Being Human: A Rank to be Earned
Monthly Newsletter| Cornwall, December 2023
Listen via audio:
Good morning from a crisp, frosty Penzance. The southwest had her first snow this week, bringing with it the kind of freshness that tells of new life. I find winter does this, particularly during the first snowfall of the season. It’s as though the soil of our psyche gets cloaked so it can restore itself in the dark dreaming of winter below, to be regenerated and renewed.
Since the bombing began in Gaza, I’ve been feeling a debilitating sense of despair. It’s as though there are shards in place of my heart and they prod at my chest so violently that I can’t not be present to it.
Grief does this. It catapults our attention to the present moment; like prayer.
There’s nothing quite like pain to make us present, is there? Having had the bones in my leg snapped in half by a London taxi in my early twenties, I know only too well the directive power of pain.
And though the type of butchery we’re witnessing in Palestine initially makes us strive for solutions outwards, and consequently despair when they don’t happen fast enough to avoid the unnecessary death of yet another child, once grief has really had its way with us, it turns its force-field around and instead of projecting our attention outwards, it catapults us back into our selves.
A Lebanese woman on one of my recent online courses shared an experience she had of this sort with the group. She thoughtfully spoke of how her agony over the past few weeks has begun to bring her back to herself. To her personal power. And it reminded me of an abusive experience I had at US immigration some years ago, when Trump had just been elected and his supporters were subsequently granted a free pass to pick on anyone who was not a white American. My hispanic name got me in trouble. And while one of the immigration officers was hurling abuse at me, I heard a voice from the invisible place that utterly overpowered his and shook my bones and bellowed, “Power does not reside outside of you.”
It doesn’t matter what guise it takes. What uniform or towering body shape. Power does not reside outside of us. Jesus knew it. When the masses called for his crucifixion, and Pilate the emperor had to make the decision whether he was to live or die, he said to Jesus, "Don't you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?"
And Jesus turned to him and answered, "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above." (John 19:10)
Power does not reside outside of us.
And when we witness the type of savagery we are seeing in Occupied Palestine, we are brought to our knees. And it is these devastating experiences in life that paradoxically return us to ourselves. They bring us home.
While we are calling for a free Palestine, Palestine is freeing us.
And what does a world made of individuals who know themselves to be free look like?
We do not have templates for this kind of knowledge in the West because people of power were systematically eradicated in Europe during the Inquisition and the colonial and missionary conversion projects in the Middle Ages. They did a great job at near wiping out any remnant of the knowledge of this type of personal power. They killed off our shamans.
And what we need more than anything now is the retrieval of this type of knowledge. To remember that power resides within us.
In early Christianity, this was referred to as gnosis - the ancient Greek word for “knowledge”. It implies a direct knowing, a union with the divine, the sacred marriage between the outer and the inner worlds, and the union of the masculine and the feminine principles within us.
It is a path of inner preparation, introspection and transformation; an approach to life that is participatory - we “know” as we are “known”. It is not just a knowing with the head, but with the entirety of our being.
Gnosis involves a complete integral knowing that unites the body, mind and heart; and by its largeness it connects the seen and unseen. It is an integral knowledge brought about by the slow unification of our being. In other words, it begins when we become aware of all the parts that make up who we are. And we can then live a life in accordance with them, which organically unifies those seemingly paradoxical parts and brings gnosis.
The contemporary Christian mystic Cynthia Bourgeault teaches the type of gnosis that lay at the heart of early Christianity, when Jesus was understood to be a wise man, or shaman. She wrote, “Jesus taught gnosis - he set his disciples on a path to integral transformation: the slow and persistent overcoming of the ego through a lifelong practice of surrender and non-attachment. His gnosis is gradual, conscious and sober.”1
So this is not a state brought on by plant medicine or alterations of consciousness, it is a slow and steady cultivation; a cultivated state rather than an induced one.
The gospel of Mary Magdalene was gnostic and is worth reading. I would recommend the version by Meggan Watterson. It is instructional and teaches what she calls “behavioural excellence”. And I think it’s codes of conduct like these that we need if we are to reorient ourselves to our personal power in order to remember that change really is in our hands.
Gnosis alters our behaviour - it moves us from ego and fear and narcissism to justice, compassion and humility. This is the antidote to the kind of savagery we are witnessing in Palestine.
Being a person clearly doesn’t make us human. We have plenty of examples of people who display zero traits of humanity. Benjamin Netanhayu being an obvious current example. He looks like a person. Talks like a person. But he shows no humanity.
We are all people. But being human is a choice. Not a given.
Many of us choose to wander in the dark. We confuse the whispers of our inner demons with the voice of God and develop a fundamentalist, narcissistic and dogmatic approach to the world that only leads to violence. We have endless examples of genocides committed in the name of religion.
When we do not choose humanity, which required battling against the invasive forces within our own psyche like the great mythic wars of the Mahabharata or the Trojan War, we fall prey to the type of divise cosmology that justifies the barbarous massacres of innocent people.
I don’t believe this violence comes down to “good” people and “bad” people. An old Cherokee story speaks of an elder telling his grandson about a terrible fight that is ensuing inside him between two wolves. One evil, angry, greedy, arrogant and blood-thirsty. The other peaceful, humble, kind, empathetic and generous. And when the boy asked which wolf will win, the grandfather answered, ‘The one I feed.’
Both wolves exist in us, and our promotion to the rank of “human” is earned by which of the two we choose to feed. When writing of his experience in the Soviet labour camps, the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918) put it this way,
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”2
Our capacity to inflict such pain is staggering. But we are all capable of it. And I think this is what is so baffling and sobering. It is not only our grief-response that is plummeting us back into ourselves, it is the disbelief at the level of brutality that we are capable of committing.
In medieval Islamic mysticism, this inner war was referred to as the battle for one’s Angel.
The writer Tom Cheetham summarises the belief of the Persian mystics by describing it as the belief that it is only through the encounter with the Angel, an encounter that is the result of a Quest and a struggle, that each individual can be promoted to the rank of a human.3
The struggle for one’s Angel is reflected in the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel. Jacob was one of Abraham’s grandsons in Genesis. He was a con-artist and a liar. His name literally means the “deceiver.”
On his journey back to Canaan, he spent the night by a river. There, he was met by his Angel. He wrestled with him through the night. And all night, he had to face his fears, his failures, his weaknesses, and his “sins”. It was only when he understood that he could not defeat his Angel, that he surrendered his struggle, and then received the blessings. Following his humiliation, the angel struck him and dislocated his hip. This wounding is common in initiatory rites, fairytales and myth worldwide, such as the wounding of Tristan by the tusks of the wild bore, or Chiron’s thigh wound by Paris’ arrow. These physical wounds are ofter initiatory and lead to a spiritual rebirth. With his wound and subsequent rebirth, Jacob was given a new name: “Israel”.
Interestingly, we will find that Israel is not actually a physical location, but a mythic place named after a mythic being.
Elevating our cognition to transcend literalisms and dogma of scripture is vital in getting the Palestinian/Israeli story straight. This is why myth is so helpful - it is dream language - it helps us perceive the world in a more holistic, metaphorical way, not through literalisms that lead to the justification of one people’s supremacy over another.
In a world with very little spiritual and initiatory holding, we can only hold ourselves accountable. No one else will. While our inner wolves wrestle for supremacy, we need to re-establish codes of honour that keep us faithful to our wolf of compassion and our Angel.
It is this pledge that will then move us from ignorance to knowledge, from agnosis to gnosis; which will plug us into something deeper that informs, empowers and ultimately promotes us to the rank of being human.
Inspired by Mother Theresa’s famous words, an American college student called Kent M. Keith published a pamphlet in 1968 titled, “Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership.”
I find his version of this type of code of honour to keep us human deeply relevant. And so for those of you wrestling to hold onto your humanity in the face of such brutality and withstanding all the many opportunities to respond to violence with more violence, I’ll leave you with his codex.
_
I: People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centred. Love them anyway.
II: If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
III: If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
IV: The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
V: Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
VI: The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.
VII: People favour underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
VIII: What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.
IX: People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.
And my personal favourite:
X: Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.
Poetry Offering
If you’ve been receiving this newsletter monthly, you’ll know I usually share two poems, one by me and one by another poet (as per a practice introduced to my Master’s cohort by Alice Oswald). I haven’t got it in me to share one of mine this month, so here is one by the phenomenal Mary Oliver. I shared this one with the folks in my Three Secret Selves class last week. May it embalm your heart and your hearth.
Angels
You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s
heads.
I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.
Announcements
All the upcoming online events can be attended live or via recording. Please follow the links for all the details.
7 DECEMBER | Online Lecture: When Women Were the Shamans (in the Mystery Cults of Pre-Hellenic Greece) | 7-9pm UK | More details
12 DECEMBER | Women’s New Moon Rite | 8-9:30pm UK | More details
17 DECEMBER | Dismemberment Ceremony | 8-9:30 pm UK | More details
Please note that the term “Gnosis” has become somewhat convoluted and some, like Cynthia Bourgeault, choose not to use it at all.
Excerpt from Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago
Tom Cheetham, Imaginal Love, p. 128