Nature Connection: Remembering Wholeness

I attended the book launch of Adrian Harris’s Nature Connection: Remembering Wholeness.

It was inspirational, I was truly buzzing on the energy, even through an online event.

I loved the combination of down to earth practical language along with an intense light of excitement in Adrian’s eyes.

I thrilled at how we started from talking about slowing down to appreciate nature but quickly reach the experience of our oneness with everything via engaging the magic of our bodily senses.

I think this book is going to be a crucial contribution to the paradigm shift the human species is currently negotiating – a shift that will get much less stressful once we collectively get with the programme. The shift from a materialist view of reality to a multidimensional, spiritual perspective. The shift from being identified with our individuated self to the magic, wonder and power of cosmic consciousness. There have been many spiritual teachers guiding this process since over 100 years, Adrian’s book is groundbreaking as it bridges the worlds of spirituality and science:

It’s so exciting that Adrian, an ecopscychologist, is are waking up scientific minded people to spirit and consciousness via direct experience of the undeniable feeling of AWE. His work stands alongside the cosmic poetic visions of Walt Whitman in the 19^th century – who was calling for men to become loving comrades to each other and through that love come home to nature – and that of the spiritual feminists of the 1970s, who offered the same kind of vision directed at women. But Adrian speaks to everyone, coming at a time when feminism and gay rights have done much to create a more equal society – could it be we finally are ready for a vision that speaks to all of us? Ready to embrace the simplicity and also impact of knowledge of the awesomeness of our true nature as humans?

It might be argued that we’ve been pushed to this point where there is no choice but to seek the basic truth of our existence by the immense chaos in our minds and in the world,

but we’ve also reached this point by pursuing equality and embracing embodiment

ie overturning centuries of shame around sexuality and the body –

reclaiming those parts of us as natural, as sacred.

In the 21^st century we are becoming more embodied.

Walt Whitman sang of the Body Electric in the 19^th century

celebrating “that every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you”

he sang of the return to nature…

“We two, how long we were fool’d,

Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,

We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return”

and of the union of the self with the cosmic soul:

“And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality.. it is idle to try to alarm me……

And as to you corpse, i think you are good manure, but that does not offend me…..

And as to you life, i reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,

No doubt i have died myself ten thousand times before.

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven…..”

Edward Carpenter heard the song

but also understood that the taboos around the body, around sex

were preventing the full embodiment of the cosmic Self…

“There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness.”

“I conceive a millennium on earth – a millennium not of riches,
nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual facilities, nor
absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity
from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth
shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies – shall attain
freedom and joy;
“And the men and women of that time looking back with something
like envy to the life of to-day, that they too might have
borne a part in its travail and throes of birth.

Carpenter prophesied that:

“The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations – all the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind – the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within.” Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889)

In early 1900s some believed cosmic consciousness was coming soon:

“The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. It will not depend on tradition. It will not be believed and disbelieved. It will not be a part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths of priests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. Its life will not be in prayers, hymns nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who came down to teach, nor on any bible or bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or to secure them entrance to heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in the here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as is now doubt of existence; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanently replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse. Sin will no longer exist nor will salvation be desired. Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of the life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self consciousness.” Richard Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness 1905

But then came World War 1 and World War 2…

Conscious evolution was delayed, but the world was changed,

purged through the most extreme of pain,

ready to release the past and step through the veils,

with no need to go through that pain again… if we can make the change.

In the 60s some believed ‘all you need is love’

but turned out we also need to be free of patriarchal conditioning –

so the way to liberation was led by those who needed it most

women and queers…

Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation were born,

both with a spiritual vision of unity

but both soon caught in division and discord,

those ever present tools of patriarchy

deeply embedded in our minds.

Whitman and Carpenter had called to men

to become a loving brotherhood of comrades.

In the 1970s feminist witches gave out the call

to women to return to nature, become a sisterhood,

to remember their ancient witchy oneness with the Goddess,

and awaken the heart to empathy through celebration of diversity,

to overturn the separation and division in society

imposed by the masculine mind

bring about the end of patriarchy!

Some gay men were hearing the call too

Radical Faeries from the late 1970s gathering in nature

embracing the masculine, celebrating the feminine

and discovering sexuality is a divine tool of transcendence,

the Faeries brought the return of ancient holy genderbenders.

But then AIDS culled the pack

and it’s taking decades to get back to the track…

Mitch Walker, writing in Visionary Love, believed in the late 1970s that:

“We gay men are at a key time in the evolution of our gay consciousness. We’ve been struggling to reach a great vision buried in us, which we first sensed only in the vaguest ways. … In the modern Gay Liberation Movement, the history of men’s struggles has been the history of groping towards our vision, sensing it in the values of androgyny, in revolution, in free sexuality. It has led us to Stonewall, to genderfuck, to the birth of a new gay culture.

But during the past few years, it appeared that our movement ran out of steam; many militant groups faded, as did the brassy colourful rebels and our flagrant joyous celebrations. The seemed to be replaced by a new movement, the vocal gay Normals: fighting in the courts, the churches, the mental health professions, gaining advocate after advocate, victory after victory. It was as if the Homophile Movement for Equal Rights, taking new freedom from our radical flowering, thrust towards its goal of mainstream assimilation leading the mass of gays with them and deflowering our movement, the movement toward our vision.

“The Homophile Movement is a dead thing: dead to the gay vision, anti-magickal, counter-revolutionary. Its spokespeople and theorists shun the roots (the radical, source of nurturance and understanding) in favour of surface values: the social norm, success, integration, acceptance, assimilation. Its shallow reality suffocates the vision in us, co-opting gay people and vitiating the creativity and potential of the Gay Movement.”

I am inclined to say the same happened to the feminist movement. It became blind to its own potential. Many women, like many gays, have assimilated into the patriarchal game.

While the gay community channelled its energy into facing the massive shock and challenge of AIDS, in the 1980s-90s spiritual feminists, who were mostly pagan, often openly declaring themselves to be witches and proclaiming witchcraft as women’s religion (as had prominent witches of First Wave Feminism in the late 19^th century), and often openly lesbian or bisexual, faced a backlash, much of it coming within the sisterhood from Marxist or materialist, atheistic minded, women, who criticised spiritual feminists for celebrating traditional feminine roles.

Third Wave feminists since the 1990s are less about a spiritual sisterhood and more about individuality and identity – they are often ‘spiritual’ in their outlook but spirituality is no longer the defining centre of their identity, it is more a sideline that informs their outlook – but does not see them declaring that that the female consciousness is fundamentally different to that of male, in that it sees oneness, interconnectedness and oneness versus what separation and difference. It sees what we have in common over what makes us stand apart, and celebrates diversity as the manifestation of cosmic unity.

So far away is modern feminism from this original vision of the movement’s pioneers – of people like Starhawk, Audre Lorde, Zsuzsanna Budapest who are regarded as Mothers of the cause – that the world now suffers the existence of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – women who are perpetuating the masculine perspective of separation rather than engaging with the oneness of the divine feminine, women who base their beliefs on biology (another patriarchal belief system that keeps us dumb to the true consciousness, the spirit, the cosmic Self within) rather than a sense that women’s power comes through their spirituality.

At Adrian’s book launch over 90% of attendees were women – apart from Adrian there were only two men. I am not surprised that women feel his call, but so can men who are not afraid to embrace the feminine within themselves, who are prepared to accept the ego is not who they really are! The TERFS are ridiculous in their inability to see that a man embracing wholeness, a truly REAL man, has to embrace the feminine aspect of himself. Amongst the TERFS I see women who are embodying their egocentric, aggressive masculine aspect – but calling it feminine!

For so long the spiritual alternative to the predominant scientific worldview of the western world has felt so splintered, often weird. The esoteric seen as a sideline, the exoteric is where it’s at in our modern society. Often it is crisis in our lives that brings us to the realisation we are approaching life with unskilful attitudes, then many go seeking teaching from religious or spiritual sources. Adrian is putting into words something that some of us work out for ourselves, but which relatively few up til now have been open to believe – that nature can bring us home: if we can open our minds, hearts and bodies, nature is all we need.

Adrian’s book shows that humanity is getting ready to make the leap. To simply reconnect – physically, emotionally, mentally and, when we’re ready, spiritually – with nature. Ready to come home to the interconnected oneness of life and consciousness, and also to know, deeply and eternally, that we are part of a loving, beneficent, conscious Cosmos. Often known to the peoples of the planet, for tens of thousands of years, as Mother.

Whitman dreamed of the divine love of male comrades

Feminist mothers spoke of women’s spiritual consciousness

Adrian Harris removes the gender focus and speaks to everyone.

There is ONE LIFE on this planet

and WE ARE THAT.

Nature coming Home.