationship to the many other forms and faces of being. We can welcome the unknown and experience our essence as verb, possibility, potential.
Embracing a more expansive self may necessitate choosing different gods. For too long we have been cursed by a vision of goodness located in an afterlife and a deity who is harsh, punishing, and distant. The god many have inherited -- separate and judgmental, seeing threats and sin everywhere, a god who is not in life -- is a marriage of Middle-eastern monotheism and Greek rationalism, and he is not one worth keeping.
To incorporate a larger vision of the divine is to redefine ourselves, for our gods often form an archetype and pattern for our ego. In a monotheistic universe -- like that of the warring desert tribes with their “one and only God” -- there is only one truth, one way of being, and alternative voices and approaches to living must be false and the work of the devil.
As above so below. When this pattern is mirrored in the structure of the self, we think we should have one and only one voice in our psyche. To question and feel uncertain is to be somehow at fault, and we struggle to be sure of ourselves, to “get it together,” not be in conflict, be without doubt. Like the patriarch, we judge ourselves, feel inadequate, suffer guilt and shame. Our uncertainties are experienced as moral faults.
There are many possible gods, many images to portray the energies and inhabitants of the spiritual realm. There may be more potential for compassion and creativity in a pan- or polytheistic universe, for there your confusion, other voices, and desires may be defined as the expressions of other forces -- sacred in themselves -- seeking expression and trying to be heard. Patience, tolerance, and self-acceptance then become virtues.
Visioning and storytelling is both creative and co-creative. In the new paradigm creation and creativity are present in the cosmos, the earth, and in the story itself. Our inner life is part of and within the greater story, and the self is not separate. The psyche is a field where we play out the relationship of known and unknown, and the unknown in ourselves, as well as the world, is vast and magical.
In the new guiding myth with its grander and more inclusive view of the sacred, we have emerged out of life. We are creations, children of the universe and earth, and we possess a rich heritage and great depths within us. It is important to cultivate that inner richness to coax out the wisdom that has been planted there. We must till, water, and fertilize the soil that all the seeds of our psyches may open and flower. The psyche and self are verbs, fields of relating, dreams. They are not defined and static; they are not facts. They are filled with potential and possibility, and our task is not to judge, repress, and eradicate, but to create conditions for their full and healthy emergence.
Gratefulness: A Natural Response to the Truly Great:
To fully enter this larger story with its mysteries, potentials, and other forms of perceiving requires becoming respectful. We must practice and develop gratitude for what we have, and open our minds, senses, feelings, and imagination to the magnificent living earth and those who share it with us. Rather than lesser forms of life, we must see them as companions in a grand journey, having arrived here with their own unique capacities, their special "medicine" evolved over the millennia that allow them to perceive, evoke, and engage aspects of the world that are inaccessible to us.
“Re-spect” literally means to look again. Respect is to challenge our limiting judgments, to accept and explore the possibility that things might be deeper and more complex than they first appear. We see the world the way we are, not the way it is. In order to change the world and its possibilities, we must change the perceiver and his. We must open the heart to open the doors.
Great Mystery, Spirit in all things, thank you for this day.
Thank you for life, for one more day to be on this beautiful earth,
for one more chance to open my eyes, ears, senses, and heart to know you.
These letters evoke and celebrate the larger epic of the universe. They place our true potential and humanity within the greater life saga and see our true nature within nature. We are the universe's storytellers, and our true gift -- what we can best return for all we've been given -- is to tell a grand and magnificent story, one that honors all the myriad forms of creation and invites the rest of existence to sit at the table with us and celebrate.
The letters were written to the Great Mystery, the River, the Spirit that moves in all things. They are poems, praise, prayers… attempts to reach out beyond myself to something larger.
In addressing The Great Mystery, I acknowledge something greater than my ego and personality, something I will never know or understand, something that will always remain a mystery. I give thanks because I did not make the world -- it has made me. Those powers of earth, air, fire, and water have woven themselves together to create the many forms of being, myself included. Every day the sun, waters, and earth feed, support and sustain me. Without them I am nothing. To be spiritually disconnected is a form of death.
I am grateful even for the ability to be grateful. Looking out on this beautiful world, my time is measured in decades. But the eyes, ears, skin, and organs of perception that I am looking through took millennia of millennia to develop. I am the recipient of capacities and gifts that I did not create, that were molded over eons, as plant, animal, water, wind, and fire experimented, danced, communicated, and evolved in mutual interactions, in calls and responses across the vast tableau of earthly history.
When mind, eyes, and heart are open together I am awed and astonished by what is all about me. The self is small, and I am within a far-greater narrative.
I sing my song through these letters, not because I am trying to be good or spiritual, but because I’ve been taught and touched by the voice of the earth. I‘ve been held, healed, transformed and transported by her movements and melodies. I‘m one note in a truly grand symphony, and I would play my part and play it well, do my best to give back something in return for all I've received. And so I simply do what anyone would be moved to do if they really knew the score.
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