I want to embrace and widen the story I so often hear these days about the ‘return of the goddess’ and the restoration of the feminine value sphere into our global life. I fully support the thrust of the message while at the same time wanting to point to its inherent flaws which ultimately undermine its intent which is to usher in a civilisation anchored in mature and wise love which honours the sovereignty and interdependence of all life.
This kind of mature love is not in the realm of the goddess anymore than in the realm of the god but is of the soul which is neither and both, born out of their inherent union.
If the goddess must return, where has she been and why did she leave? Perhaps she was offended at our arrogance and lack of humility and therefore withdrew her powers into the earth until we are more worthy of her presence. Or perhaps she is too delicate, her senses too refined for this materialistic world and she languishes on some subtle planes waiting for us to become less materialistic and gross. One scenario makes her haughty, the other weak when in reality she is neither. The equivalent in the masculine story line is the angry judgemental god retiring to his cloud in disgust and hurling the occasional lightning bolt - or the luciferian rebel who descends into the earth and tempts us, delighting in our weakness and selfishness.
All these stories seem to have roots deep in the abandonment wound our child soul’s carry because we do not yet live in a mature planetary soul-based culture.The deeper truth is that these two energies have not withdrawn and turned their face from us - in fact our very existence depends upon their love, cooperation and mutual presence. It is our awareness that has not been able to sustain the consciousness of them as ever present and so in immature egocentric ways we make up our stories of abandonment.
The duality in all these stories is this:
1. It is not our ( individual and collective ) fault, an energy we needed went away.
2. It is our fault, the energy went away because we failed to be or do something ( individually or collectively ).
These stories carry an explanation for our experience of disconnection, the promise of salvation and an expiation of blame. The most difficult thing appears to be to let go of these stories completely as while they offer us hope they also keep us disconnected from reality. The whole being of the earth in cosmos can no longer sustain humanity’s dual illusions and is asking us to grow up. Hope is great. And it leads to disillusionment - the freeing of illusions. It seems it’s time to drink that final medicine in order to take our initiation.
The goddess has gone nowhere - she is there in our very bodies, our breath, our dreams and our imagination. She is the impulse to reach out and connect, she is in the feelings of bereftness and our sexual longings. She is subtle and she is gross, she is wild, raw and passionate, she is tender, forgiving and mysterious. She neither preferences us or is disappointed in us but embraces all life, animate and inanimate in the folds of her abundant breasts - as unconditional in her love as she is implacable in her fire. She births, sustains, nourishes and destroys all forms, all sentiency and all feelings.
The God has gone nowhere - he is ever present in and as the core of our awareness. He is in the one reading these words right now and simultaneously present as the self in all beings, the still point and heart of all identity, the impulse to grow and the impulse to rest. He is neither proud or ashamed of us but penetrates all things and all states of consciousness with the unconditional freedom and potency of his presence. At the same time he remains beyond all our attempts to comprehend or make him an object of our awareness. He births, sustains, nourishes and destroys all ideas, philosophies, civilisations.
Together they birth, sustain, nourish and destroy the soul itself both individually and collectively. As part of the development process they also initiate the soul. Like a great defibrillator they electrify the heart of awareness itself, awakening it to its divine heritage, purging it of story and let it witness them making love in the centre of the temple as they have always been doing.
So the path of maturity is to discover and remember that which already eternally IS. The return of the goddess and the god and their heiros gamos at our core, individually and collectively is in reality a turning in our own awareness to face and honour what we have been drawn away from and forgotten. It does not require that we do anything, become better or more worthy.
The purification is simply a letting go of the security blankets we clung to in the face of our feelings of abandonment and exile. Letting the stories go can feel despairing as if they are the only things that keep us linked to a forgotten world that was full of love. For more and more of us it is time to let them go however, and find, at the core of those feelings of despair - the pearl beyond price, the dragon’s egg of the soul, the eternal invincible shining of the united love of our divine parents waiting for ‘our return’.
Bruce Lyon
Comments