Indigenous Elders and the Crisis of Mankind
Savage Grace, Living Resiliently in the Dark Night of the Globe
Great indigenous elders whom we revere have taught us that divine ferocity is an essential weapon in the armory of love.
In a time where denial reigns supreme and there is a corrupt emphasis on fake compassion, cheerful-ness, and too-easy forgiveness coupled with a complete inability to face or respond to dire structural injustice, it is a very difficult task to tell the truth. People have been trained in habits they call spiritual, but which really are designed to reinforce bypassing and dissociation. (we are speaking about the crisis mother earth is in)
However, shattered you are, however overwhelmed you find yourself by the facts, have the courage to do the deeper work of both creating a larger container from which to listen to stark news — plunge into shadow work on yourself which will enable you to identify why you react in such a manner.
We draw on all the spiritual traditions and their wisdom because we realize that a new universal mysticism is being born that recognizes the contributions and wisdom of all traditions. The necessity in our time demands that we listen to all of them for whatever guidance they can offer us in that is the defining evolutionary crisis of our entire human journey.
This is a special calling to those who know that we are in the Dark Night of the Globe. Author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle describes in life . . . ‘an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness’. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. The meaning you have given to your life collapses.
How do we come back from this experience?
Not by resisting, but by having the sober courage to continue to dialog with it. In a dark night experience, repressed contents of the unconscious surface to grab our attention and through journaling, art, and dream work, one develops a dialog with these contents in order to integrate their extremely valuable messages in the psyche.
If we don’t deal with it, we plunge into madness or a false sense of self that easily crumbles when challenged.
The hundreds of millions of us now plunged into dark nights that are at once individual and collective need all the tools necessary and available to help us acquire what Jesus called ‘the wisdom of the serpent’—wisdom that Blake says, “is sold in the desolate market where no one comes to buy”. Only the marriage of this dark wisdom with the inner knowledge of our sacred identify with the divine which Jesus called ‘the innocence of the dove can engender in us both the strength and the skillful suppleness of heart and mind that survival in our time demands’.
