In Druidry, as in many other religious traditions, we pay attention when seemingly significant coincidences occur. When we notice strange patterns and echoes where we expected only random noise. Meaningful happenstance.

When we were thinking about this year’s Solstice message, we thought about gods of healing. Apollo, for example. For the Greeks, he was the young, powerful, golden god of medicine, music, art, prophecy, and archery. It’s a weird grab-bag of things, to be honest. Dieties don’t usually get a dozen things to be god of. Hephaestus, for example, is the god of metalworking, and that’s kind of it. Apollo is a complex god and he has a long, complex history. In fact there’s evidence that the Apollo the Greeks worshipped was a combination of a Celtic god, maybe named Avallo or Vallo, associated with orchards, prophecy, and swans, and a separate Asian god, Aplu, who was in fact a god of plagues, prophecy, and the phoenix.

And the Greek Apollo is a god of plagues as well as medicine. In the Iliad, for example, he shoots plague arrows at the Greek army because they captured the daughter of one of his priests.

Now the Greeks didn’t think of Apollo as a plague god specifically. But many thought his name came from apollymi, meaning the Destroyer. He was not to be messed around with.

So we thought it would be interesting to look at this connection between plague and divinity. And then when we were researching Apollo we came upon this story, which was filled with so many synchonicities and strange coincidences that we felt we had to share it.

Apollo and Coronis

One day Apollo, who usually spent his time in the cities or at one of his holy temples, was wandering and hunting in the wilderness in the west of Greece, and there he met a young princess named Coronis. She was extremely beautiful; she was in fact the granddaughter of the Muse Erato, if that gives you any idea of her appearance. And Apollo at this time was unattached, and Coronis thought Apollo was one of the most handsome beings in existence (which was a fact), so they got busy with various things together.

Now Apollo is generally a very careful, rational being. As the patron of the arts, science, poetry, medicine, archery, and so on, he puts a lot of time into disciplined practice. And as the god of prophecy, he knows the future, and knows the right actions to take to ensure the best outcome. But Apollo’s lust for Coronis completely overcame him. He literally could think of almost nothing else. And his desire was not a pleasant, comfortable thing, but a jealous longing, and possessive lust. He simply had to have Coronis for his own, always.

So when, after a few months, Apollo had to return to civilization to attend to some urgent matters, he told Coronis to wait for him, and to be faithful to him. But Coronis was a princess of the wilderness; she had her own desires and her own will and Apollo was great and all but there were other young strong fish in the sea. So she made no promises.

Apollo was quite frustrated about this, but there wasn’t much he could do. Still, he commanded one of his servants, a raven (who happened to be white — all ravens were white at this time), to watch over Coronis and make sure she was faithful to Apollo while he was gone.

So Apollo went back to the cities and temples, and Coronis went about her business being a wilderness princess. The white raven watched her carefully. And it didn’t take long for Coronis to spot a fascinating young fisherman named Ischys and to lay down with him and get some business done.

The raven tried to interfere, but what could he do? So he dashed back to Apollo with the news. And Apollo completely lost it. He was utterly enraged. And it was not pretty.

First he turned the raven black. Not just that raven, but all the ravens, forever. Then he ran back into the wilderness and found Coronis and her young man. With a single glance, Apollo burned Ischys with solar fire, consuming him in an instant. Then Apollo strung his golden bow, notched it with a plague arrow, drew back, and shot Coronis through the heart.

Coronis did not die immediately. She fell terribly ill and collapsed. Her family gathered around her, carried her back to their home, and tried to tend to her. But one by one they grew sick as well. Before long all the countryside was sick with Coronis’s plague.

But Apollo’s rage quickly cooled, and he became terribly ashamed of what he had done. He returned to Coronis and knelt by her, trying to heal her. He was able to cure her family and neighbors, but Coronis could not be brought back from such a grievous wound. She lingered a while, and then died.

In sorrow and shame, Apollo took upon himself the task of preparing Coronis’s body for the funeral cremation. He lay her body out on the pyre and poured out sacred myrrh and other libations, and sang the sacred songs of mourning. Then he lit the fire to send Coronis’s spirit on her way. Coronis rose into the sky and became the constellation Corvus (the Crow).

But, as the fire rose higher and higher, to Apollo’s surprise, he heard a strange sound coming from her body. Curious, he investigated and found that Coronis was in fact pregnant with their child. The baby was near death, and Coronis’s body was quickly being consumed by the flames; so Apollo had to use all his skill as a healer to extract his son and save his life.

This child was Asclepius, whose name means “the one who has been cut”. Apollo raised him and educated him, assisted by Chiron, the centaur famous for his wisdom and skill in healing. Asclepius grew up to be the greatest healer in the history of humanity. The symbol of medicine, with the rod and the snakes, is his symbol. He was such a great healer that he could literally bring people back from the dead; and he was so successful, and the Earth became so overpopulated with people that he had cured or revived, that Zeus eventually had to kill him and make him into a constellation as well (Ophiuchus).

So what can we learn from this story? This story with strange echoes and coincidences for our time on earth today, almost three thousand years later. I’m not going to say a whole lot because this isn’t a sermon.

But one way of thinking about it is to remember that Apollo is coming from a place of science, discipline, and civilization. He is drawn to Coronis in part because she is from the wilderness, that part of the world he doesn’t yet control. So he wants to control her, to possess her. But the wilderness isn’t like that; it isn’t under our control; it will always be its own thing. If Apollo had cultivated a healthy relationship with Coronis, if he had taken the time to understand her and let her be herself, they could perhaps have had a wonderful partnership. Instead, Apollo killed her, killed an innocent man, brought on a plague, and nearly killed his own son.

Five Principles of Health

One final thing. When I first began meditating on Apollo, fifteen years ago, he charged me to work on five things in my life. Those things were:

• Strength and health of body and mind.
• Gentleness and kindness.
• Wit, i.e. wisdom and laughter.
• Charity and Healing.
• Curiosity.

Now, I learned when preparing for this ritual that Apollo’s son Asclepius had five daughters. The names of these five daughters are critical practices that allow one to prevent and cure disease. In English their names can be translated:

• Robustness
• Hygeine
• Recuperation
• Rest
• Remedy

There’s a rough correspondence between these two lists of five that I think is interesting to think about. And it’s valuable to have these guidelines in place as we all together work towards the healing of our world today.

We need to remain strong and robust in mind and body, so that we can better resist and fight disease when we encounter it.

We need to keep things clean — not just our bodies but our personal spaces and our personal relationships, aiming for truth and clarity where we can.

When we get sick we need to rest, giving ourselves time and space to recover.

The process of recovery is one that requires patience, wisdom, and good humor.

And we need to seek remedies, such as vaccines and better medical science, that can find the root of the sickness and cure it.

And finally, in this story, Apollo reminds us to seek with humility and compassion, to not let ourselves be driven to anger or to lash out at the things and people that we can never control. Only through patience and understanding can we restore the world to wholeness.

• The “materialist” answer: our brains generate consciousness (in some mysterious manner), and their brains don’t.
• The “spiritualist” answer: consciousness is separate from matter, an utterly unlike thing, which can “inhabit” or “possess” living matter; and our brains house it, but other brains don’t.

Both answers lead to deep dilemmas, because neither says anything about where one lays the lines; nothing is said of the niceties. Details like: what kinds of brains can generate (or house) consciousness? Can consciousness arise from something that isn’t a brain? Why, or why not? How exactly does it work? And what about different kinds of consciousness — sleep, inebriation, amnesia, dementia, woolgathering? And is there a difference between consciousness and sentience? If so, what, exactly? 

And each answer has its own particular problems. For materialists, it’s not clear why a human brain spawns consciousness, but a mouse brain or a worm brain does not; or indeed why it cannot spring from any cluster of nerve cells. Maybe you think human brains are sentient, and other brains have other kinds of consciousness. But you’ve just pushed the question a step back: now you also have to have a clear theory of human sentience vs. chimpanzee / dolphin / octopus sentience. Meanwhile, for spiritualists, it’s not clear why damage to the brain should change consciousness at all, or why spirits are especially at home in brains as opposed to, say, hearts or spleens.

The word paradox is Greek, from para (opposite, against) and dokein (thought, opinion, vision). A paradox is created when there are multiple ways of viewing (dokein) a situation, but the opposing viewpoints (para) cannot be resolved into a single vision. A whole new way of thinking about the situation is needed — one that resolves the apparent contradictions into a unifying whole.

Orr’s vision is animistic. In this view, consciousness is not something separate from matter, nor something generated by some kinds of matter. Instead, it is inherent to all matter. There are, for our purposes, three critical points to Orr’s position:

• Mind is a feature of the universe’s very fabric. All matter has mind of some kind. In the same way that all matter has temperature, mass, and electrical charge, it also has consciousness.
• Mind comes in many different types. The mind of a rock is slow, diffuse, and hazy; the mind of a bee is quick, determined, and keen. A human mind sits somewhere between.
• The form of a mind is isomorphic with the form of its matter. A bee’s mind is quick and sharp because its brain is a neural net that is small and attuned to learn and act decisively. A rock’s mind is slow and diffuse because its “brain” is a network of aggregated minerals connected by chemical and physical proximity; it “learns” (i.e. changes configuration) over geologic eons, and it is not attuned to the task of subsistence.

So far so good. But the mind / matter paradox also entangles (ha!) with an opposite pair of paradoxes: the observer problem in quantum mechanics, and the failure of quantum mechanics to play nicely with relativistic physics — or gravity in general. It seems that all these paradoxes may be resolved with a single model.

Paradoxes Entangled

The observer problem, at its heart, is simply that quantum mechanics entails an aware observer in order to make any particular predictions. If particles interact, quantum mechanics provides only probabilities of an outcome. Furthermore, the probabilities interfere and influence each other; and, most vexingly, one outcome or the other will only occur when an aware observer appears and takes a look. This model gives very good results, but it doesn’t tell you what a conscious observer is, and without that, the theory has a hole in its center. We know that we are aware observers, because we can literally feel how aware we are. But if other things are aware observers, we can’t know, and quantum mechanics doesn’t tell us.

Schrödinger’s Cat is the classic thought experiment that shows the heart of the paradox. I won’t rehash it here, but briefly, the paradox rests on the question of whether a cat counts as an aware observer. If it does, then the cat is the one who observes whether it is alive or dead. If it does not, then the cat is both alive and dead until a human being opens the box to check, and collapses the wave form. Schrödinger’s point is that surely it’s ridiculous to think that a cat would not know whether it is alive or dead; but then, where do you draw the line? Does a worm count as an observer? A bacterium or virus? Consciousness is thus a mystery in the marrow of quantum mechanics.

The other issue for quantum mechanics is relativistic physics. Under extreme conditions — high gravity, tremendous accelerations — relativistic physics predicts that the energies and masses involved invariably lead to impossible infinities. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, ignores gravity altogether (since at small scales and low accelerations, gravity is so weak as to be negligible). This isn’t concerned with consciousness per se, but it’s a persistent problem in modern physics and asks for an explanation.

So here we have a nice pile of puzzles! Remarkably enough, a paper came out earlier in 2021 which suggests the outline of an answer to all of them. Vitaly Vanchurin suggests the physical world might be a neural net.

The Living Fluid of Spacetime

When dealing with particle physics, which is all math, it can be a struggle to make a metaphor that “explains” what the equations are saying. There is nothing in our lived experience that really compares to what is going on at the deepest levels; but perhaps we can get a handle on it if we think of the universe is composed of a kind of living fluid.

Imagine a magical, living liquid. It’s like water, made up of tiny molecules that slide over and around each other, but with these key differences:

• The fluid’s particles are extremely small — much smaller than quarks. These particles are the nodes of the neural net, and they’re all connected or interacting each other. Mostly they’re interacting with just their neighbors, but there are also hidden connections with more distant nodes — perhaps through higher dimensions.
• This fluid can literally turn into anything. Just as water can turn into ice or steam depending on warmth and pressure, different configurations of the particles of the living fluid give rise to energy and matter in all its forms.
• The fluid “learns”, in the way that a neural net learns: the links between its nodes sometimes strengthen, sometimes weaken. Portions may freeze or crystallize; other portions may boil and expand. It may also create new links between particles, or destroy old links. Structures may emerge within it — some ephemeral, others fixed forever.
• At large scales, the fluid seems unruffled, perhaps with gentle ripples flowing through it. But at small scales, when you zoom in, the particles are always changing and coming in and out of existence in a seemingly random way. Again, this is just like water: a lake may seem smooth from a distance, but when you look at it under a microscope, the particles shimmer with Brownian motion.

A net like this is always changing, always “learning”. Connections and nodes are always growing, twisting, and shrinking. And different parts of the net can be doing different things. After all, the cosmic net is vast — perhaps infinitely vast. Some portions of the net are relatively quiet and flat; other areas are boiling with energy, surging with avalanches of changes.

In the quiet areas of the net (what the author calls “learning equilibrium”), any random fluctuation in one part of the net is counterbalanced nearby, or fades away relatively quickly. Perturbations are small and affect only very local nodes. An example is empty space, frigid and static except for wandering hydrogen atoms, and the occasional photon zipping through on their way from distant stars. Or it may be found in the depths of the ocean, where the water is at a near-constant temperature throughout, and the rain of photons from the sky is incessant but thin, and the only disturbances are slow-growing algae and extremely lost fish. It turns out that the equations of quantum mechanics can be derived from a net in this quiet state of equilibrium. 

In the more active areas of the net, where things are changing quickly (“learning disequilibrium”), the net’s connections are in a state of flux. The random firings are still going on but they’re swamped by the larger waves and surges. For example, a star may move into the region of empty space, causing spacetime to curve; or a burst of cosmic rays may sweep through. A wave of cooler water may disturb the ocean depths, or a ship may sink slowly and inexorably through on its way to the bottom. When a net is under this stress, there are a number of different ways the net could be modeled, but one simple way it might behave is in accordance with the theory of general relativity.

Paradox to Symphadox

In other words, a single net can model the effects of both quantum mechanics and general relativity. When it’s quiet and undisturbed (learning equilibrium), it acts in accordance with quantum mechanics. When it is disturbed and in flux (learning disequilibrium), it (can) act in accordance with general relativity.

Vanchurin also points out that this effectively resolves the observer paradox, in the following way. A neural net models the multiple states of quantum mechanics by maintaining two states simultaneously within the same region of the net. The multiple states are resolved into a single state when it is “observed” by another region of the net. (I gave an example of this kind of thing in the human brain in my previous article: when you hear the word “bye”, your brain simultaneously hears it as “by”, “buy” and “bye”, and resolves it into one of the three using contextual clues, i.e. information from another part of your brain). In the same way, when Schrödinger’s cat is faced with the possibility of death, the poison gas is both released and not-released into the environment, but the potentials are overweighed one way or the other by the surrounding net, which chooses among the options and collapses the wave form, probably before the cat has any cognizance of the matter. Thus the net is both the observer and the observed: each part of the net observes the other parts.

The neural net model, then, provides a framework for resolving the observer paradox and the quantum / relativistic paradox. It transforms the paradoxes into a symphadox: a unifying vision.

It also allows for answers to some even thornier questions, questions which mainstream physics has not yet approached: synchronicity and astrology. 

Time is a very tricky question in the neural net conception of physics. The equations for a neural net assume that time moves forward and learning occurs; so, unlike in relativity, time is treated mathematically as a separate kind of thing from space, matter, and energy. (There is no such thing as “spacetime”: space and time are very different things. Space, matter and energy, however, are all parts of the net.) But, unlike in Newtonian physics, there is no reason to assume that the time increments are universal, or that the learning rate is universal. That is, time may move faster or slower in some regions of the universe; and while the “laws of physics” may be approximately the same everywhere, they may operate at different speeds or in different fashions. There is also no reason to assume that future node states are not connected to present or past node states. Thus although time is real and causality is real, in some situations, a set of future nodes could influence present nodes. Causality could flow in the opposite direction.

Specifically, if some drastic event is to occur at time t, some prior events at time t-1 may be affected before the drastic event takes place. In general, the affected prior events will be much smaller than the drastic event, and individually they might all be discounted as coincidence. But taken together they can only be explained as triggered by the future event.

For example, it’s been shown that dogs are extremely good at knowing in advance that their owners are on their way home, rushing to the door and waiting for fifteen or twenty minutes before their owners arrive. (For dogs, the owner coming home is the “drastic event” that influences prior events.) Individually, any one dog’s behavior can be dismissed as coincidence; but the sheer quantity of dogs doing this again and again shows that there is likely to be some non-causal link in the world’s neural net between the dogs and their owners — a link that is hidden from normal three dimensional spacetime. The neural net physics allows this kind of entanglement trivially.

And so this is also the first theory of physics that allows for the effects of astrology. Astrological influences are invisible, acausal, and mysterious, but neural physics could, in theory, model these influences as hidden connections. In other words, these influences are not in fact uncaused; the causes are simply hidden from us. For example, if your mood is connected to the position of the moon, the connection may be due to the entangled particles shared by the earth and the moon.

(To be clear, I’m in no way claiming that the neural model shows that astrology is true, or provides the specific equations of the proof. I’m just pointing out that, unlike any prior model of physics, the neural model provides a framework for astrological influences to be studied.)

Finally, and most importantly, the neural model resolves the mind / body paradox, fitting extremely well with Orr’s conception of the universe as a minded network of interconnected particles. After all, if our brains are conscious, and our brains are simply a biological neural net, why would a non-biological neural net not be conscious? Put another way: the structure of the universe is isomorphic with that of a brain. If our brains are conscious, then any arrangement of matter like a brain might also be conscious. Remember that the brain is not conscious as a single unit. The brain consists of multiple sub-consciousnesses, and the universe is the same way. Different kinds of consciousness are localized in different areas. 

This conception of the universe tells us that are no “inanimate” objects; we are all the same substance. We are connected and we learn and change together. This doesn’t mean that we are all “one”, or that distinctions don’t matter. It can take a lot of discernment to learn how we are connected, and how to navigate those connections, and how the pushes and pulls will pan out. And many connections are hidden from us and will surprise us. But we can be assured that the disparate parts of the net are not working paradoxically at cross-purposes. Instead, the fluid of spacetime ebbs, flows and learns, sometimes slow and sometimes quick, sometimes asleep and sometimes awake, in symphonic harmony.

For a hundred years, Western civilization has been living with these paradoxes in quantum physics. For the most part, we’ve been ignoring them, going about our lives as if they didn’t exist, waiting for the physicists to find a workaround. The mind / body separation has been a much more troubling issue, for much longer. It’s resulted in all kinds of rubbish, from immoral experiments on animals to supplications for the Rapture. It inspires hope in me to think that we might finally have discovered a demonstrable, experimentally verifiable framework for resolving these into a single elegant harmony.

If our culture grapples with the symphadox and its implications fully, it will lead to a true synthesis of physics and psychology, and re-ground our civilization in ways of thinking that encourage us to engage with the universe properly. Instead of conceiving ourselves separate, exalted, exceptional overlords of creation, we will perceive our part in an ecological community, and seek to be in compassionate, full relationship with every bee, rock, particle, and hurricane.

All beings by nature are Buddha
As ice by nature is water.

Hakuin’s Song of Meditation

The last few weeks I’ve been reading Murray Stein’s Jung’s Map of the Soul, and it’s been a bit of a revelation. For almost 20 years now I’ve been thinking and meditating on archetypes, shadows, visualization, and all this other Jungian stuff, but it has been difficult to find a good, coherent, logical presentation of Jungian theory, all laid out clearly. Stein’s book is excellent: it covers the material at a comfortable depth, without too much jargon. 

One of the revelations for me has been Stein’s explanation of the “Animum” archetype. (I call it “Animum” rather than anima or animus for reasons that will become clear.) In my original post on the anima, from back in 2006, I gave this definition:

An anima is a female archetype in the subconscious of a man. According to Jung, who coined the term, the anima is a composite of female figures that have influenced the man strongly — beginning with his mother, and later influenced by teachers, girlfriends, and so forth. It is a source of intuition, creativity and inspiration. It is a place where the man projects female aspects of himself that he may be uncomfortable with. Analogously, females have a male archetype, the animus. Less is known about the animus, probably because so many psychologists, Jungian and otherwise, have been male.

(Quick note: when I wrote this in 2006, I was clearly just summarizing information from Wikipedia. The current Wikipedia article contradicts this, saying explicitly that the anima is not a composite of individuals, but an expression of a universal archetype. Stein agrees with this assessment of Jung’s view.)

This definition was enough for me to work with at the time, but Stein gives a much more complete picture. He explains how Jung believed the Animum to be formed, and thereby shows exactly what it is, and what it does.

When a child begins constructing a social identity — a sense of self within a society — they create a Persona, a sort of social mask to wear. The Persona is a somewhat simplified / adjusted version of the self that can be presented to others, to help mediate social situations. I think of it as a bit like a social media identity: it may be basically a true reflection of the individual, but it is necessarily an incomplete picture, and it may be quite different from what’s really going on behind the curtain. In some cases people may be unaware that their Persona is different from their true selves, but most people know, I think, that the “self” they show at the office or at school is different from the “self” at home, and the “self” with the family is again perhaps different from the “self” one is conscious of when one lies awake at night staring at the ceiling.

But, for Jung, there is a second mask we wear, because in addition to the external world of people and objects, there is another world, the internal world of the subconscious. The self has to deal with both of these worlds, and it has a mask for each. Just as the self constructs the Persona to help mediate with the social world, the self constructs the Animum to mediate with the subconscious world. This is an automatic, intuitive process; and the self doesn’t have a lot of control over it, especially at first. 

In general, the self creates the Persona out of pieces of itself that it thinks will be helpful socially. For example, if the self likes cats, and it thinks that liking cats is socially advantageous, then liking cats will be part of the Persona. But whatever is left over — whatever is socially disadventageous, or is felt to be too dangerous or shameful to expose — gets shunted into the subconscious, where it is grafted onto the Animum. And thus, the Animum is created out of features of the self that do not match or fit with the Persona.

So, if the self’s Persona is male, then any unacknowledged feminine aspects of the self will be subconsciously added to the man’s Animum. A man will therefore generally have an Anima. Likewise, if the Persona is female, any unacknowledged masculine features will go to create a woman’s Animus.

Once a gendered Animum begins to take shape, as an Animus or Anima as the case may be, it then becomes connected with the gender archetypes in the universal subconscious. A gendered Animum is not a conglomerate of all the gendered people a person has encountered in life, but an admixture of (a) features of the self that do not fit the Persona and (b) features from the gendered archetypes in the universal subconscious.

It seems clear, then, that men and women have different kinds of Animum because of the sexual dimorphism of our society. (So I am calling it an “Animum”, using a common Latin neuter ending, to reflect its underlying gender-nonspecific nature.) If people did not experience strong social pressure, the Animum might not take on any gender-specific features. I’ll return to this matter in a moment.

Since the Animum is created instinctively, it is usually underdeveloped compared to the Persona. Oftentimes, the Animum is weak, helpless, sick, or incomplete. This can have bad consequences for the individual, because the Animum is always a powerful attractive force.

We are strongly drawn to the Animum, and strongly drawn to people who remind us of it, consciously or unconsciously. The Animum is, after all, an archetype of spiritual growth and wholeness. We feel instinctively that by approaching the Animum, by engaging with it, we can grow and learn. So, ironically, if you have not developed your Animum, you will find yourself drawn to people who are themselves weak, helpless, or lacking integrity. You may seek out people who are heavily dependent on you, or find yourself wanting to “fix” them. You might learn a lot from such a relationship, but of course you cannot really fix your relationship with your Animum by “fixing” other people. You have to work on yourself first.

To bring it back around to gender identity, then, it seems clear to me — although I am just guessing — that since the gender of the Animum is complementary to that of the Persona, it follows that if your Persona’s gender is undefined or unimportant — that is, if the fact that you are a particular gender isn’t that important to your social sense of self — then your Animum’s gender will also be undefined or unimportant. The Animum might appear as a different gender at different times, or might be androgynous; or it might even show up as a non-gender-specific animal or some other being.

I should emphasize, in case it’s not obvious, that your gender identity is something quite distinct from your gender expression and from your gender orientation. Your gender identity is part of your self (the gender you seem to yourself to be); your gender expression is part of your Persona (the face you show to the world); and your gender orientation is the gender you are sexually or romantically drawn to. So perhaps it’s most accurate to say that the gender of the Animum is likely to be the opposite of your gender expression, rather than your gender identity, because the Animum is the reflection of the Persona (i.e. the social expression of the self, not the true self). But, again, that’s just a guess.

It might also be worth noting that some people find themselves romantically or sexually attracted to their Animum. I believe this is perfectly natural, since, as I said above, the Animum is a symbol of growth and wholeness, and we are drawn to that. But I think it’s also perfectly natural to simply be drawn platonically (asexually, aromantically) to one’s Animum archetype. Since gender orientation is not inherently correlated with gender expression (Persona) or identity (self), gender orientation is not inherently correlated with the gender of the Animum. One may, for example, be a gay man with masculine gender expression and masculine gender orientation, and have an Anima to whom one is drawn platonically. And these factors are also completely separate from how well developed your Animum is. A gay man with a poorly developed female Anima may, for example, be drawn to have feminine friends who are dependent, or in need of “fixing”. Meanwhile, a lesbian woman with a well developed Animus may have strong relationships with male friends who are themselves well-rounded, healthy, and independent. And so forth.

When I first met my Anima, fifteen years ago, she was a thin, frail woman, living in a shack in the midst of a field of brown dry grasses. Nevertheless she was a tremendous source of strength and growth, because the Animum is the self’s door to the subconscious world (just as the Persona is the door to the social world). For example, my Anima offered to do Tarot readings for me, and, weak as she was, she channeled spirits and introduced me to other guides who could help us both. As I worked with her, I strengthened her in visualization meditation, channeling energy to her, and giving her a larger house, better inner landscape “territory”, and whatever else she expressed a need for.

Her hair is now thick and red, rather than thin and blond, and she is powerfully built; and she is an excellent seafarer and equestrian. She lives in a castle by the Sea of Fire. The castle rises from the midst of a small village of traders and smiths, nestled in thick forests. There are high turrets and towers with an excellent view of the ocean, and a library, workshop, attendants, and advisors. Essentially, she rules a small kingdom. On my inner journeys she will sometimes accompany me, although, for reasons I do not entirely understand, if she travels too far from her kingdom she changes shape — often into a bird, animal, or earth spirit.

Sometimes she is not at home, and I can’t find her. At these times she is usually sailing the Sea of Fire — exploring, bringing back treasures and stories from the deeper realms of the unconscious. She brings me so many ideas I can barely keep track of them all. I am, and will remain, her loyal friend and ally, as she is mine: a bridge between my known self and the sea of the unknown psyche.

“In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” — John 1:1-5

And in Greek

The language of the Bible is remarkably direct and accessible. John is talking about great ineffable mysteries — things perhaps beyond the comprehension of the human mind — and yet he speaks simply, plainly, as one might to a child. Actually, even more plainly than that: the language of the Bible, even in the New Testament’s original Greek, is extraordinarily simple and unadorned, compared to the standards of the language as a whole.

To take one very evident example: the Bible uses “and” a lot. English (and Greek) have any number of conjunctions that might serve: “because”, “since”, “while”, “however”, etc. In general usage, writers and speakers tend to vary the conjunctions they use, thus avoiding heavy-handed repetition and a simplistic style — but also to link their ideas and lead the reader from thought to thought, showing how things fit together. The Bible doesn’t generally do this.

The effect of this is that most Biblical passages present a series of assertions without saying how they fit together. They don’t make an argument; they don’t build up a complex idea; they simply list facts. This makes things easy, in a sense, because the reader doesn’t have to follow an argument, or compare statements, or hold multiple ideas in their head at once. Furthermore, if the reader wants to build an argument, or construct a complex idea, the text allows them to do so; it permits, in fact, many possible interpretations. It may be, for example, that in the beginning was the Word because the Word was with God, since the Word was God; or perhaps in the beginning was the Word for the Word was with God, but the Word was God; or in the beginning was the Word despite the Word being with God, yet the Word was God; etc.

And in Hebrew, And in English

Did the Biblical authors intend their text to be so simplistic, easy to read, and ambiguous? Probably not. This odd use of ‘and’ actually appears in the Old Testament as well, but there, it’s a lot less out of place: as it happens, ancient Hebrew had very few conjunctions in the language. A writer of Hebrew didn’t have much choice other than to use waw, which may be translated as “because”, “since”, “while”, “for”, “yet”, etc. …but is usually simply given as “and”.

And when Jesus spoke (in Aramaic, a close relative of Hebrew), he faced the same situation. Thus when the Greek New Testament was produced, the authors were (a) working with Jesus’s words, (b) trying to join their work to the established Hebraic Old Testament, (c) may have been translating into Greek from Aramaic original texts, and (d) were probably Aramaic speakers themselves — and all these sources included lots of waw’s; meaning that they frequently used the Greek word for “and” (kai) instead of availing themselves of Greek’s full set of conjunctions.

And since the Greek New Testament was interpreted as God’s word, God’s word was kai — strictly translated as et in the Latin Vulgate, und in Luther’s German translation, and and in the King James.

The upshot of Hebrew’s conjunctive paucity and its literal translations was that the holy canon of Christianity was simplistic, easy to read, and ambiguous. The New Testament was a single (relatively) short text, but it still admitted of many possible interpretations. For a while the churches tightly controlled those interpretations, partly by forbidding the Bible to be translated out of Latin and Greek; but once translations became available, and people began to see many possible ways of reading the text, sects multiplied endlessly.

Interestingly, the Christian Bible also admits of no interpretation. That is to say, if someone wants to simply read the list of conjoined assertions without trying to see how they fit together, and just take them as they are, on faith, they can. For many, in fact, reasoned argument is seen as antithetical to religion; rational argumentation is a slippery thing that can easily lead one astray from the unadorned Word of God, or from the immediacy and certainty of direct experience with the divine.

And in Reason, And in Religion

The role of reason in religion is one of those ambiguities that Christians have been arguing and thinking about since the beginning. Augustine believed that reason was fine, as long as it didn’t contradict things known through revelation. Aquinas, on the other hand, believed that if one could simply reason long and hard enough, one would find no contradiction between revelation and reason; and he is famous for his attempts to rationally prove the existence of God.

Meanwhile, other Christians argued that reason was, at best, a distraction, and at worst, a temptation to evil. Tertullian said “I believe because it is absurd”; Luther distrusted reason to do anything more than shed light on our own ignorance; Locke believed that faith was “above reason” and it ruled matters where reason could not go; and Kierkegaard felt that faith required a submission of the intellect, hostile to it and forever beyond it.

These attitudes contrast starkly with the intensely rational stances held by the Stoic pagans of Greece and Rome, as well as (for example) the Buddhists. The Stoics believed strongly in natural law and reason, and its sway over the world and humanity. And Buddhism’s core tenets read like a logical argument: There is suffering in the world; suffering arises from attachment; therefore, to remove suffering, remove attachment.

Today the situation is no closer to resolution: the war between faith and reason is recast as religion versus science, and the battles are fought in the churchyards and schoolrooms. Some people see reason and science as the amoral midwives of the modern world, with its inhuman technology and unspeakable horrors of war, and reject them unconditionally; while others point to all the wars caused by conflicts over faith and religion, and see reason and science as our only hope for species survival.

And in Druidism

Pagans in general hold a diversity of views about reason and science. Most of them hold the Earth to be tremendously holy, and it is hard to see technology’s rape of the planet without holding a grudge toward the science and reasoning driving it. Nevertheless, most pagans I know are comfortable with science and its tenets and are happy to believe in evolution, Odin, general relativity, and the Horned God, all at once.

The ancient druids were the lorekeepers of Celtic society, praised by the Greeks for their knowledge of history, culture, astronomy, and the like; and the druids of the revival period (the 17-1800s) carried on this tradition — most were experts in language, anthropology, religious studies, and history, as well as more esoteric arts.

Different modern druids will give you different perspectives on rationality, though I think most would agree that it is essential to the balanced spirit. After all, reason is as much a part of being human as sleeping, breathing, and eating; it is a unique gift not lightly to be cast aside. But I think most of them would also agree that reason alone will not get you all the way to the top of the mountain.

For myself, I am heavily influenced by Zen philosophy, which makes use of reason, but not in the usual way.

And in Zen

Zen teaches that the highest levels of enlightenment cannot be apprehended by reason; it is beyond the capacity for rational thought. But that doesn’t mean rational thought should be abandoned. On the contrary, the logical mind is an essential tool in the search for ultimate meaning.

The Zen Master presents the pupil with a koan: a logical puzzle. Among the most famous are “What is the sound of one hand, clapping?”, or “What was your face before you were born?”, but I prefer the simpler and less-known “Who are you?” If the student answers a name, like “John Smith”, the Master then asks, “Who is John Smith?” If the student says something like, “It’s me, this person standing before you,” the Master asks, “But who is it standing before me?” The student is tasked to sit in meditation and ponder the question — who am I, when all attributes and predicates are stripped away? The logical mind loops and jumps, twists and tangles…

But koans do not have answers. Their purpose is to puzzle, to force the student to exercise the mind, to reach new insights about identity and reality. Eventually the logic, relentlessly applied, begins to break the false attachments and illusions of the world, and the student starts to ascend to the higher levels of enlightenment. And at last, logic will fail, and enlightenment will be attained.

But let me be clear: koans are not the only tools available; this can be done with any ambiguous or unclear proposition — a Tarot card, a song lyric, a chance word heard on the subway. A verse from the Bible.

Dogma and Lemma

The irony, then, is that the road to enlightenment can indeed be, and has been, walked by people contemplating the Bible’s oddly phrased, simplistic, and disjointed attestations, precisely because they are odd, simplistic, and disjointed. The less sense a Bible verse makes, the more like a koan it is, and the more wisdom can be wrung from it by the dedicated student. The most profound mystic truths have been inferred from seeming-nonsense such as “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” Even the maddest Zen Masters never exhorted their followers to eat them (to my knowledge — I wouldn’t put it past them). But this is the foundation of some of the deepest Christian mysteries — and its meaning is a source of ferocious contention between various Christian sects.

This, then, is the last piece of advice Zen offers regarding reason: don’t elevate lemma to dogma. Feel free to use whatever koans or Bible verses you like, and reason about them freely, but the final truth is beyond reason. Reason is a boat that can take you to the shore of enlightenment, but you have to step onto the shore yourself. Do not mistake your reasoned conclusions for eternal truths. To do so would be to mistake the finger for the moon.

Many thanks to Alison and Kate for hosting the Soul Writing workshop which gave rise to this poem last night. 

Maybe you’ve noticed the same thing in your own life. I don’t mean to be depressing here… but how many times have you failed to change a habit, or break an addiction? How many of your jobs have fallen through? How many times have you had to move away from your home? How many pets have you lost? How many of your friendships and relationships have failed, or faded away in distance or time? How many people you’ve loved are gone forever?

Almost all of us have tragic answers to those questions. The things we love in our lives always end; the patterns we love endlessly unravel.

In nature, things unravel, too. But there, something else is always raveling up to take its place. Trees die, but their tall standing snags — monuments to themselves — are colonized by armies of insects, fungi, and other critters, which in turn become feasts for woodpeckers and other animals. And when the snags finally fall, they become nurse logs for the next generation of trees, nourishing a richer, more diverse forest.

A tree’s death is a catastrophe, but it’s also what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe: a sort of deus ex machina, except that instead of a god swooping in from on high at the last minute to save everything, it’s a sudden unexpected change in fortune that’s consistent with the established framework of the milieu. It’s a miraculous redemption that arises inevitably from the world itself.

Oftentimes, a eucatastrophe is the result of the efforts of many, many individuals (humans, bugs, plants… doesn’t matter), each working for their own benefit or the benefit of their local community. Individually, each effort is barely noticeable, but when they’re added up, profound changes take place. Since these small efforts are self-directed, it can be extremely difficult to see what the final aggregate result will be, and whether it will, in the end, be good or bad.

Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. – Elrond, in the Fellowship of the Ring

So perhaps things look like they’re unraveling simply because we don’t have the complete picture. We as a species are young, and our vision is limited. We sometimes glimpse things that might happen, but for the most part, we only see the present and the past. It’s no wonder that most of what we see seems to be dying or dead.

The core of the problem, really, is that we can so rarely see patterns before they emerge. And so the world seems to be falling into disorder, and our lives seem to be full of endings, with precious few new beginnings.

It is an illusion, though. A new order is rising up, but we can’t see it. This is why eucatastrophes are surprising.

Oftentimes we can see the re-raveling only in hindsight. Human history is littered with dire disasters and intractable problems: the ‘population bomb’, the end of oil, war, the nuclear holocaust, monarchy, illiteracy, slavery… But it’s an undeniable fact that most of these problems have gotten better over the last few hundred years. Not solved — not by a long shot; even one person enslaved is a terrible tragedy. But better. Most problems, like human rights violations and non-renewable energy, have been improved through long years of thankless toil. Many others, like slavery in the US, cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Some, like the falling rates of crime and warfare worldwide, have just been slowly eroding away, though no one really knows why. And a few, like the hegemonic Soviet Union, have ended in a completely unexpected eucatastrophe.

This happens in one’s own life as well. I’ve left behind friends in six different cities, lost three jobs, lost a marriage… Many of these changes left me wondering whether everything I’d worked and struggled for was gone forever. But of course, I made friends in the seventh city, scored that fourth job, and found a true soul partner. After 40+ years of life I’m finally starting to glimpse the larger tapestry sometimes. There are still problems and tragedies I struggle with, but someday — sooner, perhaps, than I can see — they will pass, too.

Seeing the Raveling

How can we get better at seeing patterns before they’re fully formed?

First, practice. Look for the raveling. Too often we focus only on what is going wrong, or what we fear will go wrong. This is instinctive. As embodied beings, it’s natural to be wary, to watch for danger. But take time to look for what is going right, or what might go right, and focus on that as well. The old saying is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst; and both parts of that are important.

Also, study history. Look at how eucatastrophes happened. Most people were surprised when the Soviet Union collapsed, when monarchies ended, and so on — but the writing was on the wall for decades. What writing is on the wall now?

Trust your gut. Your conscious mind has access to only a small part of your complete consciousness. Your subconscious is always looking for patterns, and usually sees the big changes coming. Meditation, and talking to guides, can help.

And finally, have some faith. One of the things I struggle with personally, as a Druid, is what Alison calls the ‘Problem of Justice’. Just as Christians wonder why God permits evil in the world, we who follow a nature-based spirituality wonder what is natural and what is unnatural, what is right and wrong, what is evil and what is good. When you see an oil spill or a huge parking lot and you feel a visceral revulsion or sorrow, your body is telling you that it is unnatural, wrong, evil — especially when compared with a forest or pristine river. But obviously humans are part of the natural world, and what we do is natural; so in a sense, an oil spill or parking lot is natural too. So why are we always tearing things down, causing mass extinctions, and fouling the waters? How can these things be “natural”, how can they be “good”?

And it’s not just humanity. When beavers flood a forest, felling and drowning dozens of trees, or when wolves disembowel an encroaching coyote and defecate around its body as a warning to the others, we have the same problem:

Many earth-centered spiritualities look to the relationships, patterns and laws of nature for insight into the ways we might live a just and ethical life — yet, within nature are myriad examples of suffering, destruction, violence, injustice, even cruelty and maliciousness… How should we respond to them? — Alison Leigh Lilly

The resolution of these paradoxes (both the Druid paradox and the Christian one) may, in part, lie in our limited human understanding. Maybe we just can’t yet see how the evils of the world will be woven into the larger pattern of beauty. In nature, always, there is a subtle, organic order at work. Problems turn out to be blessings; tragedies plant the seeds of triumphs. Even in truly awful situations — such as a forest fire — there is a hidden raveling. Underbrush is cleared out, soil is renewed, seeds are germinated, diversity is increased, and diseases are cleared away. Forests periodically burn as naturally as the cycle of the seasons. Maybe what we see today as injustice is part of a great invisible cycle.

It can be hard to have faith, to believe in rebirth, when all you can see is death. But something wonderful is being born, right now. Study, sit in silence, and wait, and you will see it.

I say “connecting with” an object instead of “consecrating” because in our tradition, all things are sacred. We cannot imbue an object with holiness. It is already holy. What we can do is recognize the sacredness of the object, and enter into relationship with it (or deepen our existing relationship). We do this by sitting with the object, touching it, and listening for its voice in the Song of the World.

I wrote a meditation to guide this process, and it seemed to go well, so here it is in full:

Animist Consecration Meditation

Sit and relax. Take a deep breath… and release. As you breathe out, let all your tension melt away. Relax your shoulders, relax your neck, relax your eyes. Take another deep breath… and release. Imagine that a wave of warm golden light is slowly rising in your body, starting in your feet, rising up through your legs, up into your torso. The warm golden light fills your body, down your arms and into your fingers, up to the top of your head… Let your body sink, growing heavier. Your arms and legs have become heavy and settle comfortably.

Now turn your attention gently to the object in your hands. Feel its weight there. Imagine that, like your body, it is becoming heavier. Feeling its weight and heft pressing in your hands helps you relax further. … Feel its texture. Is it hard? Soft? Smooth? How does it respond when you apply gentle pressure? … Feel the temperature of the object in your hands. Perhaps it has responded to the warmth of your body, becoming warmer as you’ve been holding it.

Think about history of the object. Where did it come from? How did it come into this room? How did it come into your possession? Do you know who else has held this object, if anyone else ever has? Was it crafted by a person, or by a machine, or is it completely natural? How long ago was it made? Where did the materials of the object come from? From an animal? A plant? If so, what do you know about those living beings, and the lives they led? Did they live nearby, experiencing the same summers and winters and rains as ourselves? Or did they live far away, in a distant land, under different stars? Has it been under the sea? Did it come from the earth, crafted from stone or crystal, formed millions of years ago?

Imagine what it must have been like to experience the history of this object — from the time of its making down to the present day. Think about what it must be like to be the object, now, today, surrounded by us in this warm and sacred space, being held and warmed by your hands.

Feel the warmth of the object again. The object has responded to the heat in your hands. The heat in the object is nothing more nor less than vibration; its atoms and molecules have begun to vibrate along with the atoms and molecules of your hand. If your ears were sensitive enough, you would be able to hear the vibration of the object in the air. Hold it tightly and feel the warmth. If it were making an audible sound, what would it be? Would it be high-pitched, or low? Would it be a single constant tone, or a chord of notes? A monotone, or a tune? …

Hear that sound in your mind. Focus on it.

Now, in a moment, when you are ready and comfortable, respond to the song of the object, in whatever way feels right. Maybe you want to hum along with it, or provide a bass or counterpoint. Maybe what is called from you is a chant, or a whisper. Sit with your object, listen to it, and respond. Sing the song of the world with your object.

She was right. I have to say it is still one of the most harrowing and hair-raising things I’ve ever read. It’s a strange combination of the creepiest sort of fantastic horror — the kind you love to hear around a campfire — alongside the reality of homelessness and abject poverty — more mundane maybe, but no less horrible.

It’s a long article, so don’t feel compelled to jump right over and read it immediately, but it is amazing, poignant, and harrowing, and should be read.  The children have collectively created a mythology that is rich, colorful, and choked with fear and desperation.  For someone such as myself, who believes in various overlapping mythological systems, it raises all sorts of difficult and vital issues.  Are the children really tapping into spiritual truths?  Are they actually being contacted by spirits, as they claim?  If so, why is their vision so full of fear and doom, when the visions of so many other spiritual people have so much light and joy?

A Mythology of Fear

Edwards begins with a story told by an older child at the Salvation Army’s shelter on NW 38th street. Andre is telling an audience of younger children that angels eat neon light so that they can fly. They particularly love the neon lights of the NationsBank building; and they gather there at night to plan their battle strategies against the powers of darkness. The angels must fight because the world is at war; and it’s a war fought street by street, house by house, child by child. Andre tells the children that they have to learn how to fight, how to live — and they have to learn the secret stories.

God cannot protect them, because God has already been defeated. On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an attack by an army of demons. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell.

The angels are losing.  The evidence of transcendent evil is everywhere for these children, in a world where drugs and gangs and violence and gunfire repeatedly tear their fragile lives apart. Even the angels themselves are essentially homeless, since Heaven has been lost to Satan.

Somewhere in the jungles beyond Miami is a safe, if temporary, refuge, a place guarded by giant crocodiles, where souls can go to rest for a while.  But the dead can only enter it if a fresh green palm leaf is dropped on their graves.

The demons invading our world are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear. One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). Her eyes are empty sockets that cry blood or black tears, and if you see her, with her robes blowing about without wind, and her red rosaries clicking, you know she has marked you for death.  She enters the hearts of friends and family and turns them into deadly enemies.  If you dare, smear a mirror with ocean water, and stare at it in the dark as you chant her name, and she will come.  The stories say that she killed her own child, and has made a pact with the devil to kill all human children.  The stories say even more horrible things, but I will not repeat them here.

The homeless children’s chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name,” says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. “If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: ‘Hold on.'”

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods his head in affirmation. “I’ve seen her,” he murmurs. A rustle of whispered Me toos ripples through the small circle of initiates.

Edwards points out that, as dark as this vision is, it helps the children, because it’s a way that they can understand why their lives are so horrible, and why it seems as though the adults in their lives — the ones who are supposed to be taking care of them — either don’t care, or are powerless to help. Even if its the wrong explanation, it’s better than no explanation. And because the children can act to help the angels, their lives — and deaths — are given meaning.

One child whose life has been touched by the Blue Angel is Maria:

She first appeared to Maria at the deserted Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, which Maria calls “the pink haunted house.” A fierce storm was pounding Miami that night. Other homeless people who had broken in milled about the building’s interior, illuminated only by lightning. Her father was drunk. Her mother tried to stop him from eating the family’s last food: a box of saltines. “He kept hitting her and the crazy people started laughing. When I try to help her, he hit me here” — Maria points to her forehead. “I tried to sleep so my head and stomach would stop hurting, but they kept hurting.” A blast of wind and rain shattered a window. “I was so scared. I pray out loud: Please, God, don’t punish me no more!”

An older boy curled up nearby on a scrap of towel tried to soothe her. “Hurricanes ain’t God,” he said gently. “It’s Blue Lady bringing rain for the flowers.” When Maria awoke late in the night, she saw the angel with pale blue skin, blue eyes, and dark hair standing by the broken window. Her arms dripped with pink, gold, and white flowers. “She smiled,” Maria says, her dark eyes wide with amazement. “My head was hurting, but she touched it and her hand was cool like ice. She say she’s my friend always. That’s why she learned me the hard song.” The song is complex and strange for such a young child; its theme is the mystery of destiny and will. When Maria heard a church choir sing it, she loved it, but the words were too complicated. “Then the Blue Lady sang it to me,” she recalls. “She said it’ll help me grow up good, not like daddy.”

Maria agreed to sing some of the song: “If you believe within your heart you’ll know/that no one can change the path that you must go./ Believe what you feel and you’ll know you’re right because/when love finally comes around, you can say it’s yours./ Believe you can change what you see!/ Believe you can act, not just feel!/You have a brain!/You have a heart!/You have the courage to last your life!/Please believe in yourself as I believe in you!”

“Even if my mom say we sleep in the bus station when we leave the shelter, Blue Lady will find us. She’s seen my face.”

Stories For Children

How do the children know these things?  Some of the stories are obviously derived from urban legends found in other places.  The basics of the Bloody Mary story are known to children throughout America and Europe, especially among girls, although her name is variously Mary Worth or Worthy, Mary Worthington, or Hell Mary, and she is not always viewed as evil.  The Bloody Mary legend appears to have been merged with the La Llorona legend of Latin America, a woman crying for her children, whom she drowned.  (If you want to be horrified a dozen times over, look at the Wikipedia articles on these urban legends.)  As for the Blue Lady, she may have derived from Yemana (or Yemaya or Imanja or Big Mama Wati), a compassionate blue-robed Santeria ocean goddess.

But none of this explains the children who have seen and spoken to these spirits, and whose lives have been touched — for good and for bad — by them.  They do not explain Maria and her song.  They do not explain the angels and dead relatives that come to the children and give them updates on how the War is going.  They do not explain the child haunted nightly by the ghost of his father until he managed to place fresh leaves on his grave.  They do not explain the gang that called on Bloody Mary to help them protect one of their members from justice… and how she incited them to kill him themselves.

These stories have real power — powers of meaning-making equal to that of many mature religions; powers of life and death, light and darkness. How, then, can they be so dark? So horrible, so hopeless?

Those of us who pray to God know full well that He has not abandoned us.  Those of us who pray to pantheons have experienced firsthand the richness of the spirit world, the cycles of growth and retreat, and the supreme power of Light over Dark (if Dark is acknowledged to be anything other than an illusion!).  How can the children be so clearly connected to the spirit world, and yet draw from it so much fear and horror?

The Fascination of Horror

Have you stood in front of a dark mirror and called out her name?  Most of us have.  Anyone who hears this story is bound to be horrified, but also intrigued and curious…  Would it work?  Would she really come?  What would it be like?  Am I brave enough to do it — and if I am, and she appears, am I brave enough to do anything other than scream?

The excitment and delight and thrill of a really good scare — this is nearly universal among us.  But why? Lynda says:

Folklorists were so mystified by Bloody Mary, and the common element of using a mirror to conjure her, that they consulted medical literature for clues. Bill Ellis, a folklorist and professor of American studies at Penn State University, puzzled over a 1968 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease article describing an experiment testing the theory that schizophrenics are prone to see hallucinations in reflected surfaces. The research showed that the control group of nonpsychotic people reported seeing vague, horrible faces in a mirror after staring at it for twenty minutes in a dim room. But that optical trick the brain plays was just a partial explanation for the children’s legend.

“Whenever you ask children where they first heard one of their myths, you get answers that are impossible clues: ‘A friend’s friend read it in a paper; a third cousin told me,'” says Ellis, an authority on children’s folklore, particularly that concerning the supernatural. As president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, he’s become an expert on polygenesis — the appearance of a story in multiple places at the same time.  “When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you’ve hit the ultimate non sequitur.”

Regardless of whether Bloody Mary is real, any attempt to contact her or summon her is at best an act of idiocy, at worst a particularly unpleasant way to commit suicide.  What is it that pulls us to her?  What is the source of the fascination?

Creeping Dread

In meditation, I’ve visited with many spirits, guides, and gods, including my anima, who had this to say.

First, yes, Bloody Mary is real, and so are a whole host of other evil spirits.  But in fact they are not very powerful.  In and of themselves, most of them can be banished by sunlight on daisies.  What really gives them power over us is our own fear and ignorance.  They cannot affect us unless our fear drives us down to a low enough “vibration” that they can reach us.  Bloody Mary will not appear in the mirror unless you are already ridiculously frightened — the fear alone will give her the strength to take on a visible form.  She really does feed on fear, in a very literal way; and lack of fear will render her powerless.

So what is the source of the fascination?

First, understand that we are immortal souls; we may be damaged or blocked for a while, but we cannot be destroyed.  Second, remember that it is by facing our fears that we grow and mature.  Therefore, what could be more natural than a fascination — an attraction — to danger and adventure?  Danger is an invitation to growth; fascination with it is healthy.

But for these homeless children, who have fear and desperation as constant companions, and have few comforts in life, Bloody Mary is a power to be avoided at all costs.

I experienced the fascination of horror myself while I was researching this article.  When I was younger, I would have dismissed the Bloody Mary legend as balderdash, but now I’m a little older and wiser and I know what spirits can do.  I found myself intensely curious about this story, and read many different versions of it, and found lots of examples of people online who had seen her.

Clever me — I was doing this research in the middle of the night.  I was not in a room with a mirror, but of course all the windows around me had been turned into mirrors by the darkness of night behind them.  I slowly, inexorably, began to freak out.  I was sure I felt a not-too-friendly presence in the room with me, and wondered if I had been summoning Bloody Mary — or something equally unpleasant — with my fascination and dread.

I fought hard to dispel the fear.  I saw nothing.  But for the first time in over twenty-five years, I had to go to sleep with the lights on.

Mind and body seem so different that it’s almost as if they belong to separate worlds entirely. No doubt this is why it’s been so easy for so many people to believe in a ‘soul’, a mind that can be separated from the body and continue its life, in its inner world, long after the body has died — or even enter another body entirely. This despite the fact that the mind is obviously affected by physical events: it becomes sluggish and unfocused when the body is tired or sick, and it can lose memory or skills or even suffer a change of personality if the brain is injured or chemically affected.

Over time, two main camps have formed around this paradox. The first, as I’ve mentioned, believe that the soul or mind is separate from the physical body, and is fundamentally made of a different kind of stuff; and when the body dies, it moves on to some other realm, or finds another body. The second camp believes that the body creates the ‘mind’, perhaps analogously to the way a computer executes instructions in a computer program, or the way a flautist plays a melody. The mind — the ‘inner world’ — is generated by the brain and will come to an end when the brain stops working, just as a melody stops when the flautist puts down the instrument.

In ‘The Wakeful World’, Emma Restall Orr tackles this paradox, and (1) shows that both the solutions above are lacking in serious ways, (2) points out a third solution — indeed, a multitude of other solutions, which have been suggested at one time or another over the past few thousand years, and (3) offers her own take on the problem. In this article I’m mainly going to skip over (1) and (2), since there’s no way I could do Orr’s treatment justice, and instead briefly (and necessarily crudely) describe some aspects of (3) and look at some things that follow from it. In particular, Orr’s take not only leads to the idea that rocks think, but answers why human brains think differently from rocks, and gives a new view of the place of the human experience in the ecology of mind.

Inspired World

So what is Orr’s take? There’s no way to describe it briefly and do it justice, but for the purposes of this article, part of Orr’s view can be summarized in this nutshell:

• There’s not just one kind of consciousness. There’s normal waking consciousness, the run-of-the-mill I-think-therefore-I-am consciousness, but there’s also dreaming consciousness, woolgathering consciousness, drunken stupor consciousness, and so on. There’s consciousness when you’re so absorbed in a movie or a task that you’re not self-aware at all, at least in the literal sense of ‘being aware of the self’. And there’s perceptive consciousness, which is simply perception, without any differentiation of perceiver and percept. It’s all mind.

• There is no mind-body split. It’s not that mind is some kind of ghost or spirit that inhabits dead matter. Mind is a property of the world, just as naturally and inevitably as wetness is a property of water. Mind is world, and every part of the world is minded, in some way or another. Naturally, different parts of the world have different kinds of consciousness at different times, but it is always and everywhere there. There is something it is like to be an electron.

One concept she uses in particular is the “lit mind”: “The self which is wide awake to the experience of the moment, consciously aware of the sensation of being, thinking about and considering the data of its world, this is the lit conscious, the lit mind.” It’s a useful concept, because it immediately implies the “unlit” or “dark” mind — dark in the sense that, while it is real, it is imperceptible to the lit mind. The dark mind is where dream images arise and unbidden urges take root, but it is also the source of inspiration, intuition, and empathy. “The mind,” she says, “is a vast and ancient wood, the density of its canopy allowing sunlight only now and then to reach through and touch the spiders and mushrooms in the leaf mould of the forest floor. This is who we are… From the fleeting moments of the lit mind where conscious awareness allows the thinking self to consider its context of being, a moment’s light softly fades into the shadows. Yet even as these shadows thicken with a growing darkness, this is still the mind.”

The image is compelling — a strong metaphor, and a much better approximation of reality than the crude mind vs. body paradox. Mind is not all light, and body is not all dark; there is brightness, and darkness, and shades of grey, but it is all nevertheless the same wood.

But a strong metaphor is not a theory. Even a philosophical treatise is not a theory, or even a theorem. To move from metaphor towards concreteness, questions have to be answered. For example, why is so much of mind ‘dark’? Why is the lit part so narrow and focused? What creates the light, and what sustains it, and what causes it to fade away? And what determines where the light falls? Does a rock have a lit mind? And if not, why not?

Our Hive Minds

Neuroscientists are starting to see how the structure of the brain gives rise to properties of the mind. Things that seem to be going on in just our own inner world can be explained by looking at how the axons and dendrites in our physical brains act. This is an essential point, so let me give an example.

Experiments have shown that if an article on a web site ends with the word “Goodbye!”, people are (slightly) more likely to buy something from the web site. The effect disappears if the word is replaced with “See you!”, “So long!” or “Farewell!” Why? Before you answer, consider this apparently unrelated fact: experiments have also shown that people take (slightly) longer to understand written or spoken utterances if they contain a large number of homophones (i.e. words that sound the same). This difference is on the order of milliseconds, but happens even if people are not conscious of the homophone as they read or listen.

The reason for both of these strange effects is that the brain is a network of massively interconnected and interlocking neurons, and various sub-groups of these neurons are trained to work together to solve particular tasks. When the brain takes a word in through sound or vision, all these different groups start working in parallel to interpret it. There is a small group of neurons that knows about the word “bye”, and another network that knows about the word “buy”. When those sounds are heard, both groups of neurons fire, and send signals to the rest of the linguistic neurons about their interpretation. It’s up to the rest of the system — the neurons that know about syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the context — to decide which word is right, and ignore the other. This happens so quickly that you don’t even realize that both homophones were, briefly, both under consideration. But it does slow you down enough for experimenters to detect the difference.

And when you see the word “Goodbye!”, even though it’s quite clearly not at all related to the word “buy”, the neurons in your head associated with “buy” nevertheless get excited, because that’s all they know about. And because those neurons fire, everything else in your brain associated with buying things is also slightly more active. And that means, on average, you’re slightly more inclined to actually buy something from the web site.

It’s quite literally like a hive of bees. When bees are looking for a new place to build a hive, they send out explorers to check out various locations, and when they return, they do a special dance to communicate about the location to the rest of the hive (where it is, what it’s like, how strongly the bee feels about it, etc.). Spectator bees begin to dance along with whichever explorer bee they agree with. Eventually the whole hive is dancing; but a bee may change the way it’s dancing depending on how many other bees around it are dancing the same way. Gradually, through a roughly democratic process, they all find themselves dancing the same dance. And a new hive location is chosen.

The mind, in other words, is not a single monolithic black box that has one thought at a time. It’s a thick underbrush of competing thoughts, only some of which make it into the ‘lit mind’. And this thick underbrush of competing patterns is well-described by the interconnected structure of the brain’s neurons.

Digging In the Undergrowth

Let’s take a moment to look more closely at this structure. Each neuron has many strands (dendrites) allowing them to receive signals from other neurons. But it has just one output strand, the axon; and while that axon may be linked to many other neurons, the neuron sends exactly one signal at a time, to all of them at once. A neuron is dormant until it receives a strong enough signal through its input strands, at which point it fires.

People like to wax poetic about the incredible complexity of the brain, but as is evident, the most basic structures can be laid out in a paragraph or so. A rock about the same size of the brain has a much more complex and intricate structure than the neurons of a brain. A three-pound human brain has about one hundred billion neurons; a three-pound rock has about five hundred trillion trillion atoms, and each atom is part of a molecule which may have any number of connections to other molecules. Molecules aren’t connected by strands, but they do touch each other, and they send ‘signals’ in the form of chemical exchange, electrical current, and even (very slightly) gravitational attraction. They may be strictly laid out in rows, as in crystals, or allowed to come together however they like, as in igneous rock.

Now of course it’s true that I’m not making a strictly fair comparison when I equate neurons and dendrites with molecules and electrical current. Brains are also made of molecules, and to a first approximation, a three-pound brain has about the same number of atoms as a three-pound rock. And I’m not saying that the non-neural parts of the brain — the white matter and so on — isn’t minded, just as a rock is minded. But the neurons of a brain make up a network in their own right, and it’s that simpler network that I’m interested in, because it’s that which gives rise to the lit mind.

Why You Don’t Have Rocks For Brains

So if rocks are actually more complex than brains, why do we have brains in our skulls instead of rocks? Why are brains associated with the lit mind? Why is your brain “smarter” than a rock?

There are three crucial properties that rocks lack:

• The very simplicity of neural structure is essential. Simplicity allows focus, as I’ll show in a moment.

• Brains are protected, almost completely surrounded on all sides by a hard skull and layers of cushions and fat that keeps out sound, shocks, electrical influences, etc. The inputs that brains do receive are very limited and constrained: a stream of photons from the eyes, acoustic signals from the ears, smell, taste, touch… A rock, on the other hand, is exposed on all surfaces equally.

• Neural nets are also malleable, but not overly so. It is more malleable than a rock, because if it receives input, it can more easily adjust its internal structure in response. It’s less malleable than a pool of water, which changes its internal structure dramatically at the slightest touch.

Taking these three properties together, it makes sense that a brain would give rise to a tightly focused consciousness. The malleability of the internal structure means that it responds and changes well to its input, learning how to filter and sift the input so as to home in quickly on the thoughts and decisions that give it the best results. The simplicity of the network makes it speedily trained, and it learns a smaller number of categories, filtering out everything it deems irrelevant.  Similarly, if a network receives little input, it will naturally have not much else to think about, and its focus will be tight.

This is not quite the same as Kant’s notion of finitude — the idea that we are continually swamped in a sea of sensory input, and the mind filters most of it out, discarding it as irrelevant to our daily lives. We know, for example, that there is air in the room, but it’s not something our conscious minds think about every moment. That’s true, but it’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m saying that, as vast as the sea of sensory input is, it’s miniscule compared to the sensory input available to a rock. Our brains sit in the dark, except for tiny threads of photons coming in through the eye’s pupils; and in silence, except for the trickle of electrical current from the vibrations of the inner ear; and in constant warmth, except for the signals coming from the skin up through the brain stem. But the rock’s whole surface is exposed to all the elements.

In other words, brains are minded in a lit way because they’re protected from most of the information out there in the world; and what they do get, they rigorously filter so that they can ignore irrelevant details and focus on what’s important (to them). It’s helpful to think of the brain, not as a device for discovery, invention, or logical thought, but for deciding what’s noise, and filtering it out. In much the same way that a black and white photo allows you to see more details, shapes, and textures than a color one, filtering out irrelevant information allows the brain to ‘see’ the remainder more clearly.

And this means that a brain with even more tightly constrained inputs, simpler structure, and more malleability will have a tighter focus, a more brightly lit mind, than a human brain. This doesn’t mean the more brightly lit mind will be “smarter” than a human brain (whatever “smarter” means); it means it will be more efficient at finding the minimum correct patterns and categories for its organism to successfully navigate the world. An ant has a very focused mind — perfectly focused for navigating an ant’s world, too focused for navigating a human world. And a human brain navigating an ant’s world would quickly be unable to stop its attention from wandering, grow bored, lose track of its tasks, etc. Each mind is lit appropriately at a level set by evolution.

This lit mind — this focus — is delicate, though, and can be easily lost; and if that happens, the lit mind begins to shade into the dark.

• If the brain gets too much input too fast — especially input that isn’t easily classified according to the brain’s belief system — it can find itself overwhelmed and unable to make sense of its surroundings. This leads to a loss of focus, a transition into a ‘dimmer’ consciousness.

• If the brain gets two (or more) different kinds of input — say, from being raised by an ultra-liberal mother and an ultra-conservative father —  it can find itself with a sort of double vision, maintaining two schemas, and perhaps maintaining multiple contradictory self-models. Recent research on people who grew up bilingual suggests that the two languages are actually associated with two different sub-personalities, with slightly different preferences, prejudices, and so on. It’s been shown that these folks’ brains end up being more malleable, though it can take longer for them to learn certain things, especially at a young age. The brain can operate with multiple contradictory worldviews, but it can lead to a performance degradation.

• If the brain’s ideas and worldviews are never tested against reality, or are only tested against the same facts again and again, it can find itself unable to distinguish important patterns from unimportant ones, and suffer a loss of focus.

• And more obviously, if the brain is subjected to chemicals (or a chemical imbalance or lack), no sleep, etc.

If any of these things happen, it means the brain starts acting less like a brain and more like a rock — letting in too much of the world, unable to categorize it or filter it. Without sufficient focus, the brain relaxes into other conscious states.

Speaking With Stone

How, then, would we make a rock act like a brain? Would it even be possible? Absolutely: reconfigure the stone so that it has limited potential connections, limited inputs and outputs, and so on. When we do this, we call it a ‘computer’. Again, this is not ‘improving’ rocks, or giving them mind; they are already minded. We are constraining, focusing their minds. So far our computer-brains have connections and inputs that are much more limited than a human brain, so that even though computers are more malleable than human brains, their consciousness is much more tightly focused. Today’s computers’ minds are lit at a level somewhere between a bee and a beehive.

In this way Orr’s work leads us to a very different conception of mind: one in which humans are no longer at the top of a great chain of mental being, no longer kings of cognition, but simply possessed of a brain that is very well adapted to our needs — not too constrained, not too free, not too malleable, nor too rigid, for our ecological niche and social natures. Just as Copernicus dislodged humanity from the physical center of the universe, this reading of Orr dislodges us from our psychic pinnacle. Instead we’re part of an ecology of mind, one in which the tiny brightly lit mind of the beetle is as valuable and miraculous as the vast dark mind of Mt. Ranier.

As Orr says: “When the actuality of every glint of nature’s mind becomes evident — in the rain and in the air we breathe, in the wet leaves and the photons, in the planet — our values change. When every rustle of perception, every murmur of response, becomes tangible, visceral, it inspires and vitalizes the substance of our reality. When we know the world around us to be crafted of memory, it compels us to refine our response-ability, to become more actively involved in nature’s ongoing creativity.”

Good bye!

This post is part of the Animist Blog Carnival for May 2014, hosted by Alison Leigh Lilly. My deepest thanks to Alison for inspiring many of the ideas in this post, and her valuable feedback on it.