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The Pathfinders: A Sermon to the Dead
October 2000
There is a great convergence going on now.
This convergence involves the meeting of Eastern and Western spirituality,
Taoism and physics, many strands of new age thought, the arrival
of traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines in the West and
the opening of allopathic medicine to spiritual insight, the sorting
of past traditions to uncover what is truly global and honestly
ecumenical, the re-awakening of living myth, and the re-enspiriting
of technical civilization. The convergence is happening right
now, accelerating with unstoppable momentum towards Unity. With
the release of Eastern mysticism and Western mysticism into the
global brain–symbolized respectively by the exile of Tibetan Buddhism
from its isolated mountain homeland, and the opening of the doors
of the hidden traditions of the West under Vatican II–mysticism
has gone mainstream. With these openings of formerly esoteric
teachings to the world, we pathfinders now have at our command
a wide range of techniques, practices, and disciplines that are
converging to make up a new spiritual technology: a heart-centered
directing of our individual spirits towards Spirit, towards Great
Spirit, towards whatever name (imago dei) we choose to give the
Creator.
I am part of this re-awakening of Spirit in the world, the re-inhabiting
of enchantment after centuries of the dominance of materialistic
thinking, the re-investment of the anima mundi (the world-soul)
with Spirit, to regain the balance of unified soul and logos/technos.
As a pathfinder and waymaker, I have had to give up some of the
options that my cultural traditions had laid out before me. I
will never be able to call myself a Christian, or a Buddhist,
or a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Jew. I am part of the wave of mystics
that is re-animating the world with Spirit, and I can never be
part of the established orthodoxy of centralized religions. I
have had to let go of that need. (I won’t say it was easy.) Abandoning
the labels of the past, and the comfortable familiar forms of
past faiths, is the price I must pay, in order to find a new way.
All the old maps are incomplete. I abandon them willingly, and
do not look back. The price is not too dear, because the reward
is greater still.
I was born a mystic, and I believe (after decades of study) that
the heart of every established religion is a mystical revelation.
There is a central mystical experience, which in later centuries
tends to get ossified into doctrine; fresh mystical revelations
can even be rejected as heresies if they are too dissimilar to
the orthodox interpretation of the original revelation. But it’s
always the disciples, in the act of codifying and transmitting
the teachings, who harden them into dogma. The Teacher does not
linger to correct. Touch the ground, and vanish. The Messiah has
always already come, and is always as yet unarrived; such revelations
happen in the Now, outside time.
We pathfinders are the breakers of orthodoxy, so that Spirit can
flow in again. We are the pathfinders of the way of direct contact
with the Divine. We respect the traditions of our fathers and
mothers, but we are neither bound by them nor invested in them.
We see that all the old maps are incomplete; we are making new
maps as we go. We use the tools we have at hand, or we invent
new tools as needed. Do not underestimate our creativity. Our
creativity is endless. Our instrumentalities and our practices
are how we make our way(s). Our spiritual technology is how we
carve our path(s). The hierarchical orders of the world’s major
religions cannot contain us. We are “misfits” who do not conform
to the New World Order. We make meaning for ourselves, such meanings
as are useful. We are the whirling dervishes dancing in the grocery
store, the spiral dancers in the parking lots, the singers in
the desert where no-one can hear. We are the sellers of perfume
in the dungheap. We are spiritual nomads. We have home places,
and home bases, but we are called to journey. We are those who
cannot stay-at-home, but MUST answer that Call to see what’s over
the next rise. We meet each other on the other side of the mountains
of the mind. No matter where we start from, we all end up in Shambhala.
We all respond to the Call.
Our purpose is to bring spiritual balance to our technical civilization,
to re-connect the heads and hands of the builders with their hearts.
We seek re-unification. The world-mind has splintered into several
cultures, and several ways of being; we are summoned to re-unite.
Yes, we are a threat to the established world order(s). We are
dangerous teachers. Because we exemplify in our various ways that
the social, religious, cultural, and ethnic Tribes of our birthplaces
cannot contain us. We will push towards Oneness. We will strike
off on our own, to climb the mountain to talk directly with God.
We will create what you cannot imagine.
We do not need intercessors: neither the priestly castes, nor
the image of a Savior as Intercessor. We seek to have an Adult
relationship with Spirit, not a relationship where we are helpless,
dependent children. Our union with the Divine is direct, natural,
and continuously growing. It requires no salvation, only spiritual
direction.
We are an evolutionary step beyond the Tribes of the past, and
towards the living embodiment of the truth that every person is
a self-contained religion. We respect everyone. We hate no-one.
We love all. Physical matter does not need to be redeemed, because
there never was a Fall from Grace. Everything that is, is alive.
We see our planet, Mother Earth, as alive and worthy of respect.
We want to leave a clean campground behind us. We love our Mother,
and we know that she is the source of many great wisdoms. And
we know at the same time that Earthschool is not our true Home:
we are Spirit and we are having a human experience.
Yes, we are a threat to the dominance of the world’s great religions.
We are dangerous because we do not accept authority unquestioned.
We think for ourselves, and we believe that intellectual intelligence
alone is incomplete. We must learn to balance mind and heart and
will into alignment, so that they work in alliance. We do not
seek to tear down the religions or other social institutions of
the past, because they are our parents and we love our parents.
But we will let them die a natural death, and not seek to resuscitate
them endlessly. We do not cling to the past. We are not engaged
in tearing down or reforming the existing systems of religion
and government, or any other institutions. We notice them crumbling
around us, but we are engaged in creating new forms and so give
the dead institutions only passing attention. We are a quiet revolution
that hardly anyone has noticed. Yes, we vote: but not in any pattern
you would recognize or be able to predict.
We reason with our hearts. We feel with our minds. We are the
pathfinders and waymakers. We are the Children of the Dreaming.
We are the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. We are the Children
of the Sun, and are clothed with the stars. We are the contemporary
mystics and practical Seers, for whom guidance and revelation
are as ordinary as toast. We are the misfits that cannot be crammed
into categories. We do not need hand-me-down clothes for our beliefs.
We will not wear pigeonholes and call them comfortable. We are
neither slaves to the past nor worshippers of tradition. Mental
walls cannot hold us in. Many of us are not monosexual. Rather,
we are pansexual: we embody eros, passionite living itself our
creed. We are your children, and we have already grown up. We
look just like everybody else. We can hold down jobs, go to school,
be retired. We can be disguised as a Catholic priest, or as a
Radical Faerie–or both. Some of the time, we look just like you.
We are Individuals: the Tribes cannot contain us. We acknowledge
that there have been many Individuals who have come before, waymakers
and pathfinders before us, teachers who prepare the way, and we
honor these. We most of us live their teachings, rather than merely
rehearsing them.
We are the first generations of the conscious adulthood of the
human species, when the species is viewed as a single organism
of which we are all living cells. The species as a whole is still
(for now) caught in the throes of a turbulent adolescence, and
is thus still at war with itself (both Symbolically and literally,
as acted out via the world-channel). We are the part of the species
that wants to live, to grow up, and that abhors racial and cultural
suicide. We want to live, so we seek new ways in which the world-soul
can survive and thrive–rather than committing some sort of angst-ridden
suicide in a fit of childish pique. We are the first species Adults
that the global mind has produced en masse. We want the species
to survive to grow up, into its completed Adulthood. We are the
self-aware layer of the world-mind; something huge and collective
is waking up, and we are its interface. Perhaps we will become
the Adults who will look God in the eye and recognize ourselves,
just as Spirit uses our eyes to see Itself.
We know that many of you do not understand us. We love our parents,
and we know that we confuse them. We accept that not all of you
can see the new paradigms as they emerge. You do not need to fear
us, because we do not hate our parents. We love you, and we know
that our journeys will not be like yours.
But we are not undisciplined children. We are not somehow misled.
We are not susceptible to the traps of cult or guru-worship, because
by our very nature we cannot stand to be contained, and we do
not readily give ourselves over to worldly authorities. We are
not simply trading old cults for new cults–we are giving up all
cults for good. We walk through the marketplace, using no more
than we need.
Make no mistake: We are not a relapse. The old ways are already
dead–we will simply stand by as they die the natural death of
all worldly things. We have no need to either lengthen the process,
or to hurry it. We are a new monastic order that has no monastery,
because we know that retreat from the world is no longer feasible.
True contemplatives must now engage the world. We are the living
embodiment of the eremite who remains in the world to heal it.
(Thomas Merton was one of our first. His life is a model of engagement
while also seeking solitude and silence.) We are Spirit, and we
are having a worldly existence.
We are the end of history, because we transcend history. Oh, we
will still have record-keepers. But history is no longer to be
a wounded thing, this record of conquests and conflicts, of wars
and bloodshed, of human bondage, of the illusions of identity
that are nationalism and ethnicity. We are history’s redemption,
its healers. There is nothing that cannot be redeemed.
We look like everybody else, but we recognize each other when
we meet. We appear to you as your diversely-formed children, but
when we look at ourselves we see no color. When you look at us,
you only see our ethnicities, those signs of our birth-Tribes–but
when we look at each other we see only kin.
We are all ages on the planet at this time, and we have been appearing
on the planet for almost a century, first as a trickle, then in
greater numbers. There are great changes coming along with the
great convergence: and timeshadows ripple outward in all directions
from this as-yet-unnamed Event. We are a mounting wave. What have
been called the astrological ages, the 2000-year cycles of planetary
evolution mirrored by the Earth’s precession on its tilted axis,
these changes that parallel the spiritual and conscious growth
of the species, from the Age of Aries that was our species’ childhood,
to the Age of Pisces, which was our adolescence, to the Age of
Aquarius beginning now: these are concepts we take for granted,
they seem so obvious to us. We move freely through time, because
our souls are anchored in the Now, and time is only the Now. History
is an illusion. There is only the Dreamtime. We are post-historical.
We are the emergence of the idea that Spirit dances forever in
the Now. We have no historical agenda, because we transcend history.
We are the first generations of the children of earth to have
embraced their shadows, and woken up. We are here to change the
world.
You misunderstand us if you think this is hubris. It is not the
arrogance of toddlers or the self-absorption of adolescents that
we embody. It is the emotional maturity of adulthood that we embody:
the calm self-awareness of those who have walked into their darkest
places, made alliance with their demons, and emerged again into
the light. We are no longer wounded healers, because we do not
cling to our wounds. Our vision is turned upwards into Spirit–not
focused on our wounds, our past hurts, or our histories. We take
what there is to be learned–then move on.
Nor is this the arrogance of youth: we are not discarding the
past. We keep the wisdom we have learned. But we do not let the
past rule us. We will not be enchained. We take what we have learned,
and make a new way.
I can’t tell you what the new way looks like yet, because it can’t
be caught in words. We are still creating it. I am a catalyst.
I have visions of the future, of what will be, and I even have
a sense of its unfolding, possible dates and places. But I can’t
describe it yet, because we haven’t got the language yet.
Timeline? Perhaps not for 200 years. Perhaps tomorrow morning.
Probably not in my lifetime–but I don’t care. We work towards
the goal in present time, for there is only the Now. We do not
perceive history the same way you do: we see it as the telling
of a story, where meaning is a mystery. And perhaps we are the
end of the old version of history.
That is one thing that all of us pathfinders share: a vision beyond
time, that present language cannot fully describe. One of our
purposes must be to re-invest language with a spirit of revelation,
deepening the existing words till they resonate beyond simple
understanding. We need to bring back the ghosts of layered meaning,
and let them haunt our words again. The closest any of us can
get so far is poetry, and art, and music. The poets have more
maps than anyone, even if they’re only partially filled in. If
you encounter a making that contains a yearning for something
beyond, something more than the drama of the personal self–then
you have encountered my kin. We do not make self-absorbed, self-centered
art, nor expressionist art–we make spiritual art, transcendent
art, transpersonal art. We are the precursors of the Planetary
Art Network. (cf. Argüelles)
Because we are such committed pathfinders, not all of us will
agree with the details of what I write. This is only one attempt
to envision ourselves: the group mind describing itself. Some
will quibble with my choice of words, others with my attempts
at descriptions. Still, we will recognize each other even if we
don’t speak the same language. This is our purpose: to make a
new way, to find a new path, to (if we must) create the new paradigm.
We already embody a paradigm that differs from our Tribes’. We
are the awakening consciousness of the self-aware global brain,
the neo-cortex that the world-soul has grown in order to contemplate
its own being. We are the dreams of the world-soul, and we are
its dreamers. There are many labels and descriptions for this
process–and these labels are part of the convergence that is going
on–but none really matter beyond having something to talk about.
We do not accept many limits.
We know who we are, and we recognize each other when we meet.
We are something very new in the world’s history, and we have
been here forever. The convergence is accelerating: can you feel
its wind passing through your soul? We watch for its emergence.
So, I have no name for us as yet. Nor am I content to paste on
an inappropriate label. Let the mystery stand for now. We know
who we are; we can feel the shiftings of the dream-body of the
world-soul, and for now that is enough. When we awaken at last,
our name(s) will appear simultaneously to all of us–we are connected
on so many levels–and it will seem as if it had always been there.
Have you noticed that sometimes a new idea arises from many sources
simultaneously–an idea whose time has ripened? We watch for that.
We have the patience to wait for that moment, because we do not
perceive our time here as limited–neither in this life, nor any
life to come. We have the patience of the master builder: we will
take our time, and get it right the first time. We do not try
to push the river.
This is not about religion. This is about what lies beyond religion.
Or perhaps lies at the original core of every great religion.
The pathmaking does require spiritual direction, and disciplined
contemplation. It requires fertile ground in which to plant the
seed that will awaken. So we do need guidance, especially at the
beginning. (This is why some of us still look like the religious
of every tradition, why we still pretend to be monks and priests
and contemplatives.) But we need guidance mainly to avoid the
traps of mere eccentricity. Spiritual direction, as developed
by all the great religions, is another useful tool for us, another
spiritual technology to point us towards Spirit. It is something
one seeker does for another, even if they never meet face-to-face.
It can be in the form of letters, or conversations over tea. It
can be the great spiritual writings of the world’s traditions.
Merton and Lao Tze and the Zen masters and Gandhi and Rumi and
Rilke and Mirabai and the Hassidic Rabbis have all provided me
guidance. And we give each other guidance, as we light the trail
for each other. A truly open-hearted friendship–one true friend
to whom you can say anything--is also spiritual direction. You
don’t have to be a priest or a religious. (cf. Guenther; Neufelder
and Coelho) And finally, guidance comes directly from Spirit,
when we arrive at a certain place in our practice: the still small
voice within.
If you have read this far, you must realize by now that this portrait
of the pathfinders is incomplete. We are still un-naming them.
There is a time to shed preconceptions, and a time to build anew
from what stones are left in the garden. We are still shedding,
even as we begin to build. I have a few mounds of soil left in
the back of the potting shed, but I need to make more flowerpots.
I am raking the gravel: waves surrounding islands of moss.
These can be no more than preliminary notes, because the flower
itself has not yet unfolded. We are taking pictures on a camera
with no film, and we must first invent developer solution.
These are, therefore, only preliminary notes towards a new geography
of being. The new maps have many lacunae still. Here Be Dragons,
Here Be Tygers. The elusiveness of the subject is part of the
exercise. Mystery is the point: nothing else.
So, even incomplete as it is, I must bring this writing to a stuttering
end, unresolved for now. We’ll come back to descriptions when
being poetry no longer serves.
I am something new. I am part of this wave of people of re-awakened
spirit who cannot be contained by established, organized institutions.
We will find our own way, and we will leave lanterns behind us,
to illuminate the trails.
Join us.
Wake up! It’s sunrise. It’s time.
Clues To Who We Are (in lieu of a Bibliography):
Thomas Merton: Day of a Stranger
Jose Argüelles: The Transformative Vision; Earth Ascending; The
Mayan Factor
Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian
Michael Novak: The Experience of Nothingness
Ralph Ebner: God Present As Mystery
Marsha Sinetar: Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics
P.L. Travers: What the Bee Knows
Frederick Franck: Art As A Way
Alex Grey: Sacred Mirrors; Transfigurations; The Mission of Art
Buckminster Fuller: Tetrascroll
Hakim Bey: TAZ: Temporary Autonomous Zone
Michael Murphy: Jacob Atabet
Nancy Kress: Brain Rose
Ann Maxwell: Name of a Shadow
Lyall Watson: Gifts of Unknown Things
Nikos Kazantzakis: Saviors of God
Barry Lopez: Winter Count; Field Notes; River Notes
James Hillman & Michael Ventura: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
Odysseas Elytis: Eros, Eros, Eros
Gail and Snell Putney: The Adjusted American (Normal Neuroses)
Thomas Moore: The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
Margaret Guenther: Holy Listening: the Art of Spiritual Direction
Jerome M. Neufelder and Mary C. Coelho: Writings on Spiritual
Direction by Great Christian Masters
Michael J. Gelb: How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
John Cage: Anarchy
Loren Eiseley: The Star Thrower
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth Anderson: The Cultural Creatives
Caroline Myss: Sacred Contracts
Matthew Fox: Original Blessing
Robert A. Heinlein: The Original, Uncut Stranger in a Strange Land
Sandra Miesel: Shaman
Susan Seddon Boulet: Shaman; Goddess
C.g. Jung: Word and Image
Janet O. Dallett: When the Spirits Come Back
Katya Walter: Tao of Chaos
A Spiral Dance essay © 2000 Arthur Paul Durkee / Black Dragon
Productions.
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