Am I separate?

It was 6am in the liminal space of daybreak, lounging at the ambient stage at Garbicz festival in Poland a couple of weeks back, immersed in a delicious vinyl ambient set as mist and smoke made itself near visible rising from the lake (and the smoke machines) and intermingling with the thick canopy of trees in and around us. 

I was at the tail-end of a light LSD trip and a long, long night dancing, when two questions hung themselves clearly, simply, almost in a childlike way in my mind -

Am I separate?

Do I belong here?

There was no sting to the question, no emotional baggage to what one could reason might be the root of all suffering, it was a very honest and open question, I wasn’t even asking, the question was asking. 

Am I? Do I? 

I let the question rest into the moment for as long as it kept itself fresh, then nudged to my husband that it was time for bed and we stumbled out of the misty cocoon back to our tent.

But the question stayed with me.

Are we separate? 

If you were ask me so simply then I can easily reason no. Starting with the basics; our breathing - this infinite tidal wave exchange with each other and our environment. Our eating - somehow metamorphosing food bits into “me”-bits. …To the most mystical and metaphysical of experiences… And yet, do I feel separate? 

Oh yes. Absolutely. Most of the time in fact. I feel hard against reality. Clonky even. Like an estranged puzzle piece landed in the wrong box. It is a practice to yield into reality (and a practice I have devoted myself to). I also harden in the face of challenge, I don’t soften to open myself to creative possibility. Yet another practice.

I wonder about this feeling of separation. Have humans across ancient eons always felt so separate? Or is this a chronic symptom of modernity? Do we have to work harder in this age of technology to remember our inter-being with the natural world, even as the inter-net , Indra’s Net*, works so hard to “connect” us all?

* ’Indra’s Net’ being an ancient Hindu and Buddhist concept symbolizing the universe as an infinite, multi-dimensional net with a jewel at each intersection that reflects all other jewels.

I have been doing a lot of personal research these last few years on the transformation of Europe and the Near East from flourishing, goddess-worshipping civilizations to societies shaped by the slow—and often violent—rise of Abrahamic patriarchal monotheism. And how this shift led us from revering and worshipping Nature in all her wild temperaments, to practicing domination and control over her from above, a perspective that became embedded in the overarching culture. A perspective that a few thousand years later we can observe as the foundational premise of our modern society.

     There is so much to discuss on this topic, from so many angles, but for now I just want to say that I believe we are still suffering from being severed from Her - from the dark earth mother -  from living and worshipping in her cycles, practicing intimacy with all the mysteries and gifts of the natural world, to distancing ourselves from her untamed wildness, exerting our control and domination over the living breathing miracle of existence. 

    There are so many fascinating and telling myths from this transitionary period - before the mother principle of divinity had to go completely underground - when the new god was still just pressing into the old gods, when Lilith was still a wild woman living inside the Tree of Life, a relic from Sumerian folklore, when the warrior-king Gilgamesh was employed to cut up the tree to make a throne and thus drove the wild woman Lilith out, long before she was absorbed by the Hebrew tribes and re-cast as the demonic force who sent the snake to tempt Eve (The snake that of course have long been an ancient symbol of the feminine mysteries of death and rebirth, and of the Goddess of the Underworld). Long before Eve sinned and doomed all of mankind…. But I digress…

   Of course I don’t mean to romanticize all aspects of a long ancient past that we know nothing about. Except for archeologists not finding any tools and machinery for grand warfare in the goddess-worshipping cults of the neolithic times (something that seemed to be introduced with the arriving cult of the Storm God, the Heavenly Father, the God of Light), we can assume that they at least did not practice organised warfare, but we can’t know intimately their direct experience of reality as compared with ours (obviously). What we do know is that they practiced rites in worship of nature within the rhythms of her seasons and cycles. And from that we might assume that that fostered a direct felt sense experience of being woven into the web of creation, as we can see from many indigenous cultures whose spiritual worldview is grounded in reverence for the natural world and all her phenomena, and as we can see through the streams of mysticism and animism that survived on the margins of (and sometimes secretly inside of) patriarchal domination. But I have no doubt that humans then endured immense hardship and struggle. Nature is fierce. But I specifically wonder about this existential hungry ghost of modernity that seem to eat our culture today from the inside, this pain of separation, this perverse exploitation of natural resources, and the desperate longing for belonging, the crisis of meaning that we experience in our world today.

And I wonder what we can remember again about the worship of the natural world. And of making sacred. I wonder what the technology of ritual and ceremony in relationship with the earth mother can show us about the interwoven web of living.

But, back to my innocent dawning question. “Am I separate?”

Maybe this reverse way of asking is clever.

Instead of asking “are we One” which seems a bit fluffy and idealized to ask, maybe asking the opposite opens up a knowing that we can’t possibly be separate - so that leaves a definite opening into its opposite, if we are not separate… then what are we?

Maybe from the crack of the “am I really separate?” inquiry, I can follow the cookie crumbs back towards…. Source?