Healing the divide

The news is like ceaseless, driving rain pelting my face. Trying not to reiterate what has already been said, this blog is a digestive system rather than an echo chamber. I digest. And, at times, given a lot of bad news, digestion takes a while. I masticate and contemplate, then see what comes up. Let’s call it intuitive news digestion. Now I’m ready to hand you the sh*t.

Petrified poo

The Orange Turd - we’ve heard enough about him. What’s more interesting is that he is an icon of a movement. The people who think he’s wonderful are the root of the issue. What does he mean to them?

Our country has a deep rift. But like a fractal pattern, perhaps each of us also has a divide within. We all have demons, but we have learned (through helpful therapy) that the things that haunt us are usually repressed desires, fears, or anger that ooze out of our control and pop up, unbidden to destroy relationships and make our lives difficult. The more we try to rid ourselves of these unsavory attributes, the more they surface. Our minds feel out of control when our anger or ticks wreak havoc until we turn toward the quality we are pushing away.

In the body of America, there is an unmet need, a repressed expression. We are demonizing the other half of ourselves. We cannot divorce ourselves or kill ourselves, so we must face our demon-half of the population, for we demonize each other. Not only must we face our other half, but we must love, hold, and listen to our demons with compassion to try to understand. Only then do we see the ferocious evil melt into a child-like, unmet need.

What is the need for the other half of America?

Well, let’s look at their icon. He is the obvious racist, sexist, capitalist pig that is so very repulsive to science-based, inclusive liberals. But let’s reduce the Orange Turd to a feeling. Well, he shoots from the hip. He’s impulsive. Deeper still, he is illogical. He speaks purely to emotions with no facts or real content.

Here is the first clue to understanding.

Then there are those signs outside our liberal doors or yards that say- We believe - water is life, love is free, no person is illegal, and science is real- it seems almost incomprehensible that we need to say any of this. It’s so obvious. But taking out the sexism and racism (not that these aren’t important), we are left with the part about science. We proclaim its reality as if cell phones, computers, and cars aren’t enough proof.

Maybe another clue.

Confucius maintained that one must liken oneself to oneself. We cannot show compassion to others unless we develop compassion for ourselves. We are all a little bit crazy. Confucius also maintained that it was imperative to chant, do rituals, recite poetry and be moved by music to truly change at a deep level. This is what is offered in the churches of America: feeling, music, belonging, faith, and resurrection. Something that Science, and education doesn’t provide

Psychological clue #3.

See my blog post with pictures of Jesus holding guns. It seemed so bizarre. But when I put on my phycologist thinking cap and see it as an image that has meaning, it becomes less offensive and more of an interesting symbol. Religion is defending itself. It feels endangered and threatened to the point that it needs violence to survive.

Clue #4.

Putting these clues together, perhaps we can hypothesize that the emotional, illogical, spiritual side of America (the religious right) has risen as a repressed monster because it has been impoverished and out of favor with our rational, logical, scientific paradigm of America.

There has been a significant decline in Christianity in America, about 16%. Of the 62% of the US Christian population, 40% identify as Protestant and 19% as Catholic. Perhaps this is the reason why the Catholic Church chose an American Pope.

You can see the mosaic of clues pointing to the root of the divide. Let us put facts aside and journey to the mythical, magical side where we dream and imagine. This is what we need to learn from our counterparts; even though it feels like Christianity is an outmoded religion that doesn’t allow us to move forward, yet it holds the roots of ancient myths, community, and spirit. Scientific, capitalist America needs this, for science on its own is out of moral and spiritual control and will destroy us just as much as non-critical thinking, faith-based political force that we have now.

A quote from the book, A Short History of Myth –

 “Because the novelist and the artist operate at the same level of consciousness as myth makers, they naturally resort to the same themes. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness can be seen as a heroic quest and initiation that has gone wrong. Published in 1902, just before the West began its great disillusion, the novel describes the sojourn of the ultimate civilized Mr. Kratz deep in the African jungle. In traditional mythology, the hero left the serenity of the social world behind. He often had to descend into the depths of the earth, where he would meet an unsuspected effect on himself. The experience of isolation and deprivation could result in a psychological breakdown, which led to a vital new insight. If he succeeded, the hero returned to his people with something new and precious. In Conrad's novel, the labyrinthine recalls the subterranean tunnels through which the initiates crawled back into the womb of the Earth and the underworld of the primeval jungle. Kurtz does indeed look into the darkness of his heart but remains stuck in his resignation and dies spiritually. He becomes a shaman manique, with no respect but only contempt for the African community that he abuses.”

“A mythological hero learns that, if he dies to himself, he would be reborn in new life, but Kurtz is caught in the toils of a sterile egotism, and when he finally reappears in the novel, he has the obscenity of an inanimate corpse, obsessed with his own fame. Kurtz seeks not heroism but only barren celebrity. He cannot make a heroic affirmation of life: his dying words are – “The horror, the horror!”. Conrad, a true prophet, had already looked at the triviality, selfishness, greed, nihilism, and despair of the 20th century.”

“In 1922, T.S. Eliot depicted the spiritual disintegration of Western culture in his landmark poem The Wasteland. In this myth of the Holy Grail, the wasteland is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society without the conviction that comes from deeper understanding. How is it possible to put down creative roots in this stony rubbish of modernity where people have lost touch with the mythical underpinnings of their culture? Instead of understanding the inner coherence of their tradition, they know only heaps of broken images. Elliot lays bare the sterility of contemporary life by means of poignant, lapidary allusions to the mythology of the past- to European, Sanskrit, Buddhist, biblical, Greek, and Roman myths. It's alienation, ennui, nihilism, superstition, egotism, and despair as he confronts the imminent demise of Western Civilization. When we have pieced (religions) together and recognize their common core, we can reclaim the wasteland in which we live.”

At the end of the Short History of Myth (which I hope some of you read – it is truly short), Armstrong proclaims that humans have always been mythmakers and challenges us to deepen ourselves by integrating living myths back into our lives.

What myth do we hold as true enough that we can let go of our critical minds and just go with the symbolic dream? There are so many breakthroughs in the phycology-therapy sphere that there are signs of real transformational understanding. Science, as well, is expanding into the surreal. So much has come out of the quantum small to the vastness of deep space-time. How can we not see God? There it is - not a God-man, nor a Goddess-woman, yet infinite creations held by endless space. It's magical, mysterious, and powerful.

Maybe our next myth might be a fusion of Jesus and science. Jesus, the transgender, intuitive explorer of space-time, with Mary Mangelin, a genius physicist, explores space in their quantum ship shaped like a cross. They sacrifice themselves to a black hole and come out in a parallel universe, learning that all is destroyed in order to be created again – the ultimate recycling symbol. Infinity is realized. They are resurrected in this parallel universe, bringing back the divine wisdom, logos, to Mother Earth. The Father's wisdom rejoins the emotional Mother Earth, the male and female unite within Jesus, and the repressed feminine becomes empowered through Mary. In a fractal universe, as below, so above, so inside, so outside. Here, within us, is where balance is restored.

Scientific minds integrate with our moral mythical minds, and we can see both truths.

Here is a stab at a space-Jesus myth, but it is not enough. The myth needs music, theater, art, holidays and community to bring it to life. Like so many shifts in religions, the new overlays on the well-trodden path of the old.

Spirituality needs to hold science accountable to life, and science should hold spirituality accountable to open-mindedness. This is the balance we need to survive.

Perhaps this gives us something else to chew on besides grinding our teeth in anger and frustration through the pelting rain of nonsensical atrocities. We protest and put a sign on our front lawns, but we also need to look for solutions within our own lives. How are we divided within ourselves? Are we whole? What spiritual language do we speak, and can we use this to decipher what our religious counterparts are saying?

No matter what happens, even if it all looks bad, it comes down to what is in our minds and relationships. How do we want to spend these precious moments of life? Hate and worry erode our soul. There’s more than one dimension to work on.

Cut loose, dream deeply, imagine unity, and untangle our feelings by befriending our pain. Sorting out what the other half of Americans are about is beyond what the crazy T-rex does. He’s a patsy to the dying oil industry (even as the Earth’s ecosystems collapse), a stubborn patriarch (which I am losing hope that we will ever get beyond), and an egomaniac (endemic of our culture). Our conservative family and friends will still be here long after he is gone. We can only change ourselves and make the heaven we hope for by developing our inner world for who has ever had the outer world be perfect? Well-being is our affair. Developing compassion and understanding for our conservative population is what will move us closer to a calmer center and a cohesive America. This is not easy. Hate and division are much easier but toxic and will lead us to destruction.

This is a call for each of us to be the hero in the journey to wholeness.