Ancient Wisdom and Gods of War (Warning: Open minds required)

With what’s going on in Palestine, I have been doing a lot of thinking about religion. Most of the main ones we have operating now have playbooks that date back to very different times. I am a student of history and firmly believe that the seeds of our dilemmas, as well as our functionality, have their roots in past choices. Indeed, my work is based on helping my clients to look back through their individual pasts to find where the beliefs that are shaping their lives stem from. But if we don’t, hidden in our psyches, those seeds will trip us up again and again. So, it’s not the fact that something is ancient that’s the problem. It’s really its viability to help us live the lives that we need to live in our world today. I rely a great deal on ancient wisdom. But it has to apply to the circumstances that I/we face.

This requires flexibility, adapting old wisdom to new circumstances, rejecting that which does not fit the requirements of the 21st century, or where we are in our loves. I made the analogy on this topic the other day, that it’s like someone traveling somewhere on a cycle, but refusing to turn a corner because he was told to ‘go straight there’. There are elements of this example that apply to doctrines of most religious bodies. For instance: In a world awash with humans, fast approaching the limit that the planet can accommodate, the edict to not contracept or limit the size of our families seems irresponsible. At least to me. But each of religion holds on to these types of edicts in many ways. I am not going to ‘pick on’ any one religion here.  But it is obvious to me that many of the most fixed ways of being within our social network come from some book somewhere which is not permitted to be questioned for its voracity in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Many of these rules have favoured aspects of our populations, creating inequality that is hard to shift because it has been adhered to for so long. Patriarchy has benefitted enormously from the males centered religious organization for millennia. They have favoured exploitation, politics, and economics at the expense of indigenous peoples world-wide, especially limiting the potential and talent of women, causing them to become unpaid domestic workers and breeders. The wisdom and ability of millions of people, that could have benefitted the species as a whole, was wasted. 

This exploration led me to look more deeply. At this point I must say that in my 20’s I was a scholar of the bible, having read it from cover to cover, and actually taught it for many years, so I am not speaking from lack of experience. I was looking into the various ways women had been subjugated to the needs of the economic world, coming across a reference that made me think about the relevance of religious mythology to everyone. It occurred to me that the moment we shifted into fixed masculine religions, we left behind the ancient knowledge of cyclic nature, upheld by earlier more pagan philosophies. These earlier forms of understanding recognised change in seasons and the flow of life. They were regulated by its ever-changing nature. The masculine philosophies were linear, focused on continued growth in set directions, unattached to Nature and actually antipathic towards it.

I recalled the fact that before the Council of Nicaea, where Rome lay down the tenants of what a world-wide church was allowed to look like, they decided to abolish the idea of reincarnation from the books, all references disappearing. I wondered about this. Then it began to make sense. I have heard said in Christian settings that the Hindu people didn’t care about things because they believed they would come back again anyway. Maybe this was a joke stimulated by colonial minds but yet it made sense.

At this point I feel I should explain my own philosophy. I can’t take credit for this. I first read about it in a book by Phillip Pulman called The Amber Spyglass, part of a trilogy called His Dark Materials. In the story a young girl called Lyra found that heaven was a lie and that everyone that had died was trapped there for eternity, never changing, and stuck with their own resentments. She set about releasing them. When she did, their cells joyfully disbursed back into Nature where they would become part of everything. (This is a precise of the books and is an approximation). For me the feeling I had reading that part was life changing. It felt so right to be recycled both physically and energetically, that for me, it has become the way to go. As I have worked internally on this concept it gains validity. Everything that dies goes back into the Earth and the Life force leaves symbolically into the Air element, the Universe. As energy never dies, the cycle of life is honoured by the contribution I make to it on death, rejoining the Whole to be allowed to live again in some other way.

As a result, this started me thinking about the benefits to the church from everyone believing that this life is all there is, and that if we don’t do as we are told by it, we will live for eternity in horror. If we do, then that’s it. We continue doing as we are told as we live with God. The idea appalled me. Millions of people trapped in a society with no recourse to their own ways of being, following a tenet that ensures their abilities were shaped only  by the church and for its patrons’ benefit, was a very good reason for them to knock the idea of coming back in any form whatsoever on the head.  So it is that all the major religions adhere to similar principles. They justify their wars, their treatment of women, their demands of men all to retain control over the resources of the planet which are fast running out under their tutelage.

If we are ever going to get out of the bind this leaves us in, it requires some critical thinking on all of our behalf’s. We must stop following anything blindly, listening to our inner selves, whilst questioning the programmed contents of our minds. Most of all we need to see where we can align again with the laws of nature rather than the false laws of Man. Maybe then we will open our eyes and see a way to heal and move forward.