The Crow-crossed Crone

Crone sits with Crow.

Crow is not interested.

Crow likes biscuits and suet pellets.

Crone wants enlightenment. She believes that by connecting to Crow she can expand her consciousness and become a wiser enlightened being.

Crow is not impressed. Eventually, annoyed by the questing-eyed pleas of the Crone, she says, 'Do not think you are special. You cannot evolve into a higher consciousness. There is no higher consciousness. Their is just one. And that is Psyche.'

Crone is confused. She thought that Psyche was some higher state, a place that she in her human way, could attain through he practices of thinking and believing and story-telling and writing. She thought Psyche was the destination - the way that all-too-humans would connect with more-than-human.

Crow laughs and flies away.

***

The thing about Psyche is this: it is not some kind of mystical wisdom or even evolved compassion nor yet a higher consciousness. It is Gaia. Or Nature. Whatever you like. Let us consider this whole as the Biosphere and let us refer to this entirely as 'they'. They do not care about our individual happiness. They are not really interested in how we feel. They nurture us, sure, with water and soil and air, but they are not nurturing. They are the extreme of non-duality. Not a one (which brings with it the idea of a two), but a messy mesh of living processes of glorious, effervescent complexity. They just ARE and that ARE is utter entanglement in process. There are no individual little nodes of subjectivity to be counted: all matter is always in the process of transformation, from arising to decomposing.

Humans, as Crow's contribution suggested, have got it all completely wrong.

We humans seek, psychologically, to extricate ourselves from the web. We say how we each matter so much - with our soul, our sentience, our subjectivity - little realising that our sentience is, or should be, in service to matter - not granted some independent value. And so we believe that we should not suffer and we should not die and we should experience pleasure. And then we realise that we are not alone in sentience and come to believe that no sentient being should suffer, no sentient being should die. But dying is part of what THEY are all about. Dying and decomposing, being killed and being eaten is part of the process of transformation. Because we object to our own dying, our being killed, our being eaten, we seek to spread that around... to the cattle and the chickens, the gazelles and the rabbits, the starlings, the butterflies... anything that can be deemed sentient.

But what we forget is the role of what we perceive to be the non-sentient in Their unfolding. Life's processes are predication on those beings we deem to be beneath our compassion - the plants... the trees... the bacteria... It is they - the bacteria and the fungi, the lichens and plants, the trees - who make life possible. They are the generous generators who allow for sentience - and they allow for sentience, under Psyche's auspices, so that sentience may be in service to the unfolding - not so that sentience can claim supremacy .Here is the mystery: Psyche is the consciousness of all this too. A consciousness that embraces all life and which acknowledges the role of all life and in which all beings are multi-threaded processes of entangled cause and effect that cannot be separated from the cause and effect threads of all around them.

Our mistake is to believe that we can heal the harm we have done by growing beyond what we now are, but Psyche's lesson is this: we have made ourselves, as Jung said, walk in shoes too small. It is not that we need to manufacture bigger shoes, like a new evolved consciousness, but that we should not be wearing shoes at all. If we took them off, this consciousness of individual self would just be but a small part of what we believe ourselves to be. We would share in the consciousness of group, the consciousness of ecological community in our own environment and the consciousness of biosphere. The petty concerns of ego dissolve. Dying and being eaten - so this flash of life in matter is passed - life passes to other matter. The ability to harm group, community, biosphere would be lost for it would be experienced as a harm to the Self - the vaster Self that is not stuck in this skull.

Our problem is that either we cannot sense the Self or that we think it arises through us: that it is our task to fix the world. We think that we have a range of duties and responsibilities because of our moral sense or our power or our evolving consciousness.

Always, always, there is this difference: that we see ourselves as the judge and jury of each other and of other species.

Connect with Psyche and they say, 'All Our children are flashes of luminescence in enlivened matter. All. And all are part of the unfolding. Be satisfied with what is given, relish it, and do not mourn its passing.

'All Our children are precious, but their value is the value to the unfolding, rather than rooted in themselves."

They say, 'Do not create another ideology, however well-meaning, to rise about the calamities you have made. Accept instead that you are kin with parasitic wasps, with aromatic trees, with gazelle-killing lions and with hawk-fleeing sparrows. All life consumes life. Remember this - all life consumes life. You cannot escape that cycle.

'What you have done that is so disastrous is to forget that you are kin with all life and to raise the little splash of sentient self of the individual into mastery over the broader sense of life's Self. Instead of consuming life to live, you destroy life to satisfy your feelings and you desires, your theories and your quest for power. You have gone wrong by believing that all life should fit your varying imaginings of it. What hubris.

'Do not seek to counter the catastrophe you have brought by exercising your current understanding of the world by trying to create another story of your grandeur - as the compassionate evolving consciousness of well-intentioned salvation. No. Just stop pretending you are other than animal. Stop pretending you are better than the fox or the fern. Your claims of connection are false if you seek to impose an ethic other than Ours. And Our ethic is that all Our children are part of the recycling of matter in a world-wide web that cannot be separated into the special little units that you, deluded creatures, see as precious in their independent arising alone..

'What is precious,' They say, 'is how each flash of enlivened matter contributes to the whole. What matters is not to be good, but to be whole. What is crucial is not to focus only on the light, but to make the darkness visible.'

What, then, the Crone asks, is my path? How do I ensure that this fleeting flash of luminescence serves the whole?