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Animal realization & smelly allies
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I was talking with someone newly interested in our work today, a young mother, a medical doctor by profession and also, interestingly, a graduate of a several-year course in shamanic training in South Africa. She mentioned she had had an awakening in the wilderness during that training, in which the interconnectedness of all life became evident to her beyond concepts and words. And, as she put it, she realized that wherever she is standing on this planet, that is home.
She had explored our websites a bit but hadn't read much in detail about our approach. So I explained our orientation to the healing of the Spirit/Matter split, how the process works, etc. I spent some time explaining that most of spirituality is still coming from the spirit side of the split. Even most spiritual teachers today and historically are, at most, in my view, negotiating an uneasy truce with matter from a profound bias toward spirit.
The whole "Perennial Philosophy" takes its stand there, proposing for millennia that in fact Spirit is the source and senior principle in relation to Matter and all psychic and energetic phenomena of life and the universe. From that perspective, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great early 20th century advocate of the divinity of Matter, pointed out in one of his last essays, Matter is "no more than the humble servant of [Spirit], if not, indeed, its enemy." (The Heart of Matter, p. 26)
Toward the end of our conversation the young doctor and mother asked for some advice. She said she f was getting very reactive toward other women who she found "hectic and dogmatic" in the way they related to her and, especially, to her newborn. She was angry and disturbed about it and didn't know what to do with herself.
I had just been explaining how, in my view, a post-Spirit/Matter split approach to living is friendly to the ego, the mind, desires, "broken zones" or traumatized, split-off fragments of psychic identity, and all the hot-zone reactive emotions that classic spirituality views as sure evidence that one is not properly detached, serene, and "practicing."
So I suggested to her that this is actually an excellent in-life laboratory for her to explore what I was talking about. She is, after all, an animal -- a very material as well as spiritual being! Having lived in the South African wilderness, she has had much more exposure than most of us to the fierce protectiveness of, say, a mother lioness to her cubs. Her own fierceness as a mammalian primate mother was kicking naturally into gear. But her spiritual conditioning was leading her to assume she must be wrong for feeling such intense emotions. So on top of her stress about how her these other people were interacting with her baby, she was adding a whole other load of angst-ridden internal conflict, making herself wrong and trying to be different "on the inside."
I suggested that she begin to consider that in fact these reactions are quite natural to a post-Spirit/Matter split life in the at once divine and animal existence that is itself most natural to us human critters. It's scary and not easy to do this when we've had so much "spiritual" judgment about anything in us that's not squeaky clean and serene in our emotions and relationships. "Dat ole debbil ego" and all that.
But those very reactive, hot-zone emotions and impulses become what we might consider "smelly allies" on our way to the fullest human version of "Animal realization" -- an aliveness that is rich with paradox. In it we are utterly awake to the transcendent, impersonal ground and totality of Being, of Life, of Spirit. And at the very same time, we are present and alive in our bodily persons, full of our own distinct psychological and emotional history and patterns, as well as all our likes and dislikes -- if anything, more authentic, integrated egos than we ever were before.
It's not that we merely presume freedom to act out whatever impulses and reactions arise. That would be a real regression. It's that we dare to allow ourselves to feel and animate and be them so that we don't add an additional layer of stress to the reality of our situations. How we choose to act in any moment, how, for instance, my new friend will now choose to deal with those pressurized situations where people are treating her infant in ways that she finds unacceptable -- this is all the challenge of wise and creative living.
But when we give ourselves permission to become divinely human animals, when we let the smelly allies of our supposedly non-spiritual "stuff" reacquaint us with what author/analyst Anne Baring calls "the deeper matrix of instinct," our energy, attention, and awareness are much more free to directly encounter that challenge in all the moments of daily living. Much more free than we could ever have imagined before.
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