Images for Spirit

A young woman in my ceramics class is making artifacts dedicated to the goddess Diana. Having heard her talking with another woman about Catholic school I couldn’t help but think how absent women were in most of western religion, one of many reasons people have rejected them. There is a spiritual yearning that isn’t addressed. In his book The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Schlain wrote about how early more unifying cultures, revering the feminine, centered on community, were crushed by the armies of the male god. The male in charge is still the center of western religions more concerned with obedience than spirit. The imbalance of the male dominated structure of most religion has imprinted itself on modern attitudes even in the absence of the religion itself. For twentieth century Indian teacher Sri Aurobindo, the Mother represents the divine source of energy at the center of everything. The female brings forth life. Robert Chilton Pierce emphasized the need for the feminine in his writings. The last chapter of his book, The Biology of Transcendence, is called The Resurrection of Eve. He puts great emphasis on birth and early development as laying the foundation for capacity to love and engage with the world. His recommendations for changing our troubled world begin there and he offers science that supports them. To understand something better it helps to see it, have images that allow a person to examine details and relationships that stir their own thoughts about mysteries beyond the visible. Structures of insight like archetypal compositions or mandalas that focus attention inward offer scaffolding to find a personal connection to a spiritual center. The problems of today can only be solved with love. We need better imagery to connect to the universal love that includes all. Finding core visual structures that attract us personally resonate and integrate our energies. So much of today has degenerated into top-down autocratic with conditional love used to control. Those mindsets have led to chaos and disruption of individual peace. Personally meaningful imagery to contemplate can be a unifying light. Since Michael died, I’ve watched many documentaries of Near Death Experiences hoping to get a sense of what he might have undergone when he left his body. He definitely wasn’t there anymore, but the idea that all that he’d been simply disappeared seemed utterly implausible. One of the most consistent features of most people’s descriptions included the tunnel toward brilliant white light. Carl Sagan suggested about this phenomenon that we might be remembering birth. The choice of Diana as personal image underscores birth and connection to nature and cycles. Imagery to help integrate the feminine could start with the tunnel, apt metaphor for the journey toward a loving unknown. Time to balance all those obelisks with sacred wells and grottos.