About ten years ago, my friend Mary and I used to take her small son Bill out to a place in the countryside north of Los Angeles, where we could hike along a stream and walk under live oaks. The same area was popular with local teenagers, who left the stream littered with beer cans and garbage. Mary always brought some large trash bags with her. When we were leaving, the three of us would fill them with beer cans. Our efforts never seemed to make any appreciable difference, and once I asked Mary why we bothered at all.
“I know we can’t clean it all up,” she said, “but I believe in picking up the garbage that you find in your path.”
The beer can principle, as I think of it, has served as an ethical guideline that allows me to keep my sanity in a society filled with exploitation, pollution, and destruction. It seems a good point of departure for discussing the ethics of magic. A common misconception about religions and cultures based on immanence is that they lack ethics or a conception of justice. For Western culture bases its ethics and its justice on the stories of estrangement. If we discard these, if we let unbridled nature reign, don’t we risk social catastrophe?
It is hard to imagine catastrophes greater than those that the ethics of estrangement may be about to precipitate. Still, the world-view of immanence does carry with it a set of ethical imperatives, though they are based on principles very different from those of patriarchal culture.
The conception of justice in Western, patriarchal traditions is of a set of absolute laws that transcend the world, that are imposed on the world from outside. The laws, like the God who stands outside the world, are valued out of context, over and above the values of the world, of human feelings, needs, and desires. They are the laws of heaven, and must be followed whatever their consequences here on earth—because heaven, not earth, is what we value. So, although no Catholic of conscience would claim it is ethical to cause suffering to the poor, the Pope continues to ban birth control, even though its effect is to doom many of the poor to inescapable hunger and suffering.
The popular conception of justice, which shapes even the humanist institutions of the West, is built upon the stories of estrangement. After the Apocalypse comes the Day of Judgement, when the war of the Good Guys with the Bad Guys is ended and each is either Saved or Damned, Making it or Falling, depending on how well they have lived by the truth, the rules, entrusted to the Great Man. Such a story is an enormous support to all authority. It reinforces the ethic of power-over that teaches us that good people obey the rules. It places rules and authority in a realm beyond question, valued above reason or the evidence of the senses. It allows us to cause pain and suffering quite comfortably in defense of the rules. Perhaps fortunately, Western culture has never succeeded in living up (note the direction) to its own conception of justice. Heretics, rebels, and sinners have always tempered the rule of absolutes.
The immanent conception of justice is not based on rules or authority, but upon integrity, integrity of self and integrity of relationships.1
The world-view of immanence values each self as a manifestation of the Goddess, as a channel of power-from-within. People of integrity are those whose selves integrate both the positive and the negative, the dark and the light, the painful emotions as well as the pleasurable ones. They are people who are willing to look at their own shadows instead of flinching from them. They honor the shadow because they know that its very distortions reveal the shape of the ground underneath.
Integrity means consistency; we act in accordance with our thoughts, our images, our speeches; we keep our commitments. Power-over can be wielded without integrity, but power-from-within cannot. For power-from-within is the power to direct energy—and energy is directed by the images in our minds and speech, as well as by our actions. If these are consistent, energy flows freely in the direction we choose and we have power. If what we do is at odds with what we say or think, then energy gets blocked or mis-channeled. If I think and say that I hate pollution, and yet walk by and leave the beer cans lying at my feet, the energy of my feelings is dissipated. Instead of feeling my own power to do something, however small, about litter, I feel and become more powerless.
Directed energy causes change. To have integrity, we must recognize that our choices bring about consequences, and that we cannot escape responsibility for the consequences, not because they are imposed by some external authority, but because they are inherent in the choices themselves. If I leave the beer cans lying, and go away feeling powerless and depressed, my powerlessness is not a judgement imposed by an irate Goddess—it is an inherent aspect of the decision I made.
The ethics of integrity are choices based on internal consistency and inherent consequences. They are not based on absolutes imposed upon chaotic nature, but upon the ordering principles inherent in nature. Nor are they based on rules that can be taken out of context. They recognize that there are no things separate from context. The Pope, were he a representative of an immanent religion, could not ban birth control without acknowledging that he is also choosing the consequences of poverty, starvation, suffering that such a ban will bring. But of course, an immanent religion could not have a Pope who makes decisions that bind millions of others. In a religion of immanence, each individual is sacred. Each of us has our own direct line to truth; each of us is her/his own Pope, so nobody can be invested with authority over us. Only those who must bear the consequences of a decision have the right to make it. And those who make decisions must bear the consequences.
It is interesting to try to envision a large society based on this principle. At first, one is struck by how much less would get done. We could build no more freeways through neighborhoods if those whose houses would be destroyed could veto the project. We could build no more nuclear power plants or nuclear bombs, nor could we carry out any of the large-scale projects that involve forcing some people to accept conditions they don’t want. We might no longer be able to carry out any projects that involve vast, sweeping changes in the land or in neighborhoods.
Instead, we would turn to changes that were small, organic, incremental, cooperative. We would have to transform our technology, our economy, our entire way of living. Instead of damming a wild river to provide electricity, we might need to construct a windmill for every house.
We would, however, be prevented from making vast mistakes—from bulldozing entire neighborhoods only to let the lots lie empty for years, from placing whole states in danger of irradiation, from waging war. Such an ethical principle could provide self-correcting feedback to culture, forcing us to evolve more slowly and more carefully. Indeed, cultures based on immanence have evolved very slowly, and have not developed Western culture’s technological prowess. They adapt to land and climate rather than change radically the face of the earth.
Anyone who is uneasily contemplating the prospect of the wheels of production and/or progress grinding to a halt can, of course, relax. We are not, as a culture, about to switch to the ethics of immanence suddenly. We can, however, begin to apply these principles to our own lives, groups, and organizations.
What many of us discover, however, when we begin making decisions according to our internal integrity instead of externally imposed authority, is that what we have always called our conscience is really an internalized version of external authority, an inner self-hater that gets us to do what it believes is right by means of domination, threat, fear, and guilt—by telling us the stories of estrangement. “A good person picks up beer cans,” the self-hater whispers. “If you don’t, you’re bad. You are breaking the rules. You will fall from the circle of the chosen, the elect. A terrible judgement will come upon you.”
The next chapter will deal at length with the self-hater, but for now it is important to recognize that the ethics of immanence have nothing to do with guilt. They are based on pride, not guilt. I pick up beer cans not because I feel rotten when I don’t, but because I feel empowered when I do. I can see that the stream-bed looks better and feel pride in having made that change, small though it may be.
The idea of an ethic based on the individual’s sense of pride and integrity must make many people profoundly uneasy. Didn’t Hitler believe in his own integrity? Aren’t we throwing open the door to crime and vast selfishness?
Perhaps, if the individual self is seen out of context. But immanence is context, and so the individual self can never be seen as a separate, isolated object. It is a nexus of interwoven relationships, constantly being shaped by the relationships it shapes. Integrity also means integration—being an integral and inseparable part of the human and biological community.
In a community in which the sacred manifests through inner integrity rather than external authority, the integrity of every self is valued—yours as well as mine. No one’s personal sense of righteousness—be that person a Pope or a Hitler—can justify her/his domination over others. I must recognize the sacredness of your will, as well as mine, and if they conflict, we must struggle toward a solution that both of us can freely accept. (More about that process in Chapter Six, “Building Community: Processes for Groups”.) In such a community, good listeners might be valued more than loud talkers. Manipulation through fear, guilt, blame, or appeasement is unethical. Process becomes as important as content or product.
When personal integrity is valued, diversity also must be valued. No longer do we tell ourselves stories about the one truth, or the set of rules that everyone must follow. Immanence is polytheistic—it allows for many powers, many images of the divine. We do not try to coerce everyone into following the same trail along the stream; instead, we say that we each have our own path to find, our own trash to pick up. If we all walk the same track, then only a narrow strip gets cleared. If we spread out and go different ways, together we can cover a great deal more ground.
In ecological systems, the greater the diversity of a community, the greater is its resilience and adaptability in the face of change—and the greater is its chance for survival.
The ethics of immanence encourage diversity rather than sameness in human endeavors, and within the biological community. Diversity can even be used as a standard for judgement, leading us, perhaps, to favor a salt marsh over a subdivision, or a multitude of small businesses over the interests of a few large corporations.
Diversity fosters and is fostered by balance. As stated in Barry Commoner’s fourth law of ecology: “There is no such thing as a free lunch. Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost, and which is not subject to overall improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided, it can only be delayed.”2
Relationships of integrity are balanced: no one is attempting to get a free lunch at someone else’s expense. Instead, the energy each puts out is roughly equal to the energy she or he gets back. No one does all the giving or all the taking. Giving and taking may swing up and down, but they swing around a fulcrum, a center. It is no more ethical always to give than it is always to take.
Life and death balance each other. They are not a good/bad duality. Life expands; death imposes limitations. When the two forces are in balance, a rich diversity of life-forms can coexist.
The ethics of immanence strongly value life—but not as an un tempered absolute. For life, too, is relationship, interwoven in a dance with death, and death is the limiting factor that sustains the possibility of new life.
There is no external authority, no set of absolute truths, that can tell us precisely how to determine the meaning of our personal commitment to the dance. For some, preserving the dance of life/death may mean neither eating meat nor using the products of domesticated animals. For others, it may mean refusing to register for the draft. For still others, it may mean keeping up the daily struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent.
Questions of life and death inevitably bring up the issue of abortion. For some women, a commitment to serve the life-force might make an abortion impossible. For others, an abortion might be the highly ethical choice not to bring forth a child that cannot, for whatever reason, be wholeheartedly loved and cared for. For a child is given life not just by its physical birth, but through relationships with loving, caring human beings. If those relationships cannot be assured, then the newborn is given only half a life, a precarious, starved existence.
But abortion is not truly an issue of right-to-life versus right-to-choice. To maintain the right of every egg and sperm to reproduce blindly is like maintaining the right of every cockroach and flea to populate the world endlessly. The question at stake is actually the right-to-coerce. Only our assumption that some people have the right to exercise power-over others allows us even to consider taking the choice away from the woman whose self and body and future are at stake.
For human life to be rich, joyful, loving, it must be the freely given gift of the Mother—through the human mother. To bear new life is a heavy responsibility, requiring a deep commitment, one that no one can force on another. To coerce a woman by force, or fear, or guilt, or law, or economic pressure to bear an unwanted child is immoral. It denies her right to exercise her own sacred will and conscience, robs her of her humanity, and dishonors the Goddess manifest in her being. It is the responsibility of an ethical society not to force every fetus conceived to be brought to term, but to provide support and resources so that every child born can be fed and sheltered, loved, nurtured, and protected.
Nor is death an absolute to be feared. Death, too, is part of the moving, changing process we call life, part of the cycle. For the stories of immanence do not end with a bang—or even a whimper—they are circular, they are stories about the way the moon wanes and becomes dark, only to wax again, about how the sun dies at the Winter Solstice and is reborn as the year is newly born. The Goddess is Crone and Reaper as well as Mother; the God is the grain that is cut down as well as the seed that is sown. But the harvest, the reaping of herbs—or of any rewards, returns, profits—must be practiced with respect for the balance of life and its continuation in the richest and most diverse forms. The animal herds are culled, not obliterated. When herbs are cut only a few are taken from each separate clump so that they may grow back in future years. Human communities must limit their numbers and their lifestyles to what the land can support without straining resources or displacing other species.
Death, in fact, becomes the source of power-from-within—for only when we acknowledge the ultimate limits both of our power and our responsibility can we be free to bring power forth. We can act freely only when we recognize that we are neither powerless nor omnipotent; that our active will, strong as it may be, is tempered by the activity of other wills, that our needs and desires must be balanced with those of others.
As life and death must be in balance, so must self and community. To act with integrity, we must see ourselves in context, as individuals and as members of a larger community (a society and culture that in turn are part of the biological/geological community of planet earth and the cosmos beyond).
To be a member of that community means both to be shaped by it and to have responsibility for shaping it—for preserving both its balances and the interplay of diversity and richness of life in its fullest expression. No one can live out the fullness of self when she or he is hungry or condemned to a life of poverty and discrimination. A woman cannot be fully herself when her roles are circumscribed, when she is not free to be strong and creative, to control her own body and her own sexuality, to be a leader and to be in touch with power-from-within. People cannot live fully when the color of their skin limits their freedom and opportunities, when their lives are overshadowed by the fear of war or the threat of ecological disaster. To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.
Honoring the inherent value of self also means placing a high value on human needs and emotions. Our feelings—even our fears, our anger, our pain—are valued as part of our lives. We cannot be integrated without them. Integrity does not mean trying to get beyond anger or transcend negativity. It means that we stop trying to fit our feelings into the story about the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys; that we see them as carriers of power-from-within.
In the ethics of immanence, sexuality is also sacred, deeply valued, not just as the means of procreation, but as a power that infuses life with vitality and pleasure, as the numinous means of deep connection with others. Sexual integrity means honestly recognizing our own impulses and desires and honoring them, whether or not we choose to act on them. If we value integrity, we must also value diversity in sexual expression and orientation, recognizing that there is no one truth, or one way, that fits everyone.
Sexuality is sacred because through it we make a connection with another self—but it is misused and perverted when it becomes an arena of power-over, a means of treating another—or oneself—as an object. Sexuality, when valued, does not become an obsession. It is the ultimate movement of power-from-within whenever it is welcomed with honesty—in simple erotic passion, in the unfathomable mystery of falling in love, in the committed relationship of marriage, in periods of abstinence and chastity, in affectionate play between friends, or in its infinite other guises, which I will leave to the reader’s imagination.
Coercion may be more subtle than physical rape or overt economic pressure. It includes psychological pressures that influence people to ignore their needs or repress their desires, political pressures to focus their sexual drives in so-called acceptable channels. and social pressures. By these standards, the attitudes promoted by most of the major religions are extremely coercive and unethical. When the ethics is based on integrity instead of authority, no one has the right to interfere with another’s sexual choice. “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals,” is a statement Witches attribute to the Goddess. Sharing love and pleasure with each other is considered one of the best things human beings can do. A society based on the ethics of immanence would encourage all choices that allow that expression to be most honest, that would make us free to listen to our own deep desires.
Life, being sacred, demands our full participation. The ethical person engages in life and does not withdraw from it. Our ideal is not monastic seclusion or asceticism, but the fully human life lived in the world, involved in community. To be human is, by definition, to be imperfect. We accept our imperfections and are no longer forced to emulate the superhuman standards of the Great Man, a standard from which we must inevitably fall.
Honoring ourselves, our feelings, our human imperfections, allows us to start where we are, and let others start where they are. It means that we can allow ourselves to work like human beings, to stop and rest, to enjoy the stream and the fresh air and each other’s company along the way. We do not have to work like automatons—and no one of us is responsible for doing it all. Cleaning up the stream is our collective, communal task.
For justice, inherent in the world and in the ecological balance of the biosphere, operates communally. The kid who throws the beer can may not be disturbed by its presence in the stream. The owner of the chemical company may not be the person who gives birth to a defective child. Nevertheless, their actions have consequences from which they can never wholly escape. And if we are not comforted by the story of a final Day of Judgement, when all scores will be settled, then it becomes an even greater collective responsibility, here and now, to change those practices that destroy the lives of individuals and the interplay of life-forms around us. No external authority—God, Goddess, angel, or convoy of visitors from another planet, will do this for us. We must create justice and preserve ecological and social balance. This is the prime concern, the bottom line, the nitty-gritty of the ethics of immanence.
But what makes kids throw cans in the stream? How do we confront what theologians insist on calling the problem of evil?
Evil is a concept that cannot be separated from the stories of duality. Power-over, violence, coercion, domination, hurtful as they are, are not evil in the sense of being part of a force in direct opposition to good. Instead, we can see them as mistakes, processes born of chance that spread because they served some purpose, structures that may now have outlived their usefulness.
The problem of evil is really a problem of randomness. Is the universe entirely controlled, directed, knowable—based on cause and effect—or is there an element of randomness? The new physics tells us that, indeed, there is a basic principle of uncertainty, of chance, at work in the innermost nature of things. Without randomness in a system, there could be nothing new. Or, we could say that because there is randomness at work new things develop, new relationships are formed; some of these further the diversity, the richness of the interplay of life-forms and create beauty—some do not. Power-from-within is also the power to say no, to bind, to cull, to limit, to stop.
To say no, to set a limit, is not necessarily to make a threat or to use power-over another. When 2000 people say no to the licensing of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant by blockading and going to jail, they are setting a limit. When hundreds of thousands of Europeans march in the street to protest the presence of nuclear weapons in their countries, they are setting a limit to United States foreign policy.
Setting limits is something every parent must do; but good parents do not have to be authoritarian. You cannot beat children and make them stop throwing temper tantrums, but you can shut the door to the room and walk away, saying, “When you are done screaming, I want to hear what you have to say.” The parent who beats the child sees her/him as an object to be controlled; the loving parent who sets limits sees that the temper tantrum expresses a moment in the relationship of child and parent. It is not something the child is doing alone, the parent plays a role in the child’s tantrums, and when the parent changes her/his relationship the child’s behavior too must change.
Nor is the nuclear plant an object; it too is one aspect of a complex system of relationships, that we can change by withdrawing our cooperation. And if we want to stop kids from throwing beer cans into the stream, we must somehow change our relationship to them, and, in so doing, change their relationship to the stream and, perhaps, to themselves.
Because every change we make is a change in a relationship in which we take part, we cannot cause change without changing ourselves. That is the origin of the magical dictum, “What you send returns to you three times over.” In shaping any energy, we take the shape we create, we become the power that we call forth.
Immanent justice rests on the first principle of magic: all things are interconnected. All is relationship. Perhaps the ultimate ethic of immanence is to choose to make that relationship one of love; love of self and of others, erotic love, transforming love, affectionate love, delighted love for the myriad forms of life as it evolves and changes, for the redwood and the mayfly, for the blue whale and the snail darter, for wind and sun and the waxing and waning moon; caring love for the Cambodian child, the Haitian refugee, the farmer in El Salvador, the restless ghetto teenager; love for all the eternally self-creating world, love of the light and the mysterious darkness, and raging love against all that would diminish the unspeakable beauty of the world.
Love connects; love transforms. Loving the world, for what it is and our vision of what it could be, loving the world’s creatures (including ourselves), caring for the stream, picking up the garbage at our feet, we can transform. We can reclaim our power to shape ourselves and the world around us.