Look up in the sky on any evening and you might see a long series of lights traveling in an oddly straight line across the sky—odd as in, “there are no straight lines in Nature.” You have just glimpsed the Starlink satellites, orchestrated and owned by Elon Musk, billionaire venture capitalist and vocal proponent for a dystopian future on Mars, a dusty, cold, desert planet of harsh extremes.
Then there’s AI. Amidst an outcry among scientists, politicians, philosophers, educators and social commentators as well as ordinary people, the development of artificial intelligence has landed, bringing enormous potentials for both good and evil.
What is Real and what is unreal becomes more and more difficult to discern. And things are changing fast. Conditions of climate distress and the unraveling fabric of life—social, political, spiritual—are of grave concern. As modern life becomes more distorted, fragmented and strange, “up and out” religious philosophies of spiritual transcendence are not sheltering our souls as they did for millennium past. We humans are like refugees, casualties of an endless war, anxious orphans who have lost our way. People everywhere are asking: How will future generations bear the coming times?
The way forward comes within each person. Cropping up everywhere is a shared, felt longing for the Divine Feminine. She calls us home, to a rightful relationship with the Earth and the Cosmos that brings sanity and soul to the human quest of modernity.
It sounds simple, but after thousands of years of denial and repression, we must rediscover what our ancestors knew. Throughout the ancient world, She was revered as the primordial cosmic Force that overflows from the formless Beyond, spilling out as Creation. She moves the human imagination as the goddess in many forms by many names, and yet She is all genders, all inclusive. She was “Sophia” or Wisdom in Greece, “Hakima” in the Aramaic language of Jesus’ time.
The Divine Feminine brings wisdom because She is about Life as Reality. “The only doorway to God is through the Feminine” is a teaching of classical tantra, given many times and in many ways by my own teacher, Lee. It is through Her that we may find clues to the puzzle of our times: Have things gone terribly awry, or is this all part of a Divine Plan?
The Divine Feminine is the force that ignites our evolution and creativity, alchemizes human experience. She reconnects us to our own holy instinct, to the innate wisdom of the heart, to the breath of life and our own breathing in and out. She is Great Nature, the Mother of the five elements of Creation—space, air, fire, water and earth—from which we are born. We intuitively turn to the natural world to restore, rejuvenate, reconnect, remember. Like the rishis of ancient India and shamans from indigenous people everywhere, we can learn the secrets of life from Mother Nature.
For us moderns, when we live with Reality as it is, we are able to make wise distinctions between what is unreal and what is Real, and this causes spiritual sanity to grow within us. It happens naturally, organically—a small, sweet flame that blossoms into love and devotion to what is, as it is. The Divine Feminine sustains us, provides energy, fuel, and purpose in our everyday reality, guides our path across the great ocean of being. Taking refuge in Wisdom, we begin to participate with Life in a new way.
Living with Reality, I catch glimpses of the dynamism between Her apparent polarities as the very magic that makes Life happen. Mother Universe brings constant change in spiraling evolutions because transformation is the name of Her game. Space and time are the place where She dances. In Hindu mythology Ma Kali always carries a damaru (a simple drum) in one hand to beat out the rhythms of time. The great goddess will inevitably destroy to make way for what is emerging from Her evolutionary impulse. This is as true at the cosmic level of stars and galaxies as it is at the quantum level of particles and waves or in the changing seasons of the year, or journey of a human lifetime.
Death comes in many ways and often, long before this body dies. Loss, trauma and grief could be the angels who visit me at any time. On the path of Wisdom we prepare ourselves to receive them, to taste the Holy in their mood and glance, even through our tears. Yes, this body will die. All that I have gathered to me in this life, these beloved relationships, these lofty concepts, this poetry, these words, this art and knowledge, these children and grandchildren, this love of life as I’ve known it will pass away.
Endings take their toll. Certainties we took for granted fall apart. Disappointment and heartbreak run rampant. Even the carefully crafted architecture of our spiritual practice, yoga, prayer or contemplative life—forms of the past, rituals, creeds and dogmas—are subject to the Ma Kali’s river of time. Being grounded in sanity and soul means we need to work with all the troublesome realities that Reality brings our way. We have to come into embodied relationship with being fully human.
Just as the Earth loves her Sun, we can come to love and praise this Reality in which we live and die. Mother Earth lives in perfect harmony with the universal Force that creates, preserves, and destroys life. The ancient Celts called the triple spiral of the three forces the triskelion; in the Hindu tradition they are the three gunas. We humans experience the movements of the three cosmic forces as fate.
For the ancient Greeks, Amor Fati or “love your fate” is considered „the formula for human greatness” because it leads to trust, surrender and ultimately to a living faith. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Why would I feel any anxiety? Death is certain, whatever I do. I place reverence, faith and serenity in my fate.” The Divine Intelligence of Wisdom (Sophia, Hakima) has “designed“ death as the doorway to a greater life, and so fate becomes divine destiny. But these are just concepts and platitudes for us moderns—until, through radical transformations in time, we learn to trust the fundamental goodness of Life.
Trust is essential, because living with what is Real is not an easy path. Becoming a seer of what is Real and what is unreal requires courage and humility. Purification takes us to new levels of surrender, awareness and presence. We earn the wisdom to know the difference between resignation, helplessness, and the freedom of surrender. Bone-hard honesty about ourselves is necessary. The ongoing birth of conscience (responsibility), conscious suffering, and wandering in the wilderness of the unknown become ordinary daily fare. We constantly face and work with our limitations. At the most basic level, we must come to know ourselves intimately—an inner work that tills the ground of basic sanity, reconnects us to depths of soul, roots our feet on the Earth, prepares and strengthens us to be of service to others.
Mother Universe is the true Starlink. Whispering of oneness, wholeness, opening, connection, the relationship of all things and beings, She calls the orphans to come home, to remember our natural place in a vast cosmos spun from Her shining fingertips. Wisdom tells us we are made of stardust, cradles us in truth, sings within our hearts. She rejoices in our freedom, wonder, creativity, gratitude, and praise. Through Her gift of Grace, She reveals that miracles do happen.
Mary Angelon Young
Further reading:
- The Art of Contemplation (Mary Angelon Young)
- The Birth of the (Lion OM C. Parkin )
- The Myth of Enlightenment (OM C. Parkin)
- Intelligence of Awakening (OM C. Parkin)
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