The Divinity of Life

As I gave my presentation at the book launch last week, I said something spontaneous that stuck out in my mind. There wasn’t a lot of reaction to the concept from the audience, but I am not surprised as it was almost a throw away line. A very profound one so it turns out to be. For me at least.

The sentence was “maybe Life was the first Divinity.” What?

It started me going back in history as is easy for me to do, leading me to the beginning, where Life had to establish itself as a going concern. It took a lot of trial and error, weighing this against that, moving on from attempts that didn’t work as they were, adjusting them accordingly. Like the time it created too much oxygen through the process of carbon dioxide breathing plants, from which the waste biproduct filled up the atmosphere until it was ready to explode, taking the Planet and Life with it. As a result, Life encouraged the development of oxygen breathing beings that walked out of the sea in a timely manner to adjust the balance again. Clever Life.

But humans were a long time coming. By the time we did arrive, much of the hard work was done. Gasses in the air balanced, temperature in the range life could comfortably thrive in, just the right amount of moisture drawn from the atmosphere. All good. Maybe Life went too far when it developed us, but you never know the consequences until you’ve taken the action, so here we are. We were made to question, so question we do. We did.

But like children without life experience to fall back on we made stories that would best explain the way Life worked to our inexperienced minds. Finding ourselves up against the dilemma of meeting our needs from what Life provided for us was a mystery we had to make sense of, so the stories began. Alongside the needs. We needed water, heat, food, shelter. We needed safety from the denizens of the area we lived in, so being children in the process, we called out for the parent to provide, not realizing that it already was, giving us the opportunity to become creative in our own right, within the parameters provided.

As there were obviously bigger beings than us existing all around, the desire to call out to them for assistance was writ large. But how do you conceptualize the rain, winds, sunshine? You see them as all powerful beings, like yourselves but different. Unlimited, while you are small and limited. Here is where it gets really interesting. In the caves of Lascaux in France, there exist some of the oldest cave drawing so far found. They are in a collection of interconnected caves, with drawings covering many ages. Although most of the drawings depict images that the people would have interacted with daily, at the back are found some that are drawings with bulls on human legs, humans with cloven feet, humans with horns. These come from a time 20-32,000 years ago when the human brain began to understand symbolism. It was the deep time of story. Rather than witnessing what was around them, they also began making stories to explain it in a way that they were able to understand. So, the human love affair with story began. It could be used to explain anything: babies arrived in their mother womb through eating a pumpkin seed, the wind would punish us if we were not good to our siblings, if we didn’t sacrifice some of our food to the elements, they would become angry with us and cause droughts to arrive. What you can symbolically image you can conjure a story about.

The process by which we turned away from living with Nature (Life) and turned to our made-up world had begun. We separated all elements up into the gods, made up imaginary ways of appeasing them. The word god was a derivative of the ancient word ǥuđán meaning to pour out: God originally meant the pouring out? What of? Life! And so, the stories grew. They were in every culture, from Maori the stories of Papatuanuku, the goddess of the Earth, and her love life, how her first husband made with her the fish beings of the sea, and the humans coming from her second marriage to Ranganui, the sky god. In Europe we have Yggdrasil, the world tree from which Life began and all the gods and goddesses of the Nords and Germanic peoples. The Native American people had Wakantunka, and Grandmother, and the Greeks built a whole pantheon of explanations for all manner of Life choices. All of them depicting aspects of Life that humans needed to find a way of understanding.

In Egypt, under the reign of Akhenaten the concept of the One god first made its re-entry. I say re-entry because as we have seen it all came from our ability to explain away the various aspects of the origin of our life with story. Maybe it was from contact with that source, that the Judaic concept of God began its journey.  Through the colonialism of the Roman Empire, the European world came in contact with these stories, and they spread. Let’s divert for a moment, though. As a result of our discovery of the ability to use symbolism and story, our minds have done a brilliant job of turning our whole lives into story. So much so, that we have difficulty defining the difference between the stories and the reality. We love it so much that all our current entertainment is about being told stories. Maybe we have disappeared into the story itself and have forgotten, or never really known, what reality was. Certainly, we psychologically build stories about ourselves internally that serve to become the basis for our choices and actions, for good or bad. But they are indeed all stories, sometime ones that others have concocted about us. They can be changed as soon as we realize we are not the story but the storyteller. We can choose which one we believe. A wise man who helped me decades ago once said “Don’t believe everything you think”. Wise words indeed.

Many years ago, when I was running a Psychosynthesis course in Sydney, I would have take-away tea sitting in my car before the course began. One night, staring into the water underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I had a strange thought. What if we are all gods who developed a game like snakes and ladders. We had so much fun playing it that we spent more time there than in our actual lives,( sound familiar)? We went up the ladders only to hit a snake and slide down again. We were jubilant going up and angry coming down, but we forgot that it was a game. We started to see it as if it were our lives. If we hit too many snakes, we believed we were losers, as opposed to the winners that hit all the ladders, so we all strived to have wall to wall ladders. But the game, and indeed life, is not like that. If we didn’t have difficulty, we would become stagnant, unable to find creative solution to meeting our needs. Our growth never occurs if we live our lives pursuing easy options. But we forgot there was a life outside the game, and most haven’t yet learnt how to step out of it. But step out of it we must.  We have to embrace Life in all of its divergent wonder, before we lose the lot by creating a living nightmare. We have to wake up.  Whether we like the idea of being “woke” or not, its time to step out of this story, and start again. There is only one thing we need to understand: that our survival depends on our co-operation with the thing that we are all part of, Life itself.