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I worry I have been looking but not hearing. I think we are in the Underworld and haven’t figured it out yet. We are frightened and we do not know what will happen next. 

Soul seems more dangerous to talk about than sex, violence, death or money these days. I believe something will crawl back out of the Underworld. It will. It always does. But it may not be us.

The night world is where we are.
I say it. I say it till we may hear it.
And in that darkness, 
we remember what we love the most.

- Martin Shaw

Through the millennia of wars, with their mountains of slaughtered bodies and oceans of tears, we have forged multiple shape-shifting alliances and identities. In this long journey, our unfathomable undivided soul, shunned and hijacked, has, for the most part, sunk into the underworld. It is, now, to the underworld that we must travel to seek its guidance.

A way of understanding “soul” within the approximation of language that tries to defy the amorphous reality in which we swim, is the ground of consciousness, of life. We live in an immutable ensouled world, where, as the indigenous world knows, all is conscious.

Shaped by the splits of modernity, where soul is replaced by consumer materialism, we feel, acutely, the ache of its loss. Like a ghost ship, it sails trying to find a harbor within the lost sacred matrix of inter-being that is modernity. From this tragic loss of soul, all disasters unfold.

Why? We can only kill, cheat, and dominate another when we don’t know all “others” are part of ourselves. This is because we’re not in touch with “all is resident within one immutable, alive, dynamic, pulsing, benevolent awareness.”

Politicians shout freedom. Freedom for who, and at what cost if some are free but not others? No amount of bombs can secure our freedom when it is at the expense of others. By now, we should have an inkling that none of us are free until all is free.

In this hauntingly somber moment, we sit on the edge of an abyss facing genocide, extinction, and the utter destruction of all humane values. As we take stock of the immense, vast terrors we are capable of, rising deep from the cavern of our collective historic trauma, no bypass will do it.

Instead, it’s a moment to pause and allow the pull of the underworld to call us down, far below the cognitive, separative, dividing mind. Here, make our holy offering, lay on the Earth, and enter the path of deep sorrow and prayer. Then listen.

The compelling movement to transcendence within the meditative metaphor won’t help here. It splits up and away from this plunge into the messy, murky, unknown tides of the underworld. So, it is to the indigenous remembrance I respectfully turn.

Our Elders, the Kogi, remind us that the source, sacred Earth life intelligence, is “Aluna,” the one who goes by many names. Our task as humans, they say, is to embrace the challenges we now face, and not distract ourselves. Aluna needs the human mind to participate in the world because that mind is embodied and can communicate with the cosmic mind.

To enter here is less to see than to feel. Less shining light than sensing through the dark. To follow the current of life, like floating in the aquifers feeding the earth. Here is the whisper of old, the ancient way of remembrance. Here we release from dominance, and in that darkness, we remember what we love the most, and, finally, finally, maybe we allow the eros of life in its fullness to flow through us so we can truly heal our hurting selves and transform our abandoned world.

Thanissara, August 24, 2024