The Return of the Great Mother

by James Thornton

A raven sits on a lightning-struck ponderosa pine in the high mountain meadow. He’s a young raven, and I know him well, since he was born here on our land and I feed him many mornings. Suddenly he’s airborne on youthfully strong athletic strokes. I see why he’s taken off: there is a pair of older larger ravens flying nearby, his parents. He dive bombs the one in front, his father, making him change course. He’s dive bombed in turn by his mother, taken quite unawares and given a good clip. He screams a loud cawk of surprise, and peels off, letting his parents fly on.

He saw the other ravens long before I did. It’s like that with species. Each species is attuned to its kind with astonishing acuity. They are also attuned to their prey and predators, should they have any. In a more domestic example, if you’ve ever walked a dog around a neighborhood, you will have experienced this species tuning. The dog you are walking is much more attuned to the other dogs than you are, and you can follow the dog’s awareness, increasing for a while your own.

Our Cultural Self-Regard

We’re like other animals in being tuned to our own kind. Human beings are mainly focused on other human beings. As with other animals, this has benefits: we find mates, care for our children, and so on. But our fascination with ourselves goes well beyond what it needs to be to keep our lives and our species going. We’ve elaborated the nuthatch’s ability to find another nuthatch in the woods in a million peculiarly human ways. We produce an endless series of fashion, gossip, news, celebrity, art, cooking, home, hobby, and other such magazines and TV shows. Most of our books and films, most of our art, most of what fills our newspapers, is about us. Nothing much else interests us. Human culture is entirely a mirror image of human beings, very seldom reaching across to the transcendent. And by transcendent here I mean not only the ineffable experience of the Divine but the manifest body of the Divine all around us in the form of glorious Nature, rich and strange, covering the face of our planet.

We have so successfully focused human culture on humans that there is seldom any other focus at all, save for a few nature shows, many of which nevertheless focus on a human presence, whether on or off the screen. Other than domesticated pets, which are wild animals made over in our image, we rarely think about other species, rarely meet them, rarely think our way into their phenomenal world. Most humans now rarely leave urban areas, where they see only a landscape we’ve made over in the image of ourselves.

When you start to think about it in this way it begins to seem that human beings are a bit obsessive. A little mad in being massively more interested in the latest affair of the current politician or pop star than in the disappearing magic of the wild world, which opens always to the eternal.

Let us compare our culture, and its consensus mind that we all share as members of it, to the individual mind, and let us think about awakening in each. The individual mind can awaken, as we can discover in our own experience; the consensus mind can awaken too. Let us explore this parallel.

The normal human mind is focused on its own concerns, its own life, health, and security. Each of us begins by being obsessed by ourselves, and by what we need and want. We are hard-wired by evolution to focus on these things, and of course we need to take care of them.

But our ability to fantasize, abstract and run mental scenarios lets us turn these ordinary needs into obsessions which dull our ability to see that life is bigger than our desires. Until we run into a wall in our life or begin spiritual practice, we don’t find a way out of the small round of our obsessional self-regard.

Opening

When we begin practicing, or when we have a spontaneous encounter with mortality, we begin to see that our limited ego-bound world is a prison. A prison whose walls, though previously invisible to us, prevent us from being happy and from experiencing and returning the full flow of love available in our lives.

With much practice, we begin to move beyond the constraints of ego’s habits, and its endless round of desires endlessly refreshed. As we identify less with this body, this biography, this psychology, we begin to open to a more impersonal experience. One that is more spacious. And because it is less tied to our own obsessions, there is more room for compassion. Compassion is awareness focused on another, and the actions that arise from this focus.

We have no time for compassion when we are busy being obsessed by our own desires. Returning to our consensus mind, our cultural obsession with human beings looks very much like the ego madness that we all experience before we start to practice. Locked into an autistic self-reflexiveness, our culture, even at its best, seldom breaks its obsessional focus. As a result, our culture seldom has any wisdom to teach us. The structures of wisdom are built by breaking the bounds of the habitual, so that reality undeterred can flow through for a moment and gel into a larger armature for our perceptions.

But our cultural obsession with ourselves may be about to change. We have been laboring hard to turn all the resources of the Earth into more of ourselves, and more of our material goods, with the same mindless impulse that we see in bacteria in a laboratory dish. Our labors have in some ways produced marvels, of course, and a life that is longer, safer and better for many. But the downside of our efforts, something we are beginning at last to understand together, is global climate change, and the suite of eco-disasters it will bring about. Our labors have had the unintended consequence of building us, as a species, into a corner. A corner in which global environmental change will very likely disrupt world food production, bringing famines and plagues, flood coastlines, where much of the world’s population lives, and threaten to unweave the fabric of civilization.

The bright side of all this? It is very much like the bright side of a brush with death in the life of an individual. The individual who has a brush with death often awakens, sees that his life was too bound by ego’s obsessions, and grows.

There is a good chance that the pending eco-disasters will let us experience an awakening of the consensus mind as a culture. An awakening that will let us look beyond our obsession with our own species to see our interdependence with all other forms of life, and their beauty. We often fail to see beauty beyond the human frame of reference, from the Greeks who declared that "man is the measure of all things," to contemporary fiction which catalogs fine gradations of urban angst.

There is an infinite measure of beauty beyond man. A rock in the Sierras is often more beautiful than any sculpture; a sunset in a natural setting more moving than any canvas; a meadow blooming in the mountains more wondrous than any garden. The diversity of species inconceivably more majestic than all the works of man.

The Great Mother

In the last few years, the science of the Great Mother has been born. It was initially called Gaia theory after the Greek Earth Mother goddess. Scientists, being conservative, now often call the same science geophysiology. This is the study of the interconnection of all life, the study of how all living things conspire to make the Earth a good place for life, acting like parts of one vast living body.

I like to think of the mind of Gaia, whose focus is broader than ours. Gaia’s focus is on all the life on Earth. Not on human beings alone, but on maintaining the conditions under which all of life can proliferate and flourish, creating ever more stability and biodiversity. Ever more myriad forms for the undifferentiated One to express Itself through.

What we need to do as a species is think like Gaia. We need to think not only of our own human concerns, but about all the life on Earth. We need to do this for the selfish reason that we may not survive unless we do so. But in doing this we move beyond selfishness as well, beyond our human focus on turning as much of the Earth into ourselves as we can.

When we start thinking like Gaia, we start thinking more impersonally–not "what do we want now?" but "what choice balances our needs and those of the rest of the ecosystem?" This broader focus is a way of describing an enlightened mind. And if we begin to think like Gaia as a culture, we’ll be doing it with an enlightened consensus mind.

There’s no reason to think that our consensus mind can’t become enlightened, just like our individual minds can. It may even be that Gaia helps, pushing on our consciousness to make it easier to awaken. She needs to take care of all life on Earth, and helping us wake up faster may be how she does it, so that we become a more conscious part of the Gaian loop, tailoring our actions to fit the needs of the system as a whole.

When we start thinking like Gaia, we are celebrating the return of the Great Mother, by embodying her own attitude, larger than our own. The return of the Great Mother requires no new churches, no worship, nothing special. It requires only that we think differently–that we wake up to the great world beyond our own concerns, and serve all sentient beings by including them in our thought, and by letting our actions be determined by this inclusion.

The eco-disasters our self-obsessed ways of acting have engineered may be just the kind of salutary shock, like a brush with death, that we need to wake up as a species. If we do so, if we together create an enlightened consensus mind, we will bring about a compassionate society. One that treats all human beings equally, one that respects the Earth and all her creatures. And if we create the compassionate consensus mind, open to a reality broader than ourselves, we will have brought about the sustainable society as well. A sustainable society and a compassionate society are the very same thing.

How can we help to enlighten the consensus mind at this turn of the millennium? By awakening ourselves, by taking Nature as our teacher, by studying, celebrating, protecting, and being grateful for her endlessly complex, bottomlessly beautiful riot of life, of which we need to become a more conscious part. This focus on taking care of the natural world, and awakening in order to do so, gives new meaning to the ancient idea that we practice to save all sentient beings.