Who Is Sophia?

 . . . if you receive my words,
And treasure my commands within you,
2 So that you incline your ear to Wisdom,
And apply your heart to understanding;
3 Yes, if you cry out for discernment,
And lift up your voice for understanding,
4 If you seek Her as silver,
And search for Her as for hidden treasures;
5 Then you will understand the fear of the Lord,
And find the knowledge of God.

                                                ~ Proverbs 2 

Since LoveWisdom belongs to all of us, and all of us belong to LoveWisdom, it helps to have a common language, a way to speak freely with each other, no matter our personal religious, philosophical, spiritual, or political beliefs. We need a space of inclusiveness, so that our conversation together can be co-creative, not dictated from some particular perspective. We need conversation and community that allows each of us to work with our own unique soul purpose in ways that facilitate the realization of our most precious ideals, for the benefit of all. 

Sophia is a figure who can help us. She is medicine for soul and soil, for the culture in nonduality with Nature, the individual in nonduality with the vast community of life. She is not a belief, not an idol. Sophia is a language of the soul, a way of speaking and thinking, a way of life, an art of living, a bridge to the divine (and the divine itself), a connection to the Earth (and Earth itself), an image and a vision. 

We are visionary beings, but our visionary capacities can be corrupted, controlled and co-opted, taken over by delusions, sicknesses of the soul, invasions of inauthentic imagery. Sophia can function as a common vision, a common sentience to overturn “common sense,” a communal touchstone, without becoming a dogma. Sophia as an image, as a guiding inspiration, offers the union of vision and practicality, vision and skillfulness.

Laozi tells us: 

The dao that can be told

is not the eternal Dao

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

He reminds us that the beginning of Heaven and Earth has no name. And then he names it Dao—the Way. We will name it Sophia. Thus, The Classic of Dao and Its Virtuous Action becomes, The Classic of Sophia and Her Virtuosity. We will try to find the gateway to all understanding, but we must enter darkness to find it, and Sophia will forever remain ungraspable, never fully defined. This frustrates the grasping mind that has hold of each one of us.

But, if we allow Sophia to become our Way, or to shed light on the Way we already follow, it can bring us great virtue and virtuosity, great integrity and insight, great dignity and magic to our life and the life of the world we share.

“Sophia” is the Greek word for Wisdom, and all religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions revere wisdom. Indeed, all decent people revere actions that express wisdom, love, and beauty, and Sophia Herself is Wisdom, Love, and Beauty. She is seen as the womb of love and compassion, which means that anytime we experience love and compassion, we have done so within Sophia, by the Grace of Sophia. We are being born anew each time we allow love and compassion to function in our lives, for Sophia is what functions—Wisdom is what works, rooted in love and beauty. 

If we see Sophia as archetypal, we can understand Her in many helpful ways. To say Sophia is archetypal is to say, loosely speaking, that She is a part of all of us, that She is a dynamic, alive patterning deep in our soul.[1] But She is more than that, for She is the patterning that creates and connects all things (thus revealing there are no “things), the patterning of the connectedness and functioning of all things—we could call it the sacred creative ordering. 

She is an energy, a non-oppositional force, the lucid presence, the sheer openness, the spark of bliss, the fire of awakeness that is the heart of life, the heart of each one of us, abiding as the divine, the great mystery, the intelligence that creates us. In some traditions, She is That, the very intelligence of the Cosmos, the creator, the great mystery, the divine itself. 

Read the poetry of Rumi or Hafez—Sophia is The Belovèd. 

Thinking of Wisdom (or thinking Wisdom) in an archetypal way allows us to understand why it has been and remains useful to personify Wisdom. As the psychologist Andy Fischer (2013) puts it, personification is “indigenous to the psyche” (102).[2] we don’t perceive archetypes directly, but we perceive their images and expressions, and through them we perceive the world in a particular way. Wisdom has been given many names throughout the world. She appears in various guises, sometimes directly, sometimes through manifestations or avatars, sometimes in myths, fairy tales, and legends, either as a divine figure, or as a hero or heroine who has opened themselves up to Wisdom’s inspiration in order to accomplish the impossible—for when we fully open to Wisdom, we are not separate from Her, and never were. 

Because of the pervasiveness of Wisdom, it is possible to see Her in some ways as what we might call an ultra-archetype or uber-archetype, a presence manifesting even in figures one might associate with other archetypal energies, if one were being very strict. But this is part of Her inclusive appeal: She is a touchstone in some way or other for almost anything we might admire, value, or love, because anything we honor, revere, value, or love has a basic sensibility to it, a basic intelligence and beauty, and we ourselves want to approach what we value and love with intelligence and care. Sophia reminds us that wisdom, love, and beauty transcend all labels, that what we ourselves are transcends all words and concepts. 

In suggesting this, we seek only a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty, a figure that facilitates our relationship with all the wisdom traditions of the world. Thus, we must deliberately avoid any sense of colonialism. We seek humility here, and even humiliation on the part of those who may have judged their own way as superior to that of others. It is not that we “reduce” all images to Sophia, but allow the Feminine image of wisdom, love, and beauty to illuminate the images of traditions we might otherwise remain quite ignorant of. Sophia thus facilitates inclusiveness and mutual respect, as long as we practice with skill and grace, with non-neglect, non-disctraction, and non-thinking (thinking that does not “compare” in a judgemental manner, but which honors and reveres). Sophia can help us to reindigenize ourselves, to become part of the great Earth again, to rejoin the community of life as more mature and capable participants and care givers. 

In the west, Sophia appears as Athena, Metis, the Muses, Gaia, Persephone, Hecate, Themis, the Celtic goddesses Danu, Brigid and Epona, the Welsh goddesses Ceridwen and Rhiannon, the Slavic figure Gamayun, and the Norse goddesses Freya, Sága, and Vör. In the East She appears as Prajnaparamita, Tara, Guan Yin, Sarasvati, Benzaiten, and other figures. on the Southern part of Turtle Island (i.e. South America), She appears as Aluna and Pachamama (Mother Earth figures). on the Northern part of Turtle Island, She appears as White Buffalo Woman (who gave the Lakota their sacred Rites), Spider Woman, and Bikʼeh Hózhǫ́ (the spirit of speech). She appears as the Sumerian goddess Inanna, the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, the African goddess Yemaya, the Egyptian goddesses Isis, Wadjet (the Green one, associated with the cobra and with the Eye which became the Eye of Horus), Weret-hekau, Ta-Bitjet (whose blood was a panacea for all poisons), and Maat (who weighed the souls of the dead against a single feather, indicating the importance of “enlightenment” as “lightening up,” and Sophia’s ability to detect the slightest weight in our soul). 

Again, let us make clear something that, in the present context, remains incredibly challenging to clarify: this list is not about “co-opting” elements of other cultures under some grand “western” theory. It is about honoring a deep connection among all people who value wisdom, love, and beauty. We are not endorsing a simple-minded perennialism here, but it is foolish not to humbly revere the interwovenness of our souls, and to intimately sense and realize ourselves as vitally connected, related, as children of Wisdom, Love, and Beauty, and to honor that with great humility and a sense of profound kinship. 

It is not so different from the way the peoples of Turtle Island heard about the sacrament from the Christian missionaries, and could truthfully, say, “Yes. We believe that. That is true.” They did not mean they had converted, but that they recognized a common ground of sacredness, a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty—which includes a sense of honor and reverence, and which thus allowed them to honor and acknowledge truth even in places where the habitual mind would find only contradictions. 

However, as for the colonizers, the ground they saw was terra nullius, and their understanding of common ground seemed limited to the town square.[3] There were exceptions of course, those who saw how the culture of the peoples of Turtle Island overflowed with wisdom, love, and beauty, those who tried to honor and respect those people and their cultures. But history shows us we need help in thoroughly recognizing and making real a sacred common ground, and mere talk will not suffice. It requires practice, and images such as Sophia can facilitate our practice together, our practice of honor and mutual respect. 

Again, in some traditions, Sophia is the creator, and at other times She is an aspect or quality of the creator, perhaps the principal quality or characteristic. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Sophia is sometimes seen as the Feminine dimension of the divine, sometimes seen as the manifestation of divine wisdom, a presence that infuses absolutely everything—every rock, every river, every seed, every flower, every mote of dust, every atom—everything alive and alove with and as Sophia. 

In some versions, She was created first, and pervades the whole of creation. We find this described in the Bible: 

23 I have been established from everlasting,
From the beginning, before there was ever an Earth.
24 When there were no depths I was brought forth,
When there were no fountains abounding with water.
25 before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills, I was brought forth . . .
27 When he prepared the heavens, I was there,
When he drew a circle on the face of the deep . . .
When he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30 Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman . . .

                                                                        ~ Proverbs 8

Though these particular lines are written in the voice of Sophia, the author was King Solomon, a figure celebrated for great wisdom. The Queen of Sheba, herself dedicated to Wisdom, heard about Solomon and travelled all the way from Ethiopia to meet him. The Queen of Sheba wrote this poem in honor of Sophia: 

Wisdom is 

sweeter than honey,

brings more joy

than wine,

illumines more than the sun,

is more precious

than jewels.

She causes

the ears to hear

and the heart to comprehend. 

I love her

like a mother,

and she embraces me

as her own child.

I will follow

her footprints

and she will not cast me away. 

The Biblical Book of Wisdom describes Sophia this way: 

24 for Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; She is so pure, She pervades and permeates all things.

25 She is a breath of the power of god, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; so nothing impure can find its way into her. (Book 7) 

Here we find Sophia associated with the very inspiration of the divine. Can we imagine the tragedy of a life without inspiration, without breath, the breath of insight, the breath of life? 

It is through inspiration that the divine gave life to us, and continues to do so. We can intimately sense Sophia as that breath of life. And thus we used a derivative of Her name to designate our species: Homo Sapiens. The Latin name for Sophia is Sapientia, from which we get sapient. These words come from a root indicating taste, both in the sense of tasting something and having taste or aesthetic discernment. Sophia means savoring life, tasting it and thus knowing it intimately and immediately, allowing it to nourish us, getting it into our guts, our blood and bones. Through this intimacy arises inspiration, and vice versa.[4]

Opening ourselves to Sophia means opening our breathing, opening up to new sources of inspiration and joy, and to connection with all things, all sentient beings and all of sentient being. When we begin to open our breathing, we may find it surprising just how much we have been constricting ourselves. We find that everything tastes like Wisdom, everything tastes like Love, everything tastes quite beautiful. It inspires wonder in us, and an immediate sense of reverence, sacredness, and a passion for living in a good way, living in a way that honors ourselves, all our relations, and the mystery itself. 

Sophia is not a matter of speculating about wine, analyzing its chemistry, theorizing about it, making claims and arguments about it. Sophia means tasting the wine of life, and cultivating our palate for life (as we learn to appreciate, to acquire a real taste for something healthy and healing, which might on first exposure seem bitter and even unpleasant), cultivating a functioning sensibility and discernment. Sophia is intimate and direct, playful and precise, full of grace and lucidity, encompassing all tragedy and comedy, a nonduality of liberation and constraint.

We can possibly return here to the notion of mysticism and sense the mystical spirit suggested by these considerations. Evelyn Underhill famously defined mysticism as “the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”[5] 

Underhill herself admits that, “It is not expected that the inquirer will find great comfort in this sentence when first it meets his eye.” She continues: 

The ultimate question, “What is Reality?”—a question, perhaps, which never occurred to him before—is already forming in his mind; and he knows that it will cause him infinite distress. Only a mystic can answer it: and he, in terms which other mystics alone will understand. Therefore, for the time being, the practical man may put it on one side. All that he is asked to consider now is this: that the word “union” represents not so much a rare and unimaginable operation, as something which he is doing, in a vague, imperfect fashion, at every moment of his conscious life; and doing with intensity and thoroughness in all the more valid moments of that life. We know a thing only by uniting with it; by assimilating it; by an interpenetration of it and ourselves. It gives itself to us, just in so far as we give ourselves to it; and it is because our outflow towards things is usually so perfunctory and so languid, that our comprehension of things is so perfunctory and languid too. The great Sufi who said that “Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, is to escape the flame of separation” spoke the literal truth. Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those who “keep themselves to themselves,” and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have never truly known.  

This does not elevate “the mystic” above the rest of us—no more so than we would elevate the physicist by defining what it should mean to know about quantum mechanics. We might say that only a physicist can answer the question, “What is a quark?” since it takes training of a certain kind, knowledge, and above all experience of a certain kind, to answer such a question with any depth. Underhill’s discussion does not reduce to, “You aren’t a mystic! Neener, neener, neener!” In any case, we intend it here to try and get at the intimacy Sophia demands from us. Knowing—philosophical or spiritual gnosis . . . not “knowledge” but active wisdom—does not happen at a distance or in abstraction. In this sense, Underhill certainly does offer suggestions that should give all of us pause. 

LoveWisdom has to do with sensing the mutual embracing of life and entering that embracing, giving ourselves over to it and returning that embracing with grace and warmth of heart, in a manner that then holds all beings and helps to make the World we share in mutuality and care. Anthropologists have a term that kind of fits this way of practice and realization: Mystical participation. But the term gets used in a slightly negative way, even by fairly progressive thinkers.  

The phrase “mystical participation” sometimes appears in its French form (participation mystique), since the French scholar Lucien Lévy-Bruhl coined the term. Lévy-Bruhl associated “mystical participation” with a “primitive” mindset. From the perspective of the dominant culture, a “primitive” mindset allows for “supernatural” dimensions to reality. The mindset of the dominant culture thinks the “primitive” mindset is not realistic, that it is deluded somehow. But, of course, from the standpoint of such “primitive” mindsets, the “conquest” or dominant culture mindset appears quite deluded—and if the present conditions of life become grounds for evaluation, we should side with the “primitive” view and call the dominant mindset troubled, troubling, and even insane (certainly not realistic). In all cases, we cannot lay hold of anything monolithic: We no more find a single “primitive” mindset than a single “conquest” one. But, we do find some trends and general features—maybe a familial resemblance.  

Perhaps, with all necessary caveats about not taking it as monolithic, we might learn something from the Standing Rock Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria, from his essay on “American Indian Metaphysics,” included in his book, co-authored with Daniel Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian education in America: 

Instead of talking of an Indian “science” or even an Indian “religion,” we should focus our attention on the metaphysics possessed by most American Indian tribes and derive from this central perspective the information and beliefs that naturally flowed from it. . . . 

Metaphysics need not bear the burden of its past . . . if we understand it as simply that set of first principles we must possess in order to make sense of the world in which we live. In this sense the Indian knowledge of the natural world, of the human world, and of whatever realities exist beyond our senses has a consistency that far surpasses anything devised by Western civilization. 

The best description of Indian metaphysics was the realization that the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related. This world was a unified world, a far cry from the disjointed sterile and emotionless world painted by Western science. Even though we can translate the realities of the Indian social world into concepts familiar to us from the Western scientific context, such as space, time, and energy, we must surrender most of the meaning in the Indian world when we do so. The Indian world can be said to consist of two basic experiential dimensions that, taken together, provided a sufficient means of making sense of the world. These two concepts were place and power, the latter perhaps better defined as spiritual power or life force. Familiarity with the personality of objects and entities of the natural world enabled Indians to discern immediately where each living being had its proper place and what kinds of experiences that place allowed, encouraged, and suggested. And knowing places enabled people to relate to the living entities inhabiting it. 

Western scientists frequently suggest that the Indian way of looking at the world lacked precision because it was neither capable of nor interested in creating abstract concepts or using mathematical descriptions of nature. But, as Carl Jung pointed out with respect to the so-called primitive mind, once a person knew the places of things, a mere glance was sufficient to replace counting and, in most instances, was more accurate. The Indian mind was considerably more interested in learning the psychological characteristics of things than in describing their morphological structure. Hence, in some instances when defining common personality traits that people and animals shared, the Indian seemed to be talking nonsense. He or she appeared to be combining aspects of things that, at first glance, could not and should not be together. Today, as Western science edges ever closer to acknowledging the intangible, spiritual quality of matter and the intelligence of animals, the Indian view appears increasingly more sophisticated.

Indian students today are confronted with the monolith of Western science when they leave the reservation to attend college. In most introductory courses their culture and traditions are derided as mere remnants of a superstitious, stone-age mentality that could not understand or distinguish between the simplest of propositions. Additionally, they are taught that science is an objective and precise task performed by specialists who carefully weigh the propositions that come before them. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . 

One of the most painful experiences for American Indian students is to come into conflict with the teachings of science that purport to explain phenomena already explained by tribal knowledge and tradition. The assumption of the Western educational system is that the information dispensed by colleges is always correct, and that the beliefs and teachings of the tribe are always wrong. Rarely is this the case. The teachings of the tribe are almost always more complete, but they are oriented toward a far greater understanding of reality than is scientific knowledge. And precise tribal knowledge almost always has a better predictability factor than does modern science, which generally operates in sophisticated tautologies that seek only to confirm preexisting identities. (2001: 12-14) 

We might most immediately benefit from several crucial suggestions here. First: “the realization that the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related. This world was a unified world, a far cry from the disjointed sterile and emotionless world painted by Western science.” This resonates with thinking of the multidisciplinary scientist Gregory Bateson, a lifelong atheist, who emphasized the sacred and who might call what we inquire into here an epistemology of the sacred, or a sacred epistemology—a sacred way of knowing, a way of knowing the sacred, and a way of knowing which fundamentally includes sacredness. In his published work, Bateson tries to approach sacredness in many ways, including the following: 

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these ideas into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are.

Observe, however, that there have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.

I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. I believe that that mistake may be more serious that all the minor insanities that characterize those older epistemologies which agreed upon the fundamental unity. (MN:18)

This, in turn, resonates with the suggestion of the great Islamic scholar Sayed Hussein Nasr, who, in one of his lectures, gets at the same sense of aesthetic unity, which in philosophical/spiritual terms we can refer to as the sacred: 

The unifying vision which related knowledge to love and faith, religion to science, and theology to all the departments of intellectual concern is finally completely lost, leaving a world of compartmentalization where there is no wholeness because holiness has ceased to be of central concern, or is at best reduced to sentimentality. In such a world those with spiritual and intellectual perspicacity sought, outside of the confines of this ambience, to rediscover their traditional roots and the total functioning of the intelligence which would once again bestow upon knowledge its sacramental function and enable men to reintegrate their lives upon the basis of this unifying principle, which is inseparable from both love and faith. For others, for whom such a criticism of the modern world and rediscovery of the sacred was not possible but who, at the same time, could not be lulled to sleep before the impoverished intellectual and spiritual landscape which was presented to them as modern life, there was only lament and despair which, in fact, characterizes so much of modern literature and which the gifted Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was to epitomize in the poem that was also to become his elegy: 

Too proud to die, broken and blind he died

The darkest way, and did not turn away,

A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died

Hating his God, but what he was was plain.

An old kind man brave in his burning pride. 

But because God is both merciful and just, the light of the Intellect could not be completely eclipsed nor could this despair be the final hymn of contemporary man. (1989: 39) 

Later in the same lecture series, Nasr tells us that,

Knowledge of the sacred leads to freedom and deliverance from all bondage and limitation because the Sacred is none other than the limitless Infinite and the Eternal, while all bondage results from the ignorance which attributes final and irreducible reality to that which is devoid of reality in itself, reality in its ultimate sense belonging to none other than the Real as such. That is why the sapiential perspective envisages the role of knowledge as the means of deliverance and freedom, of what Hinduism calls mokśa. To know is to be delivered. Traditional knowledge is in fact always in quest of the rediscovery of that which has been always known but forgotten, not that which is to be discovered, for the Logos which was in the beginning possesses the principles of all knowledge and this treasury of knowledge lies hidden within the soul of man to be recovered through recollection. The unknown is not out there beyond the present boundary of knowledge but at the center of man’s being here and now where it has always been. And it is unknown only because of our forgetfulness of its presence. It is a sun which has not ceased to shine simply because our blindness has made us impervious to its light.

The traditional concept of knowledge is concerned with freedom and deliverance precisely because it relates principial knowledge to the Intellect, not merely to reason, and sees sacred knowledge in rapport with an ever-present Reality which is at once Being and Knowledge, not with a process of accumulation of facts and concepts through time and based on gradual growth and development. Without denying this latter type of knowledge which in fact has existed in all traditional civilizations, tradition emphasizes that central knowledge of the sacred and sacred knowledge which is the royal path toward deliverance from the bondage of all limitation and ignorance, from the bondage of the outside world which limits us physically and the human psyche which imprisons the immortal soul within us. (267-8) 

We contemplate a suggestion some will find challenging: That a vitalizing way of knowing and being, living and loving (technically, an epistemology, a foundation for science, for culture, for life), includes, rather than excludes, at least some of what a significant number of “educated” people have written off as “religious”. And we suggest here that the American Indian Metaphysic is a metaphysic of sacredness. 

Sadly, the arrogant western mindset looks down on the “primitive” mindset that accepts “supernatural” dimensions to reality—since the western mindset has of course determined the true metaphysical nature of reality, and it knows without doubt what is real and what is not, and it can thus function as the metaphysical police force for the world. According to the western view, the “primitive” believes in things that do not exist. But the metaphysics of the dominant culture believes in something it cannot even fully explain: matter. Only recently did the scientists of the dominant culture realize that the stuff they thought was all the matter of the “universe” was in fact only about 5% of the stuff out there—and we may yet find that number shifting. Moreover, “matter” remains confusing since the dominant culture cannot explain how this matter leaps into something radically different called “mind”.  

The problems get more embarrassing when we ask about the default metaphysics of the dominant culture—not the proclaimed metaphysics of its science and its academic and political philosophy, but the metaphysics of the culture as evidenced by the concrete behaviors of the culture. Unsurprisingly, the actually applied metaphysics of the dominant culture reveals itself as incoherent, and filled with delusional thinking, because, among other things, the culture behaves as if money were the foundation of the culture, and, further, that this money could function in disconnection from real ecologies and from spiritual values.  

Some of the incoherence comes from the ways spiritual values get clumsily projected and sublimated into material concerns, so that, in seeking money and the things money buys, the people of the culture channel the soul’s quest for spiritual realization (the realization of things like peace, love, healing, joy, acceptance, wonder, and meaningfulness). An alien anthropologist could understandably analyze the dominant culture as a money cult, with money in place of the more skillful and realistic metaphysical notions of mana, orenda, qi, or wakan—and I mean that with reverence for the indigenous terms that equals the critical disapproval I would levy on the dominant culture’s notions of money, property, and success. 

A related issue arises. Deloria told us that, in comparison to the teachings of western science, which are presumed to be right, while the indigenous teachings are presumed to be wrong, “The teachings of the tribe are almost always more complete, but they are oriented toward a far greater understanding of reality than is scientific knowledge. And precise tribal knowledge almost always has a better predictability factor than does modern science . . .” Is this true? Isn’t the essence of the science of the dominant culture its repeatability and hence predictability? 

Among its many sins and incoherencies, the science of the dominant culture makes two errors that we could name as a single error: The error of ignoring context. John Dewey called this the philosophical fallacy—by which we should not take him to mean a fallacy of “philosophers” only, for scientists are philosophers too.  

This error has a spiritual source, which we could put like this: Because wisdom seems daunting, the dominant culture offered yet another material bait-and-switch for a spiritual ideal, namely switching out wisdom and putting “knowledge” in its place. It’s way easier to cut open birds and smash atoms together than it is to become the kind of person the spiritual traditions hold up as wise, loving, and beautiful. Living the life of Socrates seems so much more demanding than living the life of Galileo, Boyle, Newton, or Bohr. Galileo only faced the threat of death for practicing science, not actual death. And he faced it for looking at celestial bodies and revealing problems with our model of the “universe,” not for looking at the human soul, and revealing the injustice, incoherence, and insanity—even the profanity—of his culture and his fellow citizens. 

This may sound crass. And certainly we can have respect for figures like Galileo. Nevertheless, science makes it seem as if important knowledge about life can be had no matter what kind of person we are. While the wisdom traditions recognize the place of something like facts and truth, they place a lot of emphasis on the person telling us the truth, going so far as to suggest that the most important truths only come from people who have been fully initiated into the path of wisdom, love, and beauty, and who have walked that road with honor and dignity, and who then can offer us teachings in mutual illumination and mutual liberation. Galileo the scientist taught us nothing that will liberate our souls, nothing that can help us live better and love better, nothing that will help us honor and respect ourselves, each other, the vast community of life, and the mystery of the Cosmos. All of those more important things, the kinds of things that can bring us peace, justice, and joy, depend on LoveWisdom, not “knowledge”. 

The spiritual traditions fundamentally disagree with the approach of the scientist insofar as the scientist keeps insisting on the pursuit of knowledge independent of context: The context of the World and the context of their own soul. This may seem like an astonishing suggestion. Even if Einstein had lived the life of an abject scoundrel, wouldn’t E still = MC2? Yes . . . and also, perhaps, Who knows? Careful philosophical analysis over many decades, by very serious and rational thinkers, has indicated that we cannot establish “reality” as some sort of fixed “thing” “out there,” nor can we establish that “science” “objectively” “uncovers” “how things are”. But this seems such an incredible notion that we don’t know how to metabolize it. 

The simplest examples come from things like quantum physics, in which the intentions and set-up of an experiment determine the results in surprising ways. These matters seem too subtle and nuanced, and potentially also too complex to contemplate here with any rigor. Suffice it to say that if “something” can appear as a particle or a wave (two radically different “things”) depending on context, then context matters more than we may realize—and more than keeps us comfortable. 

In some ways, the more important issue comes to this: To the extent that indigenous cultures root themselves in wisdom, love, and beauty, they recognize the importance of a person’s spiritual development. They understand that some important truths depend on who tells them, what kind of person they are. Thus, two people with the same scientific “information” may behave differently only because of the context their own soul brings to that “information”. A culture teaching a holistic science that does not switch “knowledge” in place of wisdom will invite its people to become wise, not merely knowledgeable. The predictability of such a science becomes far more reliable, because the people become far more reliable. Any careful study of things like the history of the ozone crisis, the history of nuclear weapons, and the history of genetic science may bring us to the reasonable conclusion that only by incredible luck or the grace of the sacred mystery has the dominant culture not destroyed itself and possibly the conditions of life on Earth—and we’re not out of danger yet. The “science” of the dominant culture in these and countless other ways proves itself rather unreliable. 

It also behooves us to reflect on the evidence we have that Sophia appears to bestow at least some of Her secrets only upon those She finds trustworthy. The philosopher John Dewey did his own serious work with this, in his own rather dry manner. He referred to “consummatory” experiences, and though he worked with this idea most famously in the context of art, we must keep in mind that there is nothing outside of experience, and even science can only, in the end, offer us experiences of various kinds. We should ask about them, inquire into them.  

Science refers to “data”. Philosophy and spirituality also have an interest in data, but data in the sense of what is given—in the philosophical or spiritual sense of what is given to us like a gift or an act of grace. This sense of givenness has to do with realization, and with a sense of sacredness. We would thus consider visions, synchronicities, prophetic dreams, and so on as “advantageous data,” or perhaps “advantaged data,” “prerogative data” or “concessionary data,” or even, with a nod to Dewey, “consummatory data”—the exact opposite of consumption, and thus a rebellion against the dominant culture and its way of doing science—or, with a nod to Virgil Aldrich, a commentator on Dewey’s work, “data of achievement”—which correlates with a sacred epistemology of practice-realization. We could then replace “data” with experience. Science cannot escape experience, and yet it seems to practice and realize abstraction, thus contributing to the incoherence of the dominant culture. 

Experiences arising during, or in one way or another due to, practices of meditation constitute an example of advantaged or consummatory “data”. Why? Because they come from having advanced along a spiritual path. We have turned toward our own soul, turned toward sacredness, studied the nature of self and reality, and gained intimacy with ourselves and the Cosmos. Thus Sophia grants us concessions, gifts, graces, insights, and inspirations that come in/through/as/with our immediate intimacy with the perfect-and-complete (consummate) nature of ourselves and reality.  

In the limited scientific domain, we could call the much of the data we find there “privileged data”. There, we would note how “privileged” one must be to acquire such data. It takes tremendous resources to build, power, and operate a particle accelerator, and to go through the necessary education to understand what to do with one, how to use it with some effectiveness, how to interpret the data it generates. In the broadest sense, we could also call such data advantaged and even, in some cases, consummatory, but it is more privileged than advantaged in the most ethical sense. True consummatory data, data worthy of that name, can only emerge in a proper spiritual context. Discovery of the Higgs boson is hardly consummatory in any proper philosophical sense—a consummation of “knowledge” perhaps, and perhaps even a consummation of elegance theorizing (bourgeois theorizing), and thus a certain kind of beauty, but lacking wisdom and love, and bereft of any rich sacredness.[6] 

The etymologies of all of the terms come into play. For instance, “privileged” relates to “private,” and today we must sense how it associates with the duality between public and private in general—including how the general public in the U.S. seem to experience a tension with academics and scientists whose work seems private to the academy and its intellectuals rather than a public good—as well as with particular dualities such as private wealth and public illth, organism and environment, culture and nature. Today we can speak of “priv-lit,” which signifies literature written by authors of privilege, authors (often with white skin) who have the income and leisure to pursue certain kinds of experiences, and to write about them in particular ways. We don’t want a science of privilege, a science of wealth and illth, of private against public. 

But we can also recognize the advantages of a good education. We can see that, with proper education, Nature will grant us certain concessions and prerogatives. The root of “prerogative” goes back to words signifying “going straight” and “reaching out one’s hand.” What hand reaches out in the prerogative we speak of here? The hand of Nature, the hand of Sophia reaches out to us the moment we go straight, the moment we reach out in nonreaching, the moment we reach out in nonaggression, the moment we reach out in sacredness and wonder, the moment we reach out in nongrasping and in reverence, without trying to “get” anything or “do” anything. The getting and doing put us on a crooked road instead of the straight Path (Way, Dao), a straight Path with all its nonlinearity, its spirals and curves, its astonishment and inconceivability. 

We could suggest a general need for advantaged or consummatory experience. Calling some of these experiences “non-ordinary” functions in one sense, if we understand “ordinary” to mean “asleep,” like someone sleepwalking into catastrophe. Non-ordinary then means awakening (in the extreme, awakened), or non-habitual, non-fettered, non-domesticated, non-aggressive, non-fragmented. But people often refer to “non-ordinary” states as if we should find them suspicious, compromised, untrustworthy, worthy of dismissal without further contemplation. This shows a rather silly bias. Should we call the practice of Aikido “non-ordinary falling”? Anyone who reflects with care would rather fall in such a “non-ordinary” way than in the typical, unskillful, reactive way. Should we call tango non-ordinary movement? But why shouldn’t we dance our lives? 

These issues seem in some ways subtle and not easy to fully comprehend, and at the same time they seem a bit obvious. It may help to reflect on some broader related issues. Daniel Wildcat writes the following about Deloria’s concepts of of power and place, which we considered above: 

Deloria’s formulation that power and place equal personality is ripe for exploration in the study of human development.  

Among so much sadness and dysfunctionality in our world today, it is at once sobering and energizing to think of what we might accomplish by giving our children something our parents and grandparents stubbornly held on to but were never given the opportunity to openly embrace: a way of living that found lessons on humility, generosity, and hope in the world-hope not for something in the distant future but hope in the sense of acting with the confidence and expectation that something good will happen. Ask any child psychologist—such a condition is not romantic, but crucial for the full development of healthy adults. 

A good deal of the ills surrounding us today are the fault of a society where children learn life lessons that make their formal education often seem meaningless. After all, most of what we know is not a result of explicit pedagogy or teaching; it is learned through living. Many human beings seem so caught up in their machines and technology that they have forgotten or lost the very real sense of what it means to live: to make choices that enrich life as opposed to making existence more comfortable. 

Science has accomplished much in the latter case and, as Deloria notes, little in the former case: “Western science has no moral basis and is entirely incapable of resolving human problems except by the device of making humans act more and more like machines.” “Making humans act more and more like machines”—this may be the most modern of reductionisms. It also explicitly illustrates an increasingly impoverished notion of experience and reality, and one that, thankfully, increasing numbers of human beings are questioning. It is hard to understand something if one is always controlling and taking it apart. 

Fortunately, a growing number of modern ecologists, environmental scientists, biological scientists, and geographers now readily accept the wisdom that Chief Seattle spoke to nearly 150 years ago: “We are all related . . . whatever befalls the earth befalls man.” The concepts of the food chain, ecosystem management, population dynamics, and a host of cycling processes are, at one level, scientific expressions of the traditional American Indian wisdom Chief Seattle spoke to so eloquently. At this easily observable and documentable level, science seems to be moving closer to traditional American Indian wisdom. 

At the most fundamental level this interconnectedness and relatedness of human beings to the earth provides the first principle for our rich spirituality. A spirituality that is literally grounded in our experience of the natural world as full of creation’s power; a spirituality that denies the dichotomies that most often define Western religions. This is not romanticism; it is acknowledgment of a living people’s experience, and something science too often anesthetizes its students and practitioners to. 

It is at the level of experience that our traditional and ancestral indigenous scholars have left us the richest legacy-insights of the processual, interconnected, and interrelated nature of the phenomenal world; insights too often precluded by indoctrination in the metaphysics of Western science and, more generally, the modern Western worldview. At the heart of Power and Place is the suggestion that before we all become specialized mechanics of different aspects of the phenomenal (so-called objective) world, we seriously explore and attempt to recollect a way of knowing where interpretation or meaning (subjective) is integrated in the realm or reality of experience. 

Few thinkers have written about the objective-versus-subjective and nature-versus-human dichotomies of Western thought as perceptively as Alan Watts, a scholar of Eastern thought, in the introduction to his book Nature, Man, and Woman. Watts notes that Western humankind’s faith in intelligence has led many to “think we know” how the world works, and consequently, to presume we have some right to control the organization of life itself. He states: 

This is an astonishing jump to conclusions for a being who knows so little about himself, and who willeven admit that such sciences of the intelligence as psychology and neurology are not beyond the stage of preliminary dabbling. For if we do not know even how we manage to be conscious and intelligent, it is most rash to assume that we know what the role of conscious intelligence will be, and still more that it is competent to order the world. (p. 2) 

In Western thought scientific theories of reality, knowledge, and methods for knowing are logically consistent. The problem is that they constrain, even preclude, any discussion of our human experience and life as a part of processes involving power(s), which are irreducible to discrete objects or things. 

There is reason to be cautiously optimistic. The relatively new concept of emergence as used in ecology and physics may capture how personality, as defined by Deloria, develops in specific places possessing power. Emergence refers to a model of change or development where change is not reducible to a discrete factor or factors, but rather the interaction of multiple factors or causes that are understood as processual in character as opposed to mechanical. I am of the opinion, as are a number of scholars and scientists, both indigenous and nonindigenous, that when everything is said and done the concepts of complexity, self-organization, ecology, and even evolution (as reformulated in primarily a space-dependent process as opposed to a time-dependent model) are actually ideas that are part of ancient indigenous intellectual traditions in North America. I like to tell modem nonindigenous scientists that I am glad to see that their modem science is finally catching up with very ancient indigenous wisdom. This at least always gets their attention! Although philosophers of science have pointed out various problems with the dominant Western view and a fair number of scientists would acknowledge those problems, the vast majority still do science the old-fashioned way. As my Salish friend Jaune Quick­to-see-Smith summarizes, Western scientists theorize a hypothesis (a cause and effect), design an experimental process—which is by design far removed from the world we live in—and produce a result or a finding that too often is then understood as “fact.” 

Wildcat remains in dialogue with Deloria in the text. We should consider some of Deloria’s further reflections: 

The key to understanding Indian knowledge of the world is to remember that the emphasis was on the particular, not on general laws and explanations of how things worked. Consequently, when we hear the elders tell about things, we must remember that they are basically reporting on their experiences or on the experiences of their elders. Indians as a rule do not try to bring existing bits of knowledge into categories and rubrics that can be used to do further investigation and experimentation with nature. The Indian system requires a prodigious memory and a willingness to remain humble in spite of one’s great knowledge. 

. . . . Keeping the particular in mind as the ultimate reference point of Indian knowledge, we can pass into a discussion of some of the principles of the Indian forms of knowledge. Here power and place are dominant concepts—power being the living energy that inhabits and/or composes the universe, and place being the relationship of things to each other.  

It seems wise to pause there and appreciate this suggestion: Power means the living energy that composes us, that composes all things, that composes the Cosmos. Cosmos is “order,” the sacred-creative-ordering. Power is what lives us, the living out of the sacred-creative-ordering in, through, and as our lives. Wise ones, sages, teachers, priestesses, and many others of the ancient traditions that fell apart to become the dominant culture—fell apart into the fragmentation of ignorance and the ignorance of fragmentation—would have agreed with such a notion of “power”.  

Together with this goes the suggestion that Place means the relationships, the way that Power animates the interwovenness of the Cosmos. 

Some traditions of LoveWisdom might emphasize here that Place does not mean a relationship of pre-existing “things,” but that what we call things exist as relationships. In other words, we are relational beings. This may seem easy to grasp. But is it? 

Gregory Bateson gave a lecture in which he said the following: “If I ask you how many fingers you have, you will probably answer, ‘Five.’ That I believe to be an incorrect answer.”  

Isn’t that the correct answer? Here we may find further clues about how we can re-indigenize ourselves. 

Bateson offers some help: 

The correct answer, I believe, is, “Gregory you are asking a question wrongly.” In the process of human growth, there is surely no word which means finger, and no word which means five. There might be a word for “branching” . . . . You should be counting not the things which are related, but the relationships . . . 

By default, we counts things which we view as somehow affecting one another. But the things exist first. The things would somehow have the power to affect other things. This is a naïve sense of relationship. Bateson tries to invite us into a more sophisticated sense of the World, a more graceful feel for the World: 

Look at your hand now . . . very quietly, almost as part of meditation. And try to catch the difference between seeing it as a base for five parts and seeing it as constructed of a tangle of relationships. Not a tangle, a pattern of the interlocking of relationships which were the determinants of its growth. And if you can really manage to see the hand in terms of the epistemology I am offering you, I think you will find your hand is suddenly much more recognizably beautiful . . . I am suggesting to you, first, that language is very deceiving, and, second, that if you begin even without much knowledge to adventure into what it would be like to look at the world with a biological epistemology, you will come into contact with concepts biologists don’t look at at all. You will meet with beauty . . .

It’s not a new idea that living things have immanent beauty, but it is revolutionary to assert, as a scientist, that matters of beauty are really highly formal, very real, and crucial to the entire political and ethical system in which we live.

. . . . Is the word “possession” applicable at all to relations?

Perhaps it will suffice to show that what I am saying, if taken seriously—and I say it in all seriousness—would make an almost total change in the way we live, the way we think about our lives, and about each other and ourselves.

Perhaps a curriculum is like a hand in that every piece and component of what they would call a curriculum is really related ideally to the other components as fingers are related to each other and to the whole hand . . . . we Anglo-Saxons do not learn to live in a language because we believe that it is made of separate parts . . . We have lost by the time we are twelve the idea of language as a living organized pattern.

. . . . And now, perhaps because you are Anglo-Saxons, and I am an Anglo-Saxon, you will want to ask me, “But how are we to achieve . . . a holistic education?” . . . The question springs from an already dissected universe, and therefore asks for an answer which cannot be the answer. It asks for an answer in terms of a dissected universe, and that answer I will not give you. It would not be an answer.

We face a paradox in that I cannot tell you how to educate the young, or yourselves, in terms of the epistemology which I have offered you except you first embrace that epistemology. The answers must already be in your head and in your rules of perception. You must know the answer to your question before I can give it to you. I wish that every teacher, schoolmaster, parent, and older sibling could hear the thunderous voice out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without understanding? . . . Dost thou know when the hinds bring forth? . . . Where wast thou when I set up the pillars of the earth”? I mean the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth, and fortieth chapters of the Book of Job. The pietistic silly old man thought he was pretty good and thought God was just like him, but finally he was enlightened by an enormous lesson, a thunderous lesson in natural history and in the beauty of the natural world.

Of course natural history can be taught as a dead subject. I know that, but I believe also that perhaps the monstrous atomistic pathology at the individual level, at the family level, at the national level and the international level—the pathology of wrong thinking in which we all live—can only in the end be corrected by an enormous discovery of those relations in nature which make up the beauty of nature. (Steps to an Ecology of Mind: 310) 

This puts a great deal on the table, a great deal about what a better way of knowing and being, living and loving might feel like, and the significant if not incredible challenges we face in attempting to arrive at it. After all, even Bateson himself falls back into rather ordinary “counting”. He properly challenges us to question whether “possession” applies to relationships, but that in part has to do with their status as non-things, and as non-local, which he does not make clear. We can’t possess what we can’t count, and we can’t really count “something” we cannot possess, so to speak. The two go together in some deeper sense, in a certain style of consciousness or way of thinking and knowing. Relationships should not be reified, and mind should not be localized. 

We might say that, “ninety readers out of a hundred wouldn’t stop to think twice, coming across the expression ‘a dead organism,’” wrote John Dewey in a letter to his collaborator Arthur Bentley, and we might say that ninety readers out of a hundred wouldn’t stop to think twice, coming across the expression, “I have five fingers,” or even, “I know how many fingers I have on my right hand.”  

We will eventually want to carry this same basic conversion into something like this: “Though ninety readers out of a hundred wouldn’t stop to think twice about the phrase, ‘We know how to put a human being on the moon,’ we might suggest that the answer to the question, ‘Do we know how to put a human being on the moon?’ is something like, ‘You are asking wrongly—and terribly so,’ or we may go so far as to say the answer is better put as ‘No!’ than even a qualified ‘yes.’” This will take time to appreciate, but let the seed begin to germinate. An admittedly strange suggestion, it indicates the strangeness of our inquiry. 

In all of this, we seek only to draw closer to Sophia. It may seem that we have gone far afield, but in fact we only travelled like this because the dominant culture has veered so far away from Her. Sophia is the intimacy Bateson and Deloria could invite us into—not because we “know” their meaning, but because their inquiry can dispel our ignorance.  

Sophia is not simply an “entity,” but a power we realize by means of relationship, by means of mystical participation in particular places and in the whole Cosmos, via moment (which is not the “moment” of a clock, or even the ordinary sense of “now”). Sophia dwells in the landscape. We find Her there, in our heart.

Let us recall Underhill’s words:  

The great Sufi who said that “Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, is to escape the flame of separation” spoke the literal truth. 

If we receive it as a literal truth, then pilgrimage has nothing to do with getting on an airplane or in any way travelling to land where other tribes live. The place of the wise is the place of Sophia, and power closes the gap of separation, arises as the dispellment of that gap, the dispellment of the illusion of separation, so that we find ourselves in Sophia’s places, in Her living loving heart, and we realize ourselves as a refuge for all beings, who also need power and place. We become a place, become what we are by means of pilgrimage to the places where we already dwell.

As the poet Grace Wells recently reminded me, the indigenous Irish called themselves Tuath Dé—one of the most wonderful things a human people have ever called themselves, for the word “Tuath” signifies both people and place, and “Dé” signifies the goddess. Therefore, in a gesture of intimacy, in a gesture of wisdom, love, and beauty, they called themselves “the people of the goddess” and simultaneously called themselves “the place of the goddess”. They wonderstood power and place, wonderstood rootedness in place and intimacy with the vast Cosmos. 

They wonderstood that Sophia abides as landscapes, as ecologies, as the sacred powers and inconceivable causes flowing as “power-and-place,” and they wonderstood that when we attune with sacredness and with living places, Sophia abides in us, through us, as us. Meanwhile, the dominant culture seems characterized by, as Underhill put it for us, those who “stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have never truly known.” 

Kent Nerburn describes how an indigenous Elder tried to invite him into the basic sense of the wisdom of place:

“Look out there, Nerburn,” he said. I surveyed the lavender morning sky and the distant rolling foothills. “This is what my people care about. This is our mother, the earth.”

“It’s a beautiful place,” I offered.

He snubbed out his cigarette. “It’s not just a place. That’s white man’s talk. She’s alive. We are standing on her. We’re part of her.”

Power-and-Place arises by means of intimacy, but the dominant culture is a culture of distance, even as its economy and technology invade the souls of all citizens and all sentient beings, even as its mindset has invaded sacredness to make it profane.

Let us also recall what we suggested previously:

We can see that, with proper education, Nature will grant us certain concessions and prerogatives. The root of “prerogative” goes back to words signifying “going straight” and “reaching out one’s hand.” What hand reaches out in the prerogative we speak of here? The hand of Nature, the hand of Sophia reaches out to us the moment we go straight, the moment we reach out in nonreaching, the moment we reach out in nonaggression, the moment we reach out in sacredness and wonder, the moment we reach out in nongrasping and in reverence, without trying to “get” anything or “do” anything. The getting and doing put us on a crooked road instead of the straight Path (Way, Dao), a straight Path with all its nonlinearity, its spirals and curves, its astonishment and inconceivability. 

How many fingers are on this hand that reaches out, Sophia’s hand, the hand of Nature?  

If we look at the landscape of our hand, we can enter into intimacy with relationship, and we can unleash the powers that compose it. Sophia reaches out to us by means of power and place—not only in the landscapes of the body, but the landscapes of the soul and the landscapes of the World. Proper education allows us to reach out our relationality to the relationality of the World, to touch and be touched.   

We can reach out our own hand not only from “the body,” but from the soul and from the World—in which case, the World itself reaches out our hand, Sophia Herself reaches out Her hand as our hand, and we don’t have to “do” anything. It takes very little experimentation to immediately feel some first glimmer of the difference between reaching out our own hand and letting the World reach out our hand for us—because our hand is not an object that belongs to us, but expresses the functioning of power and place in service to life. 

Here, we do not seek to “explain” what Deloria and Wildcat mean or to in any way take possession of their teachings. We seek guidance from Deloria and Wildcat because they come from such profound tradtions of wisdom, love, and beauty, because they have practiced the teachings of their traditions, because they have reflected on how those traditions differ from the ways of the dominant culture—including what aspects of the dominant culture seem incoherent and out of attunement with life.  

Those of us with lineage in the dominant culture must let indigenous traditions belong to indigenous peoples, and we must seek our reindigenization by means of listening and learning, while never co-opting or colonizing. We have our own lineages, our own lost teachings that the land can sing to us again (depending on where we live, many of us may need to co-discover and co-create new teachings and traditions, most likely in deep and respectful dialogue with those whose lineages have long lived and loved where we now must find ourselves). Sophia can help us, and at the same time we can sense how Her imperatives never obstruct or contradict those of indigenous people. Again, we look to Sophia quite explicitly to help reindigenize ourselves.  

This can lead us to something rather shocking in the present context. Gary Snyder gets at it in his Mountains and Rivers without End, where he writes: 

Ghost bison, ghost bears, ghost bighorns, ghost lynx, ghost

pronghorns, ghost panthers, ghost marmots, ghost owls: swirling

and gathering, sweeping down,

Then the white man will be gone.

butterfly on slopes of grass and aspen —

thunderheads the deep blue of Krishna

rise on rainbows

and falling shining rain

each drop —

tiny people gliding slanting down:

            a little buddha seated in each pearl —

and join the million waiving grass-seed buddhas

on the ground. (80-1) 

As part of our karma, those of us in the mindset called “white” must to turn toward these ghosts, and take up the work of rejuvenation, the work of honoring what we have made extinct, healing the suffering we have created and that our ancestors created, in their ignorance, spreading the grass-seeds of wisdom, love, and beauty.  

To clarify what this means, Snyder offers the following note on the poem: “‘White man’ here is not a racial designation, but a name for a certain set of mind. When we all become born-again natives of Turtle Island, then the ‘white man’ will be gone” (161). We can take “white” as a special case of conquest consciousness, applicable most keenly to Turtle Island, but this consciousness has arisen in “non-white” cultures, and we can in general think of a contrast between a conquest and a more liminal or ecospiritual consciousness. We should take pains to note that “ecospiritual” is not a synonym for “pagan” or “anti-Christian” but the necessary term is not easy to find. “Ecosensual” captures some of it, but that can sound misleading as well. “Liminal” has its merits and problems, and maybe we should think of an indigenous consciousness which may or may not find realization in a culture the “white” mindset might see as “indigenous”.

In any case, Snyder’s basic thought (and thus our other suggestions) resonates with the thinking of John Mohawk, a philosopher from the Seneca Nation: “I think that when we talk about re-indigenization we need a much larger, bigger umbrella to understand it. It’s not necessarily about the Indigenous people of a specific place; it’s about re-indigenizing the peoples of the planet to the planet” (in Nelson 2008: 259). Daniel Wildcat of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma defines indigenizing as, “a set of practices that results in processes in which people seriously reexamine and adopt those particular and unique cultures that emerged from the places they choose to live today” (Wildcat, 2005, 419). A set of practices. A set of practices that results in a process. Practices that give rise to processes of inquiry. It is activity all the way down, interwoven activity rooted in a place, with a history, with an ancestry of good and bad ways of practicing. All of us are originally indigenous—only we have gotten cut off from this. Even if we follow the Old Testament, we see that the divine made a place for us. Even if we follow an atheistic scientism, we can come to some lived sense of sacredness. We can all become indigenous together. 

With humility, and with the humble intention to transform our mindset and heal the division between Nature and Culture (a more general way to think of “re-indigenizing”), let us continue to follow Deloria’s suggestions: 

It is much easier, in discussing Indian principles, to put these basic ideas into a simple equation: Power and place produce personality. This equation simply means that the universe is alive, but it also contains within it the very important suggestion that the universe is personal and, therefore, must be approached in a personal manner. And this insight holds true because Indians are interested in the particular, which of necessity must be personal and incapable of expansion and projection to hold true universally. 

We might respectfully suggest that this personal touch goes to the heart of mystical participation. Our life together is a Cosmic love affair, a mysterious tango. When we dance tango, we let go of our barriers. We dance with a specific other person, and also the whole Cosmos. We dance in a particular place, and also—thereby—in placelessness. 

A spiritual life in general, and a practice like meditation in particular, means intimacy, and entrance into the alive and alove, entrance into sacredness and wonder, entrance into a great mystery. The mountains and rivers become personal, intimate, full of magic.  

As the mystical realist Dogen puts it—any careful study of his teachings compels us to count him a realist and thus also a mystic, a mystic and thus also a realist—“Saying that the self returns to the self is not contradicted by saying that the self is mountains, rivers, and the great earth.” The self returning to Sophia, returning to the Cosmic Mother or Cosmic Beloved, is the self returning to mountains, rivers, and the great Earth, returning to power and place, to empowerment and presence, to magic and mystery, to serenity and wonder, to wildness and the vast community of life, our interwoven family who give us our personal life. 

Deloria continues: 

The personal nature of the universe demands that each and every entity in it seek and sustain personal relationships. Here, the Indian theory of relativity is much more comprehensive than the corresponding theory articulated by Einstein and his fellow scientists. The broader Indian idea of relationship, in a universe that is very personal and particular, suggests that all relationships have a moral content. For that reason, Indian knowledge of the universe was never separated from other sacred knowledge about ultimate spiritual realities. 

Here we can find our way back to healing the division Dewey seemed to indulge: The division between art and science. This arises also as the division between art and ethics, as well as science and ethics. The ethical in science means more than refraining from unethical experiments. It means instead a renunciation of any form of “science” that does not further the conditions of life and arise from a holistic right livelihood. We cannot accept any science that does not arise from attunement with life and the Cosmos, and which does not also facilitate such attunement.  

Deloria reveals more about this interwovenness of ethics, aesthetics, science/epistemology, and the nature of what is: 

The corresponding question faced by American Indians when contemplating action is whether or not the proposed action is appropriate. Appropriateness includes the moral dimension of respect for the part of nature that will be used or affected in our action. Thus, killing an animal or catching a fish involved paying respect to the species and the individual animal or fish that such action had disturbed. Harvesting plants also involved paying respect to the plants. These actions were necessary because of the recognition that the universe was built upon constructive and co­operative relationships that had to be maintained. Thus, ceremonies such as the First Salmon and Buffalo Dance and the Strawberry Festivals and the Corn Dances celebrated and completed relationships properly or ensured their continuance for future generations. 

. . . . When using plants as both medicines and foods, Indians were very careful to use the plant appropriately. By maintaining the integrity of the plant within the relationship, Indians discovered many important facts about the natural world that non-Indians only came upon later. The Senecas, for example, knew that corn, squash, and beans were the three Sisters of the Earth, and because they had a place in the world and were compatible spirits, the Indians always planted them together. Only recently have non-Indians, after decades of laboratory research, discovered that the three plants make a natural nitrogen cycle that keeps land fertile and productive. 

. . . . The Indian method of observation produces a more realistic knowledge in the sense that, given the anticipated customary course of events, the Indian knowledge can predict what will probably occur. Western science seeks to harness nature to perform certain tasks. But there are limited resources in the natural world, and artificial and wasteful use depletes the resources more rapidly than would otherwise occur naturally. The acknowledgment that power and place produce personality means not only that the natural world is personal but that its perceived relationships are always ethical. For that reason, Indian accumulation of information is directly opposed to the Western scientific method of investigation, because it is primarily observation. Indians look for messages in nature, but they do not force nature to perform functions that it does not naturally do. 

Indian students can expect to have a certain amount of difficulty in adjusting to the scientific way of doing things. They will most certainly miss the Indian concern with ethical questions and the sense of being personally involved in the functioning of the natural world. But they can overcome this feeling and bring to science a great variety of insights about the world derived from their own tribal backgrounds and traditions. They must always keep in mind that traditional knowledge of their people was derived from centuries, perhaps millennia, of experience. Thus, stories that seem incredible when compared with scientific findings may indeed represent that unique event that occurs once a century and is not likely to be repeated. Western knowledge, on the other hand, is so well controlled by doctrine that it often denies experiences that could provide important data for consideration. 

By adopting the old Indian concern with the products of actions, students can get a much better perspective on what they are doing and how best to accomplish their goals. By maintaining a continuing respect for the beliefs and practices of their tribes, students can begin to see the world through the eyes of their ancestors and translate the best knowledge of the world into acceptable modern scientific terminology. 

Most important, however, are the contributions being made by American Indian scientists. With their expertise, we can better frame our own ethical and religious concerns and make more constructive choices in the use of existing Indian physical and human resources. It is this linkage between science and the community that we must nurture and encourage. We must carry the message that the universe is indeed a personal one. It may, indeed, be a spiritual universe that has taken on physical form and not a universe of matter that has accidentally produced personality. 

Wildcat offers some helpful final reflections on Deloria. His thinking, like that of Deloria, requires our care and contemplation: 

I understand Deloria’s idea of personality as the substantive embodiment, the unique realization, of all the relations and power we embody. Because each of us is someplace and, but for a few exceptions, never in exactly the same place as anybody else, our personalities are unique. Our phenomenal existence entails a spatial dimension and variations in power relations with other persons in the world. Therefore, personality as Deloria uses the term is a metaphysical concept, fundamentally different from the popular science view that what and who we are can be reduced to genetics or biochemical mechanisms. In the current reductionist genetic model of “personalities,” the critical interaction between environment and personality is all but lost. Even at the most general and abstract level of contemporary evolutionary theory the concept of species masks the uniqueness of individuals. 

What I mean can be understood by anyone who has had the long-term friendship of a dog, cat, bird, or “individual” of another species. We (each of us having such a friendship) know our other-than-human person is an individual, different from others of the same kind or breed. Why? Because we know them as persons: we learn through experience their personality. “Pets,” however, are a special case given their social circumstances. Anyone attentive to animal groups living outside of human control for an extended period begins to distinguish unique personalities of individuals in the herd or social group. American Indian traditions suggest many of our peoples fully understood how much our own human personalities depended on what could be learned from the other­than-human persons in the world. Our personalities or selves, what Carl Jung called “anima” and Paul Tournier called “persons,” as individuals within communities, require this recognition and interaction lest we become merely another demographic minority. 

In a world of human-created “virtual” persons, places, and communities, as well as biologically engineered plants and animals, humans seem prepared to become not merely the measure of all things but the creators of the “brave new world” Aldous Huxley foresaw in his cautionary novel by that name. And like Huxley’s Brave New World, there is one thing missing in the human-created ethernet world of virtual persons and artificial intelligence: a spiritual reality residing in persons and places unmanufactured and not engineered by human-the-creator. A spiritual reality permeates the world we experience, and incredible power exists in places where human creations do not get in the way or become the primary focus of our attention. This is not an argument, as my Comanche friend and colleague Ray Pierotti likes to emphasize, to take humans out of nature or for the maintenance of a pristine wilderness, a Garden of Eden, so to speak. Quite the contrary, it is a declaration that among the atmosphere of influences we move through daily, some powerful and unique influences exist in places not dominated by humankind. One need not read New Age texts to understand this; a survey of the diversity and complexity of distinct human cultures that have existed thus far and are daily threatened proves the point. The world is a diverse and complex reality. The best place to begin an understanding of this reality is with critical reflection regarding our experience. Self-determination requires reflection. 

Self-determination is reflective in two senses. First, in the sense that we can never act consciously until we have arrived at an understanding of who we are—each of us in our own unique place in the world. Here the metaphysics of living in the world draws a clear distinction between itself and the metaphysics of the world whose attendant psychology finds human self-discovery in aesthetic retreat from the world. In many indigenous traditions there are indeed “places” where one might think individuals retreat from the world for reflection and even revelation. Such a conclusion would be false, however, for in these practices the intention is not escape from the world but to seek out a better connection in the world, a connection to influences—power—that cannot be casually acquired. Heightened awareness of this/these power(s) does indeed require self-conscious reflection; however, reflection, or even contemplation, is not focused on some abstract or ideal sense of self but, if you will, on a process of discovery. 

And it is this process of discovery that brings us to the second reflective feature of the question of self-determination: the focus of our attention is to the relations and connections that influence who we are and are constitutive of our being, or what Deloria calls personality. Tribal traditions were not guided by a formal rule of law but by custom and habit. Browning Pipestem once asked Haskell students, “What is ‘the law’?” After they struggled mightily with the question, he gave an excellent answer and one illustrative of indigenous traditions: “The law,” he said with a pause, “is a contract—an agreement—between strangers.” Modern legal theory, in fact the law, is to a large extent an abstract human construction. However, and here is the critical point, in modern societies and nation-states, it is necessarily more meaningfully congruent with vague ideologies than customs, habits, and ceremonies in a land-based community of persons we know—experientially. Modern law is quite literally no respecter of real persons, but a definer and defender of persons in the abstract. That human beings in modern legal theories are philosophical constructions is an ex post facto demonstration that persons constructing laws no longer share an experiential place, as well as a demonstration of the evaporation of culture emergent from a place. In an indigenous practice of education informed by an experiential metaphysics, the focus of self-determination is on the manner in which our being and identity itself is constituted of the number of good relationships we are part of and actively maintain. Self-determination cannot be an individual question, for the reflective sense in which our selves are grounded in life among our relations and in the relationships surrounding us requires engagement with the community of persons, both human and other-than-human, when we determine what we ought to do, what choices we should make, and how we should be self-determining. 

Such a notion is indeed complex if left entirely to rational calculation, but experience gives us a source for estimation that goes beyond rational calculation. Self-determination in the dominant Western society is essentially about calculation, and appropriately so, for it has emerged in a legal culture of abstractions, of abstract persons, with abstract rights or freedoms. In such a model of politics—law, rights, responsibilities (of which there are few, for the most part), and power—solving political questions is like solving a problem in mathematics, given the right terms and operations. Legal constructionists, sympathetic to the points made above, get quickly frustrated, for in acknowledging the complexity of political environments as experienced, they quickly give up on rational elaboration of such complex models. To use an analogy from the quantitative social sciences, once one factors in more than a couple of independent variables in a computer-generated regression model of causal variables, the interaction effects are such that it grows increasingly difficult to say precisely what the effect of any single variable is. Rational calculation gets interminably difficult and hence, so the argument goes, impractical. I could not agree more. 

However, the problem is solved once one gives up on calculation and abstraction and instead redirects attention to experience through custom, habit, ceremony, and what I choose to call the development of a synthetic attentiveness. By synthetic attentiveness I mean a heightened sense of awareness that operates without thinking about it or paying attention to it. Synthetic attentiveness is the “I experience, therefore I am” indigenous response to Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am.” I have seen this keen awareness or synthetic attentiveness operate numerous times with traditional elders who demonstrate the amazing ability to be aware of events, processes, and activities surrounding them that most of us miss. Whether visiting a classroom, having a meeting with governmental officials, or being in wetlands or on a grassland prairie, I have often been surprised in discussions afterward by what these elders “noticed” without seeming to notice at all. This ability to what I will call process processes is not magical, and it only seems mysterious to those insistent on a rational schematic or mechanistic model to explain what happens. I can offer neither. I see no need to; rather, this processing of processes seems acquired by paying attention—by learning to be attentive to the world we live in. 

The question of self-determination is one of degree: how engaged, connected, and attentive are we to our community? This will seem contradictory and paradoxical to Western-thinking students and teachers. The more attentive one is to their community, the more self-determining they can be; the less attentive, the more selfish and self-destructing they willbe. Christopher Lasch struck a chord with many in his description of Western culture, and contemporary American culture in particular, as a Culture of Narcissism—a culture of self-love. I would merely extend Lasch’s insightful commentary to the love of all things or objects embodying selfishness.  

Indigenous metaphysics offers insights into many of the most troubling problems modern or postmodern societies face, by recognizing the world as having living physical and spiritual dimensions, not as a fast and fixed thing. Space, places, ecosystems, and environments are not the “final frontier” waiting to be conquered and controlled by modern ideologies; rather, they constitute the context through which we escape the abstract relativism of postmodernist thought and find what it means to be self-determining. 

American Indian metaphysics has the advantage of framing all questions of knowledge as fundamentally moral questions that literally reside in our everyday life. The way many of us live today makes it easy to compartmentalize different aspects of our life. The strength that Deloria has always found in American Indian metaphysics is their emergence from a way of life. As we think about what it means to exercise self-determination, we must not avoid examining so-called economic, political, and social aspects of our lives as part of larger moral questions and what it means to be indigenous today. It may very well be as the elder Dan in Neither Wolf Nor Dog told Kent Nerburn: living with honor is just as important, if not more important, than living with freedom. We are obsessed with freedoms, but freedom to do what? If we fail to ask these foundational questions in education, it seems disingenuous to complain about behavior later. So let us think about self­-determination indigenously: about what living with honor means to Peoples still connected to places. 

Sophia has to do with breaking down this false fragmentation that ills us, and making life a personal affair again—though in some ways precisely the opposite of our now habitual sense of the “personal,” and without effacing a proper sense of privacy. 

The primitive and the personal go together. As we noted before, “personification is indigenous to the psyche,” and this means that we mutually personify. The sacred powers and inconceivable causes personify us—make us into people. This happens in particular places, intimately, by means of our relationships. It is a mystical affair. 

The view of the dominant culture may refer to the “primitive” mindset as a “mystical” mindset, and may treat the “mystical” mindset as “primitive”. The “mystical” gets disparaged by the mind indoctrinated in the dominant culture, written off as obscurantist, deluded, superstitious, and so on. 

But this all amounts to gestures of intellectual hubris. “Mystic” refers to one who has been initiated, and life is an initiatory experience, intimate and persona. We cannot hide from it. We cannot escape or abstract ourselves away. And yet we must actually enter, just like an initiate must enter a sacred space, enter into a vision quest, enter into and receive their soul purpose, giving-and-receiving the World.  

We live in a participatory Cosmos, and that means we have to learn how to participate, learn the skillful and realistic Ways of participation, which means graceful, inclusive/patient, ethical, creative, caring, attentive, diligent, wise, and generous relationship. To learn these—which is a matter of co-discovery and co-creation altogether, and thus teaching-and-learning in nonduality—is to enter into our life, this life we all share. It is to become a mystic, which is the most practical or pragmatic relationship with ourselves, each other, all beings, all of sentient being.  

Mystical participation is not “primitive,” but is precisely the opposite: Mystical participation is the most sophisticated way of life—sophisticated and wise, practical and loving, realistic and graceful, dignified and sacred. 

Of course, mystical participation exudes an aura of wonder, and this terrifies the rationalistic mind. This wonder is the wonder of childhood. The “primitive” seems “immature” to the rationalistic mind, the conquest consciousness, the hubristic mind of the dominant culture. The “primitive” seems childlike, and so it seems unsophisticated. 

But Sophia has an ever-youthful aspect. For this reason, some of the most venerated archetypal images of wisdom appear as a youth or as touched with youthfulness, as in the case of Manjushri, always depicted as a boy, or in figures like Ryokan, who clearly presence the archetypal energies in living form. Ryokan spent a great deal of time playing with children, and often exhibited a childlike innocence.  

Jung found himself challenged by the discovery of Sophia’s youthful essence at the center of his soul. In a process exceedingly rare for “civilized” people of the dominant culture, Jung took a more or less shamanic journey into the wild landscape of the psyche, recording his experiences there, and eventually adding compelling artwork. We can benefit from his inner work if we read the so-called Red Book (a.k.a. Liber Novus) and study its images. The following passage seems particularly relevant, and it shows how Jung, as someone reared in the dominant culture, struggled with ways of knowing that defy “science” and “rationality” as this culture narrowly conceives them, how he struggled in the tension between “the spirit of the time” (the doctrines of the dominant culture) and “the spirit of the depths” (the soul’s wisdom gradually and sometimes suddenly revealed). 

On the second night I called out to my soul: 

“I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside of myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them. For I made discoveries on my erring through events, humanity, and the world. I found men. And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself. I found you where I least expected you. You climbed out of a dark shaft. You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. They burned in my heart and drove me to all the boldest acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself. You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling. You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you. 

I wandered for many years, so long that I forgot that I possessed a soul. Where were you all this time? Which Beyond sheltered you and gave you sanctuary? Oh, that you must speak through me, that my speech and I are your symbol and expression! How should I decipher you? 

Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard—are you God? Is God a child, a maiden? Forgive me if I babble. No one else hears me. I speak to you quietly, and you know that I am neither a drunkard nor someone deranged, and that my heart twists in pain from the wound, whose darkness delivers speeches full of mockery: “You are lying to yourself! You spoke so as to deceive others and make them believe in you. You want to be a prophet and chase after your ambition.” The wound still bleeds, and I am far from being able to pretend that I do not hear the mockery. 

How strange it sounds to me to call you a child, you who still hold the all-without-end in your hand. I went on the way of the day, and you went invisibly with me, putting the pieces together meaningfully, and letting me see the whole in each part. 

You took away where I thought to take hold, and you gave me where I did not expect anything and time and again you brought about fate from new and unexpected quarters. Where I sowed, you robbed me of the harvest, and where I did not sow, you give me fruit a hundredfold. And time and again I lost the path and found it again where I would never have foreseen it. You upheld my belief, when I was alone and near despair. At every decisive moment you let me believe in myself.” 

Like a tired wanderer who had sought nothing in the world apart from her, shall I come closer to my soul. I shall learn that my soul finally lies behind everything, and if I cross the world, I am ultimately doing this to find my soul. Even the dearest are themselves not the goal and end of the love that goes on seeking, they are symbols of their own souls. 

My friends, do you guess to what solitude we ascend? 

I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration? You think that the dream is foolish and ungainly. What is beautiful? What is ungainly? What is clever? What is foolish? The spirit of this time is your measure, but the spirit of the depths surpasses it at both ends. Only the spirit of this time knows the difference between large and small. But this difference is invalid, like the spirit which recognizes it. 

The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. 

But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live or to think. You will say: “But I cannot live or think everything that others live or think.” But you should say: “The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.” It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now. But you cannot flee from yourself. It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself. This way you will never reach the knowledge of the heart. 

The knowledge of your heart is how your heart is.

From a cunning heart you will know cunning.

From a good heart you will know goodness. 

So that your understanding becomes perfect, consider that your heart is both good and evil. You ask, “What? Should I also live evil?” 

The spirit of the depths demands: “The life that you could still live, you should live. 

Well-being decides, not your well-being, not the well-being of the others, but only wellbeing.” Well-being is between me and others, in society. I, too, lived—which I had not done before, and which I could still do. I lived into the depths, and the depths began to speak. The depths taught me the other truth. It thus united sense and nonsense in me. 

I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf, completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: “I am the servant of a child.” Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need. 

The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see

myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child. 

. . . . My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I laughed at myself. 

Your God should not be a man of mockery, rather . . . You should mock yourself and rise above this.  

Among the remarkable insights Jung arrived at: “I am only the expression and symbol of the soul.” Can we genuinely enter such an insight? We speak of symbols, but do any of us really think of our body as a symbol of the soul? What we ordinarilyu refer to as “body” and “mind” are nothing more than ideas, and ultimately some kind of symbol, as if the soul exists as an aperture, and out of this aperture a reality gets projected in the form of symbols, as if our life were but a dream, a magical display. “Row, row, row your boat/ gently down the stream/ Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily/ life is but a dream.” A childish song? 

We can note the tremendous irony in the way we, as Jung did, might laugh at the youthful wisdom inside us, laugh at “primitive” people who seem “childlike” to those of us in the dominant culture. What is the irony? The dominant culture doesn’t orient itself to producing adults and Elders (in the traditional sense of a wise one). The dominant culture produces aging children, advanced juveniles, many of whom remaining trapped in narrow versions of the child archetype. This arises from the culture’s self-domestication, and also from its fragmentation, since we cannot truly mature in the full spiritual/philosophical sense (and thus in the robust ecological sense) if we only cultivate fragments of ourselves. It would be like an oak tree focusing on the production of acorns alone, and never becoming more than a sapling. For a little sapling, the weight of hundreds of acorns would make it unhealthy.  

Jung tried to face some of these ironies of reason, and yet he still falls into the camp of seeing “mystical participation” as some kind of limited mindset. In the “Definitions” section of his work on psychological types, he defines “mystical participation” this way: 

Participation Mystique: This term originates Lévy-Bruhl. It connotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with the object wherein the subject is unable to differentiate himself clearly from the object to which he is bound by an immediate relation that can only be described as partial identity. This identity is based upon an a priori one-ness of subject and object “Participation mystique”, therefore, is a vestigial remainder of this primordial condition. It does not apply to the whole subject-object relation, but only to certain cases in which the phenomenon of this peculiar relatedness appears. It is, of course, a phenomenon that is best observed among the primitives; but it occurs not at all infrequently among civilized men, although not with the same range or intensity. Among civilized peoples it usually happens between persons—and only seldom between a person and thing. In the former case it is a so-called state of transference, in which the object (as a general rule) obtains a sort of magical, i.e. unconditional, influence over the subject. In the latter case it is a question of a similar influence on the part of a thing, or else a kind of identification with a thing or the idea of a thing. (CW 6, para. 781) 

Here Jung falls into the trap of the dominant culture’s egotism. He pathologizes a mind he has not wonderstood, lumping it together with fragmented versions of itself. He sees the “primitive” mind as a mind caught up in projection, in which the mind cannot distinguish itself and its own contents with others and their experience (a deluded unitivity, rather than something nondualistic, or a union of opposites in accord with Jung’s very own vision). This is all atomistic. Jung elaborates on these alleged pathologies in other passages. For instance: 

The further we go back into history the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And, if we go right down to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the idea of the individual. In place of individuality we find only collective relationship, or “participation mystique” (Lévy-Bruhl). But the collective attitude prevents the understanding and estimation of a psychology which differs from that of the subject, because the mind that is collectively orientated is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection. What we understand by the concept ‘individual’ is a relatively recent acquisition in the history of the human mind and human culture. It is no wonder, therefore, that the earlier all-powerful collective attitude almost entirely prevented an objective psychological estimation of individual differences, and forbade any general scientific objectification of individual psychological processes. It was owing to this very lack of psychological thinking that knowledge became psychologized, i.e. crowded with projected psychology. Striking instances of this are to be seen in the first attempts at a philosophical explanation of the universe. The development of individuality, with the resulting psychological differentiation of man, goes hand in hand with a de-psychologizing of objective science. (CW 6, para. 12). 

Here Jung gives us insight into pathologizing at the cultural level—but that of the dominant culture, rather than the “primitive”. One can still find strong currents of this pathological consciousness, even in “progressive” thinkers who have been influenced by the otherwise helpful work of Jung and others.  

We find in Jung a valliant effort to see clearly, and he often delivers profound medicine for the psyche of the dominant culture. In some places Jung, like many in the dominant culture, takes a page from Nietzsche. Those familiar with Nietzsche’s work know that Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality is not, strictly speaking, a work of “literal” genealogy. It is a spiritual and philosophical diagnosis of the soul of the dominant culture.  

We can see in the above passage from Jung the bias that human beings had to become “individuals,” and that the “individualistic” psyche of the dominant culture gave birth to the “miracle” of “science”. Before this innovation of conquest consciousness—the “individual”—people somehow lived while stuck in “the collective”. This sounds so obviously like a trope—really, like propaganda (for instance, versions of this argument are offered as justifications for “capitalism”)—that one can hardly believe someone as progressive as Jung bought into it . . . that is, if it weren’t for the fact that his own view of the psyche ironically explains why he would buy into it, along with other ironic facts, such as his critical views of the “science” and “culture” of the dominant nations (but, of course, one hears this in all of today’s “progressive” thinkers as well, as they try to justify the dominant culture, making it “necessary” for the World soul, rather than just engaging in the truth and reconciliation we need to heal our karmic wounds). 

The pathologizing becomes clearer on an individual level in the following passage: 

I am reminded of another mental case who was neither a poet nor anything very outstanding, just a naturally quiet and rather sentimental youth. He had fallen in love with a girl and, as so often happens, had failed to ascertain whether his love was requited. His primitive participation mystique took it for granted that his agitations were plainly the agitations of the other, which on the lower levels of human psychology is naturally very often the case. Thus he built up a sentimental love-fantasy which precipitately collapsed when he discovered that the girl would have none of him. (CW 7, para. 231) 

He describes only a failed, fragmented, unskillful “mystical participation”. We must either call it terribly deluded and encumbered mystical participation, or just call it delusion, missing the mark for mystical participation by light-years. This encumbered kind of “mystical participation” carries the same basic lack of dignity and authenticity as someone’s justifying genocide on the basis of Christian or Buddhist teachings, or someone’s failing to recognize encumbered anger on the basis of some supposedly nondualistic sensibility (somehow seeing our anger as “good” even if in fact it counts as self-centered and rooted in ignorance). It may seem strange to compare this young man with genocidal or ecocidal maniacs, but we miss the point that the same basic spiritual materialism motivates both, and that many a pining “lover” commits violence against women that we should both condemn and seek to correct. We can only consider such activity as ideology, spiritual materialism, delusion—and we correct ignorance with wisdom, love, and beauty, which in some cases involves a fierce compassion that does not lose its dignity and grace.  

We must admit that all practices can be turned to delusion, violence, and so on. And thus, the appearance of spiritual materialism in supposed mystics does not at all count against our characterization of the mystical and the spiritual orientation as skillful and realistic. Rather the contrary: We cannot count ourselves a true mystic until we muster the courage to overturn all our delusions, including all self-deceptions, however well-rationalized. 

One quibble we might make with Underhill’s contemplation above relates to her suggestion that, as to the question, What is reality? “Only a mystic can answer it: and he, in terms which other mystics alone will understand. Therefore, for the time being, the practical man may put it on one side.” Rescuing the terms mystic, mystical, and so on means ridding ourselves of certain “impractical” connotations, and even the connotation of “esotericism”. Sophia is eminently practical, and Underhill could have and perhaps should have, written the opposite: “The practical person, if they want to live well, to live skillfully, vibrantly, successfully, must become a mystic, and must wonderstand the nature of reality.” This is only esoteric in that reality remains “hidden” or “secret” until we do the necessary work.  

In the dominant culture, people feel entitled to the wrong things, and perhaps the most tragic entitlement in the dominant culture relates to feeling entitled to unearned philosophical or spiritual insight, and a misunderstanding that spiritual insights arise from rigorously cultivated experience, not from opinions or from the gratuitous traumas and struggles placed upon its citizens by the incoherence, fragmentation, and unskillfulness of the culture itself. Specifically, people in the dominant culture will often raise themselves up on the basis of partial, fragmented insights which they themselves may, on some level, experience as full and fulfilling, often because of stories they can tell related to material results allegedly achieved on the basis of such insights. While the soul knows about these incoherencies, their ego can keep the incoherence largely repressed. 

These sorts of things arise in part because we in the dominant culture inherited an abandonment of wisdom, which seems to have happened, perhaps centrally, because of wisdom’s demands and the incompatibility of those demands with the implicit values of the culture. The Greek notion of sophia related to skillfulness, and the word philosophy comes to us under the influence of Socrates, who labored as a stone cutter—thus embodying dedication as well as a need for proper effort—grace rather than force. In contrast, Aristotle, perhaps a more elitist and ungrounded thinker, spoke of phronesis, not sophia. Phronesis seems to have carried more of an intellectual connotation, and we can reasonably find intellectualism an esoteric practice in the pejorative sense. Life is activity, not abstract thinking, not speculation, pondering, navel-gazing, being absorbed in thinking or contemplation in the intellectual sense.  

However, we can make the grave mistake of accepting supposedly practical observations as concrete, when in fact they remain abstract. The business tycoon, the “thought leader,” the coach or self-help guru may sound different from what we would call “intellectual,” but “intellectual” should not mean “full of big words and academic concepts”. From the high esoterisism of the derivatives trading that crashed the world “economy” in 2007/2008 to the crass nonsense of Ayn Rand (which so many political “leaders” employ to justify all manner of injustice) to the “reasonable,” “insightful,” or even “spiritual” teachings of the self-help gurus, we find countless expressions of abstraction and intellectualism. “Intellectual” means something like “on the basis of ideas, without deep wisdom, compassion, and experience.” Sadly, even a genuinely spiritual experience can become intellectualized if the ego gets its way and manages to co-opt the experience. None of this kind of thinking accords with the way Nature functions.

Thinking must be living thinking, alive and alove, and we must evaluate our thinking on the basis of its skillfulness or lack of skillfulness, from the perspective of all beings and all the consequences of our thinking for all beings. In other words, we must evaluate our thinking from the perspective of the mystery itself, and not from the perspective of our narrow human purposes. Sophia presents a threat to all intellectualism and egotism, and also to all forms of domination, fear, craving, and ignorance. Zeus, the leader of the gods, knew that Wisdom would give birth to something that would overthrow him, so he swallowed Wisdom in order to try and control Her (like a lot of men, he tried to swallow without tasting). She must have laughed at his antics. Since She is everywhere, the attempt to control this or that manifestation of Her only leads to suffering. 

Back to Jung: 

Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. 

But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. 

Sadly, Jung’s insight seems incredibly susceptible to spiritual materialism, perhaps now more than ever. Anybody can claim “knowledge of the heart” while lacking wisdom and a genuinely expansive and skillful compassion. We can live largely unethical lifestyles (the kind typical of the dominant culture) and still claim to be “living our life to the full,” and following a “knowledge of the heart”. The level of abject nonsense can boggle the mind, as can the level of subtle, sophisticated, extraordinarily well-rationalized intellectualism. 

We live in a conceptual culture, not a culture rooted in ecologies, in places and the powers of those places. We do not live in a culture of sacredness. We do not live in a culture that presences skillful nonduality of Nature and Culture.  

In fact, we live in a largely print-based and now a “media”-based culture. We may find that skillful print and skillful media can help to awaken us from our delusions, but it requires a great deal of care. In the best case, we would return to ourselves by returning to mountains, rivers, the great Earth, and the sacredness of the Cosmos. We would begin to listen, to wise ones, Elders, and sages, and to the mountains, rivers, horses, wolves, eagles, hummingbirds, dolphins, bees, flowers, grasses, trees.  

As a supplement, we could turn to teachings recorded in books, which at their best can point us to the mountains, rivers, the great Earth, the wise ones and sages, the horses, wolves, bears, butterflies, and whales. 

We can only return to ourselves. We can only return to sacredness and wonder. No books will suffice. No ordinary “knowledge” will heal us. We require something more concrete than any of our ideas or possessions. The World demands practical wisdom, not abstractions. And yet we cannot fully understand how abstract and intellectual most of our habitual thought really is. 

If we take this imperative of concreteness and practicality together with the intimacy of tasting, finding out for ourselves, Sophia thus provides us with a basic definition of spirituality, which is a particular attitude in LoveWisdom, an attitude we can apply to our religious, scientific, political, and personal lives.  

A spiritual commitment is a commitment to taste for ourselves, to bring life, love, and the sacred mystery to a skillful realization in our own experience, our own heart, mind, body, world, and Cosmos. We don’t want to “believe,” and we don’t even want to “know”. Rather, we want to make something as real as possible, to taste it and thus come to such intimacy with it that it is not a matter of belief or even of ordinary “knowledge”. We live it and let it live us . . . we embody it, presence it, moment to moment, as each moment.  

Our spiritual commitment is also a commitment to go beyond ourselves, to participate in something greater than ourselves that has a profound kind of meaningfulness to it, something that gives true refuge to ourselves and all beings. We can just call it reality, or the divine, or life. The point is that we don’t want to remain trapped in our ego, in our neurosis, in our fears and our hopes, our craving, our anger, our ignorance. We want life, we want reality, we want our fullest potential realized—however inconceivable it may be to our fearful, ignorant mind. Thus we would work with Sophia because She is powerful and empowering, as described in the following lines from the Book of Wisdom: 

27 Although She is alone, She can do everything; Herself unchanging, She renews the world, and, generation after generation, passing into holy souls, She makes them into God’s friends and prophets;

28 for God loves only those who dwell with Wisdom.

29 She is indeed more splendid than the sun, She outshines all the constellations; compared with light, She takes first place,

30 for light must yield to night, but against Wisdom evil cannot prevail. (Book 7) 

Given this kind of understanding of Sophia, it is easy to see why She was such an important figure in Alchemy and in Gnosticism. In Alchemy, She was the Philosopher’s Stone, and also the guide who led the alchemist to the Stone, the Beloved of the alchemist who might enact a kind of divine marriage with Her.  

In Gnosticism She was at minimum a personification of Wisdom, and it is Wisdom that allows one to know the divine directly—not “know” as in having an object of knowledge, but gnosis as a nondual knowing in intimacy. But Gnosticism also has some texts that could be read as indicating a strong Feminine dimension of the divine, or even allowing the possibility of seeing the divine as primarily Feminine. Depending on our way of reading, we might see these passages as referring to Sophia, and we might therefore think of Sophia as the Divine Itself. 

The goal of realizing Wisdom was not exclusive to the Gnostics or the Alchemists. Again, it seems that every tradition, of necessity, values Wisdom, and all traditions point to figures of guidance, both mythical and historical, to help us realize Wisdom in our own lives. She awakens in the soul like a spark of bliss, a timeless flame. Sophia’s human expressions include such figures as Nestor, Odysseus and Penelope, Diotima, Socrates, Diogenes, Confucius (Kongzi), Lao-tzu (Laozi), the Buddha, Machig Labdrön, Ibn ’Arabi, Baal Shem Tov; exceptional rulers, such as Solomon or Ashoka; and more contemporary figures such as A.D. Gordon, Martin Luther King, Martin Buber, Septima Clark, Lou Salomé, Toni Wolf, Christiana Morgan, Wangari Maathai, Sayed Hussein Nasr, Joan Halifax, Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Joanna Macy, Pema Chödrön, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chief Oren Lyons, and the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. One could compose a very long list, including not only figures we might find rather saintly, but also those who became wise in a more humble way. In other words, we wouldn’t really compare Jesus and Desmond Tutu (the latter, as part of his good virtue, would never take it seriously), and yet we can sense how skillfully and sincerely the good bishop walks the Christian path. 

If we look with a little care, we find Sophia all over the place, in the exalted and the ordinary. Many of us know something about the significant stock of archetypal images of Wisdom, even if they are largely nonfunctional in our culture. For instance, we have heard of Athena, or we have heard of King Solomon, even if we don’t actively revere them and work with them as images of guidance, symbols capable of evoking sacred capacities within our own soul. Still, in our everyday lives, we actively seek out wise council from friends, relatives, co-workers, and even strangers. We know the importance of Wisdom. 

And we are aware of the contemporary figures who embody the spirit of Sophia, whether they are famous or little known outside our personal circles. But there has been a tragicomic effort to suppress Sophia, to flood us with images that dilute our vision of Her, to turn up the noise so that Her voice becomes almost impossible to hear, and to discount and discredit many of Her manifestations, or interpret them in narrow ways, whether medically, psychologically, politically, economically, or academically.  

Despite contemporary figures, and despite the fact that Sophia has had a significant presence in western culture, one would hardly know it today—and for good reason. First and foremost, if Sophia were truly present in western culture, then much of what goes on in western culture would have to change. It would mean a revolution—and a most radical one at that. Thus key forces in the culture actively repress Sophia, and therefore anything inside of us that clings to elements of this culture—despite our sense of its problems—will resist turning toward Sophia, lest She demand surrender of something we, in our narrow thinking, fear we cannot live without. Despite those fears, we long for Her—and She calls out to us: 

Does not wisdom call out?
    Does not understanding raise her voice?
2 At the highest point along the way,
    where the paths meet, she takes her stand;
3 beside the gate leading into the city,
    at the entrance, she cries aloud:
4 “To you, O people, I call out;
    I raise my voice to all humankind.
5 You who are simple, gain prudence;
    you who are foolish, set your hearts on it.
6 Listen, for I have trustworthy things to say;
    I open my lips to speak what is right.
7 My mouth speaks what is true,
    for my lips detest wickedness.
8 All the words of my mouth are just;
    none of them is crooked or perverse.
9 To the discerning all of them are right;
11 . . . wisdom is more precious than rubies,
    and nothing you desire can compare with her . . . .

19 My fruit is better than fine gold;
    what I yield surpasses choice silver.
20 I walk in the way of righteousness,
    along the paths of justice,
21 bestowing a rich inheritance on those who love me
    and making their treasuries full . . . .

    blessed are those who keep my ways.
33 Listen to my instruction and be wise;
    do not disregard it.
34 Blessed are those who listen to me,
    watching daily at my doors,
    waiting at my doorway.

                                    ~ Proverbs 8 

This passage echoes the words of Proverbs 1: 

20 Wisdom calls aloud outside;
She raises her voice in the open squares.
21 She cries out in the chief concourses,
At the openings of the gates in the city
She speaks her words:
22 “How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity?
For scorners delight in their scorning,
And fools hate knowledge.
23 Turn at my rebuke;
Surely I will pour out my spirit on you;
I will make my words known to you.” 

She is available to us, and She keeps calling. We not only fail to hear, but we may actively turn away from Her voice. When we do so, we may find Wisdom can become a rather strict teacher, because of Her fiercesome compassion:

24 Because I have called and you refused,
I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded,
25 Because you disdained all my counsel,
And would have none of my rebuke,
26 I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your terror comes,
27 When your terror comes like a storm,
And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,
When distress and anguish come upon you.

28 Then they will call on me, but I will not answer;
They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me.
29 Because they hated knowledge
And did not choose the fear of the Lord,
30 They would have none of my counsel
And despised my every rebuke.
31 Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,
And be filled to the full with their own fancies.
32 For the turning away of the simple will slay them,
And the complacency of fools will destroy them 

If we will respond to Her call, Wisdom offers us the only true refuge we will ever find:

33 But whoever listens to me will dwell safely,
And will be secure, without fear of evil. 

Some philosophers find this sort of thing a little too “poetic”. Such a reaction shows how much we have constricted the soul, for the soul needs poetry, art, and the imagination in general. It can feel saddening when philosophers fail to take the lead in defense of art, for Sophia is beautiful and creative—essentially so. Art is essential, not superfluous. Its essential character matters now more than ever. The control of art and imagination are important to the forces in the dominant culture that want to keep us away from anything that might help sensitize us to the way we now live, anything that might help us envision vitalizing alternatives. 

The philosopher Henry Corbin used the word imaginal for the visionary function of the soul, because he realized how much certain cultures, especially cultures of the dominant paradigm, had denigrated “imagination,” reducing it to something like “fantasy” or “unreality”. This goes together with the general degradation of art. The educational institutions of our culture seem to exist primarily to “protect” students from LoveWisdom and art, to keep those dangerous potentials at bay, to keep the vision of all of us constricted. 

The importance of vision often eludes us—because we lack it. Our vision gives us wings. We fly on the vision of the Cosmos that we practice and realize.[7] How far we can fly depends on our wings, and, as Zhuangzi pointed out, those with limited and limiting vision cannot even understand those with Cosmic vision: 

In the bald and barren north, there is a dark sea, the Lake of Heaven. In it is a fish which is several thousand li across, and no one knows how long. His name is K’un. There is also a bird there, named P’eng, with a back like Mount T’ai and wings like clouds filling the sky. He beats the whirlwind, leaps into the air, and rises up ninety thousand miles, cutting through the clouds and mist, shouldering the blue sky, and then he turns his eyes south and prepares to journey to the southern darkness. 

The little quail laughs at him, saying, “Where does he think he’s going? I give a great leap and fly up, but I never get more than ten or twelve yards before I come down fluttering among the weeds and brambles. And that’s the best kind of flying anyway! Where does he think he’s going?” Such is the difference between big and little. 

Therefore a man who has wisdom enough to fill one office effectively, good conduct enough to impress one community, virtue enough to please one ruler, or talent enough to be called into service in one state, has the same kind of self-pride as these little creatures. Sung Jung-tzu would certainly burst out laughing at such a man. The whole world could praise Sung Jung-tzu and it wouldn’t make him exert himself; the whole world could condemn him and it wouldn’t make him mope. 

He drew a clear line between the internal and the external, and recognized the boundaries of true glory and disgrace. But that was all. As far as the world went, he didn’t fret and worry, but there was still ground he left unturned. 

Lieh Tzu could ride the wind and go soaring around with cool and breezy skill, but after fifteen days he came back to earth. As far as the search for good fortune went, he didn’t fret and worry. He escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around. If he had only mounted on the truth of Heaven and Earth, ridden the changes of the six breaths, and thus wandered through the boundless, then what would he have had to depend on? 

Therefore I say, the Perfect Man has no self; the Holy Man has no merit; the Sage has no fame. 

Our vision carries the heart, carries the body, carries the World. Our vision arises altogether with our thinking, and with the Cosmos itself. What we can be and what the World and the Cosmos can be depends on vision. This vision is not “a seeing thing,” not “visual” in the strictest sense, but a whole feel for life, the feel of life, the taste and fragrance of WisdomLoveBeauty that feeds us and cultivates life forward for us, through us, as us. There is seeing in this vision, but even a blind person can see this.  

The philosophical hacks of the dominant culture, the coaches, consultants, and self-help gurus, call this “mindset”. But this concept of “mindset” is itself fragmented, limited, and limiting. What the wisdom traditions mean by things like vision and view vastly exceeds the concept of mindset. Sophia helps us get beyond such limiting notions. 

We can look at Sophia as an image of the soul, an energy emerging from the imaginal dimension of our being, as the imaginal itself and its awakening and guidance. But, however we look at Her, it is important to see Her as the image of Wisdom, Love, and Beauty that we are all called to presence, whatever our religious, philosophical, political, or spiritual ideals. We cannot become the beings we need to become without the essential characteristics that Sophia embodies and inspires. 

Woman is the foundation of the world;

The universe is her form.

Woman is the foundation of the world;

She is the true form of the body.

Whatever form she takes,

Whether the form of a man or a woman,

Is the superior form.

In woman is the form of all things,

Of all that lives and moves in the world.

There is no jewel rarer than a woman,

No condition superior to that of a woman.

There is not, nor has been, nor will be

Any destiny to equal that of a woman.

There is no kingdom, no wealth,

To be compared with a woman.

There is no prayer to equal a woman.

There is not, nor has been, nor will be

Any yoga to compare with a woman,

No mystical formula nor asceticism

To match a woman.

There are not, nor have been, nor will be

Any riches more valuable than woman.

(Shaktisamagama Tantra, translation by Khanna, from Bose 2000: 115) 

To take an archetypal perspective in psychology leads us . . . to envision the basic nature and structure of the soul in an imaginative way and to approach the basic questions of psychology first of all by means of the imagination.  (James Hillman, 1989: 23) 

Imagination is the reproductive or creative activity of the mind in general. It is not a special faculty, since it can come into play in all the basic forms of psychic activity, whether thinking, feeling, sensation, or intuition (qq.v.). Fantasy as imaginative activity is, in my view, simply the direct expression of psychic life, of psychic energy which cannot appear in consciousness except in the form of images or contents, just as physical energy cannot manifest itself except as a definite physical state stimulating the sense organs in physical ways. For as every physical state, from the energic standpoint, is a dynamic system, so from the same standpoint a psychic content is a dynamic system manifesting itself in consciousness. We could therefore say that fantasy in the sense of a fantasm is a definite sum of libido that cannot appear in consciousness in any other way than in the form of an image. A fantasm is an idée-force. Fantasy as imaginative activity is identical with the flow of psychic energy. (Jung CW 6, para. 722)[8]

[1] Sophia may seem “strange” to us. As Jung says, “The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions” (CW 9i, para. 1). The mention here of the collective unconscious implies that Sophia already belongs to all of us—and we belong to Her. Furthermore, Jung goes on to say that archetypes are the contents of the collective unconscious (para. 4). This makes things more nuanced. We don’t “see” Sophia, but only Her images. On the other hand, we can sense Her everywhere—and, more importantly, She illuminates our vision, helping us to sense all things. As the archetype of archetypes, Sophia directs the attunement of the soul, the maturation of each soul from seed to fruit, acorn to oak, droplet to ocean. We will elsewhere have more consideration of this process of maturation and realization.

[2] I love that phrase, in part because it is “poetic” and challenging to dry “scientific” thinking, but it can give rise to misunderstanding. Why would personification be indigenous to the psyche? Because aliveness and aloveness is everywhere, and the recognition of mind comes with “personification,” in part because all manifestations of mind are relational and involve personality to some degreee. It is not that the only way to relate to a human or to a dog or any other being is to “project” a mind and/or a personality onto them. It is that mind arises or happens relationally, and thus you and I co-discover-create each other and the World—we personify each other. It might be better to say relationality is indigenous to psyche, or just to say soul is relational through and through. To experience with you, one might say that I “take in” your presencing and it comes alive in me. That is too dualistic. But it is as if I wear your masklessness as we dance, and you wear mine. The dance is all there is.

[3] Terra nullius was a papal doctrine, a dogma of the church that declared the land of Turtle Island effectively “uninhabited,” despite the proliferation of indigenous peoples and cultures. The indigenous people would agree that it was “nobody’s land,” but that would have included the colonizers, who lacked such wisdom, love, and beauty.

[4] It is vitally important to consider what it is we spend our time chewing on. We chew on certain habits, memories, beliefs, and concepts, again and again, keeping some of them like a toothpick in the lips of our being, others like a splintering bone. If we look carefully, we may find that surprisingly little passes through the lips of our being that is truly alive, refreshing, nourishing, healing.

[5] from Practical Mysticism, available online: http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/underhill/UnderhillPracticalMysticism.pdf

[6] Dewey seems okay with this incoherence between art and science, as in the following passage, which seems advisable to take as a criticism of science, rather than a matter-of-fact description, and a reader could understandably experience disappointment in Dewey for not offering a more critical stance, rather than portraying the incoherence between art and science as a matter of different emphasis:

“In contrast with the person whose purpose is esthetic, the scientific man is interested in problems, in situations wherein tension between the matter of observation and of thought is marked. Of course he cares for their resolution. But he does not rest in it; he passes on to another problem using an attained solution only as a stepping stone from which to set on foot further inquiries.”

[7] The notion of practice-realization becomes central to better ways of knowing and being, living and loving. The meaning of practice-realization will become clearer as we go along in our practice of life, but for now we can say that there is no knowing apart from practices, and that knowing depends on two kinds of realization: The sense of “realizing” what something means, as when we say to someone, “Oh, now I realize what you were trying to say,” and the sense of “realizing” when we say, “My dream finally came to realization.” These two kinds of realization go together, for we do not know something until we practice so as to bring it to realization—only with the realization does the knowing become real, and we cannot claim real knowing prior to this. However, practice and realization are not two things. It often seems that we practice so as to realize, but one moment of practice is one moment of realization. Abstraction means standing outside of practice, and outside of realization. We claim to know, but we deal only with words and fragmented or incoherent experience, not with fully blossoming experience attuned with Cosmic reality. These are subtle matters, not easy to clarify in words without becoming scholastic. We must continue our practice.  

[8] The passage by Hillman comes from a chapter called “The Poetic Basis of Mind”. This resonates in a deep way with Gregory Bateson’s notion of the Syllogism in Grass (we will inquire into this later), which he uses to help us to see the poetic basis of evolution, which he deems a mental process. The passage from Jung invites us to see that images of Sophia are the very flow of psychic energy. Sophia is the energy of the soul, the energy of the Cosmos itself.