“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… The night world is where we are. And in that darkness, we remember what we love the most.” —Martin Shaw
Sometimes, in the early hours before dawn, a surge of fear pulls me awake.
I understand these night-time visitations with their unbearable feeling tones, as a message from the underworld. The myths of our modernity, like endless growth (plundering), rampant individualism (the “other” and nature don’t count), and us first (hierarchies of “worth”) have spun us into their inviable conclusion.
We have arrived at this time of genocide-ecocide-extinction completely unprepared for the consequences.
Instead, we wobble at the edge of an abyss as we take stock of the horrors rising deep from the cavern of our collective trauma. No “transcendent” bypass will do it. Instead, it’s a moment to pause and allow this pull of the underworld to call us down, far below the cognitive, separative, dividing mind.
Here, we make our holy offering, lay on the Earth, and enter the path of deep sorrow and prayer. Then we listen.
Sakka, the king of the gods came to the Buddha and asked a perennial question that is now acutely relevant: “Why do gods, humans, and all other kinds of beings who wish to live without hate, harming, and in peace, end up hating and harming one another?”
The origin, said the Buddha, is Papañca-Saññā-Sankhā.
In the dialogue with Sakka, the Buddha points to the process by which the mind solidifies a view of self that in turn operates under the illusion of ownership. Propelled by this illusion, through millennia of wars with their mountains of slaughtered bodies, our beleaguered souls, piece by piece, have descended into the underworld. It is, now, to the underworld that we must travel to seek guidance.
A way of understanding “soul” is the ground of seamless consciousness within which all resides. We live in an ensouled world, where, as the indigenous world knows, all is conscious. To enter the journey of reclamation of our ensouled belonging is less to see than to feel. Less shining light than sensing through the dark. Less “in control” and more like floating in the aquifers feeding the earth.
Here lies the ancient way of remembrance.
Here, we evoke what we love most.
Here, the spirit of the living dharma flows through us healing and transforming all of us, as together, we sense our way through this long night.
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