In trying to trace the historical arc that took our culture from an embodied consciousness to a unipolar consciousness, we are looking specifically for the forces that separated our thinking from our being. Etymology is one of the few means available to us for hacking into our ancestral memory banks: the shifting evolution of a word over time often traces out fundamental shifts in our ideas and relationships. As we have mentioned, for example, ancient Greeks had a word, phren, that can only be translated into English with two very different words: “diaphragm” and “mind.” That double meaning is still found in our word phrenograph, which the OED defines as,
(a) an instrument for recording the movements of the diaphragm in respiration; (b) a phrenological description or ‘chart’ of a person’s mental characteristics.
For the Greeks, though, there was no double meaning: the mind was the diaphragm. The issue here is not that some early Greek anatomist simply misunderstood the functioning of body parts; the usage traces back to a time when the ancient Greeks experienced their thinking in the upper torso, just as we experience our thinking in the head. In Homer’s writings in the eighth century B.C., which drew on an ancient oral tradition, phren was most often used in the plural—phrenes—and it denoted a multifaceted faculty that was located in the chest area. In her study of the subject,275 Shirley Sullivan explains that the distinctions we make between physical and psychological, between immaterial and material, are blurred in Homer’s world—and so it is with phrenes: a center of consciousness, it had physical, intellectual, emotional, volitional and moral aspects. That sense is preserved in Richmond Lattimore’s translations. In Book Twenty of the Odyssey, for instance, Theoklymenos says, “I have eyes and I have ears, and I have both my feet, and a mind inside my breast which is not without understanding.”276 What the term phren suggests, then, is that in the time of the Greek oral tradition, which culminated in Homer, the center of thought and self was experienced roughly midway between the cranial brain and the pelvic brain.
We can hack our way back another three thousand years or so if we trace the ancestry of our word navel. It has its earliest detectable roots in an Indo-European base that is hard to reconstruct—it could have been ombh or nobh or mbh—but we know it meant “navel.” Through all its transformations over time, it has retained that original meaning. We have to be careful, though, not to imagine that because its ancient meaning was “navel,” it meant no more than what navel means to us today. Indo-European words are characterized by a dynamic energy that reveals not fixed, independent meaning but active, metaphoric relationship. Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, writing about ancient Sanskrit roots, observed that almost all of them
are primitive verbs, which express characteristic actions of visible nature. The verb must be the primary fact of nature, since motion and change are all that we can recognize in her.277
When we search through the linguistic relationships that might suggest what the activated meaning of the navel was, we turn up some interesting clues. Sanskrit, which was introduced to India around 1500 B.C., provides some of the oldest writings of any Indo-European language. The Indo-European base for navel became the Sanskrit word nabhih, “navel,” but it revealed itself in two other meanings as well. One of its alternate meanings, intriguingly, was “relationship.” The other was “the hub of a wheel”—the round hole in the middle of a wheel through which the axle is passed. The association of the navel with the hub must have been fundamental, because it also shows up in English via a completely separate route. The English word nave, no longer a common word, also means “the hub of a wheel” and also traces back to the same Indo-European base. In fact, many of the Germanic languages, to which English belongs, have similar words for “hub” rooted in the same base. By yet a third route, that base also became nabis—again, “the hub of a wheel”—in Old Prussian, an extinct Baltic language.
Terminology for wheeled vehicles is widespread in early Indo-European languages. Archaeology tells us that wheeled vehicles were invented in the fourth millennium B.C.; by around 2500 B.C. they acquired spokes. In trying to understand the tenacity of the metaphor identifying the wheel’s hub with the body’s navel, it helps to bear in mind that prehistoric metaphors are not displays of cleverness or whimsy. They achieved currency because they captured experiential relationships—they ‘hit the nail on the head’; and like that modern metaphor, their aptness springs first and foremost from what the body understands. It is their fidelity to that cellular memory that gives those metaphors their vitality and durability. Consider, then, what it means to watch a wheel turning about its hub, and to relate that hub to the experience of the body, and to find that it accords with the navel: as the center of the wheel is found at the hub, the center of the self was found at the navel. As the wheel revolves around the hub, the sensations of our thinking being revolved about the navel. As the center of a hub rests in stillness, so too the center of the self. The hub of the self stood as the place from which one related to the world, and as the place at which one’s relationships—like the spokes of a wheel—converge. As a metaphor, the hub is close to the Japanese concept of hara and is strikingly similar to the whirlpool metaphor suggested by Alan Watts: both the wheel and the whirlpool turn about, and even into, a still center of emptiness.
Most of us would face difficulty in trying to consciously experience the navel as the center of the self, for our consciousness has too radically dissociated from our visceral brain, the center that allows us to consciously ‘be’. In fact, your normal ‘hub of activity’ is probably centered in the cranial brain. In an ironic contrast, we associate the idea of ‘navel gazing’ with the enclosure of self-contemplation—an association at odds with the hub of being, which connects us to the world. Like Neolithic cultures, we also have a wheel metaphor that situates the hub of the self; but when you look at someone who is deep in thought and tell him, “I can see your wheels turning,” where you ‘see’ those wheels is in the head—not, for instance, in the belly. And so it is that if you try to grasp the Neolithic navel metaphor by means of your ‘wheels turning’ in the hub of your conscious thinking, you will never get more than an idea of it—like an appealing bauble that can be set within a ready structure of concepts. Or perhaps the idea will just seem like a bit of spurious speculation to be dismissed out of hand. To awaken to that metaphor within your body, though—the shifting sensations of your being centered on the navel, the still hub that integrates all thought and feeling—is to begin to heal the ancient cultural schism that has split your thinking from your being.
The prehistoric metaphor of the navel as the center of Being shows up on a grand scale at the oracle of Delphi. The temple there was originally devoted to the goddess Gaia; it literally represented the earth’s center, which was marked by a conical navel-stone, or omphalos. The goddess Gaia was later overthrown and replaced by the god Apollo, as goddesses were overthrown across Europe. But the navel stone remained there, and Delphi became the most celebrated of the Greek oracles—suggesting perhaps a lingering recognition that the greatest truths issue from the chthonic mystery of Being that lives beneath the navel.
We also inherited from the Greeks the story of Omphale and Heracles. As penance for a murder, Heracles—symbol of male doing if ever there was one—became a slave to the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, whose name means navel. When he submitted himself to this queen of Being, she made him dress like a woman and do woman’s work, such as spinning wool, which he didn’t take to very well. This myth tells us about a transitional phase, when the hetabrain was struggling for supremacy and resentful of the tempering influence of the female element of Being. The birthright of the hetabrain was not servitude—it would much rather be out in the world, doing heraclean tasks.
The Greeks were among the last major cultures in Europe with a remembrance of the navel as the center of Being. The oracle at Delphi was shut down in A.D. 390 by the Christianized Roman Empire, which was fully committed to a different center of Being. The new hierarchy is pretty much summed up by the two convergent meanings of the Latin word capitalis: “pertaining to the head,” and “capital, chief, first.” That convergence tells its own story: the male prerogative of conscious thinking, held aloof from being by its own abstractions, is the supreme faculty and rightful ruler. The supremacy of head over hub—which was characterized by the cultural phase shift from logosmind to hetabrain, from integration to perspective, from five dimensions to four, from embodied consciousness to unipolar consciousness—was by then well established. The intervening centuries have merely fortified and secured its right to rule.
So we see sketched out in the history of words a transition from the Neolithic hub of being to modern hetabrain, from Being to doing—but how or why did the new kind of human arise from the old? To account for it, we need to be clear about the forces that precipitate cultural change. Very often, I think, we identify cause where we are actually observing effect. Many people, for instance, lay blame for our mind/body split at the feet of Descartes, noting that he was the first to ascribe to the body the machine-like characteristics of the pocket watch by which he kept time, or of the larger clockwork that wheeled the stars and planets through the heavens. By doing so, the story goes, he gave birth to the Cartesian duality that bears his name. The implication is that his act of putting that view into words is responsible for creating the split. Well, that accusation just doesn’t hold up. If Descartes had made the same pitch to a group of Tibetan monks or aboriginal Australians, or to the First People’s Nations of North America, his idea simply wouldn’t have made any sense to them. End of story.
No, what distinguishes Descartes is that he was the first to express something that people were already experiencing: as they heard it described they recognized its truth, because it fit with their experience. A new paradigm does not create a new experience; experience outgrows the inherited patterns of understanding, generating a tension that builds up until eventually another paradigm comes along that expresses what is being experienced. The emergent paradigm acts as a midwife, pulling the experience from the darkness into the light. And there is no question that the new paradigm affects our experience—it helps it develop and “fixes” it, in the same way that the developing process helps to reveal and fix an image on photographic paper. The potency of any new paradigm is determined by how faithfully it reveals what is already being experienced.
What can we say, then, of the forces that are able to reshape the experience of the self so far beyond an old paradigm that it loses its relevance? There are many forces that push on people from the outside—economic, military and otherwise. But even the systematic power of the early Roman Empire could not thwart a Christian experience of the world. One’s experience of the world sustains one’s belief system—but one’s belief system also sustains one’s view of the world. Force is not a sure way to change either.
If the Romans had handed out cell phones, on the other hand, the empire might have inflicted considerably more damage on Christianity. Nothing changes our experience of the world more radically than the development of a powerful new tool. That effect has long been recognized, but it seems to me to remain underappreciated. The earliest ages of man—Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age—were identified in 1816 by a Danish archaeologist based on the materials used for toolmaking, each of which ushered in a new era. Winston Churchill observed, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”278 William Mitchell of MIT took the idea further: “we make our tools and our tools make us: by taking up particular tools we accede to desires and we manifest intentions.”279 But it was Marshall McLuhan who most vividly called our attention to the effect of tools, and his insights have proven prophetic.
I once attended a lecture by McLuhan at the University of Toronto, during which he stressed the fact that while talking on the telephone, we become disembodied. I wrote a somewhat smug little piece for an arts magazine, saying in effect that I hadn’t noticed that my body was particularly absent from the scene while I was talking on the phone. Thirty years later, of course, cell phones are everywhere, and studies have found that the ability to drive a car while talking on one is on a par with someone well over the legal limit for blood alcohol. Marshall—if you are listening, I repent.
Some new tools, such as phones, create a new medium for communication; but McLuhan observed time and again that the most significant message of any new medium was not what it communicated by, say, the words on the page or the images on the screen; the most significant message any new medium conveyed was, in effect, the new experience it provided of what it means to be human. Of course, it is from our culture’s array of such experiences that its story derives. In my view, then, McLuhan’s greatest accomplishment was that he turned our attention away from how tools or technologies affected what we could do and directed it onto how they affected our being. In a culture obsessed with doing, that suggestion was radical.
McLuhan observed, for example, that to assess the impact of the printing press by evaluating the new things it enabled us to do was to miss the real revolution; its impact could be understood only by appreciating how it altered our experience of who we are: like any tool, print works as an extension of man, shaping and transforming “his entire environment, psychic and social.”280 McLuhan carried his critique well beyond a study of media and applied it to both concrete and conceptual tools; he showed that the new use of a language or hammer or clock would alter our experience of both self and world, and so forever alter us.
Consider, then, the technological advances of the Neolithic Revolution, which was underway in the core of Europe by 6000 B.C.: it saw the development of agriculture, the creation of permanent settlements that sometimes amounted to towns (Catal Huyuk grew to 8,000 people and 2,000 homes) and the domestication of animals, among other accomplishments. Because our culture sees and understands according to the values of ‘doing’, it is natural for us to focus on how those developments changed man’s efficiency and migration patterns and enhanced his opportunities for survival. But if we assess the Neolithic Revolution in those terms alone, we miss its real message. McLuhan would urge us rather to consider how those developments altered man’s psychic and social environment—his Being. To begin to do so, we need a sense of what man’s psychic and social environment was prior to the Neolithic Revolution.
Henri and H. A. Frankfort were a husband-and-wife team who specialized in the ancient Near East and helped us understand that the world of ancient man was not the four-dimensional decor our eyes see around us today. Most notably, whatever ancient man looked upon was alive—there was no such thing as dead matter. Nor was any line drawn to divide the realm of nature from the realm of man. The world of phenomena was a living presence that surrounded him and beheld him and communicated with him. Every part of it expressed a presence that was never fully knowable, but to which a personal relationship was as natural as breathing. The world was a revelation of Being, and as such had
the unprecedented, unparalleled and unpredictable character of an individual, a presence known only in so far as it reveals itself.… [The world] is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is experienced as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship. Thoughts, no less than acts and feelings, are subordinated to this experience.281
In that it is reciprocal, the relationship constitutes an exchange of gifts. In that his world had the “character of an individual,” we can see that ancient man was “feeling the thing as a whole”—feeling the world as a Thou:
The whole man confronts a living “Thou” in nature; and the whole man—emotional and imaginative as well as intellectual—gives expression to the experience.282
One might surmise that in ancient man the male pole of conscious thinking was not as sensitized to the possibilities of perspective as we have become—but his capacity for reason, as the Frankforts explained, was by no means negligible. For instance, people
explained phenomena in terms of time and space and number. The form of their reasoning is far less alien to ours than is often believed. They could reason logically; but they did not often care to do it. For the detachment which a purely intellectual attitude implies is hardly compatible with their most significant experience of reality.283
That last sentence raises a simple question with bewildering implications—is the detachment of an intellectual attitude compatible with anyone’s most significant experience of reality? In fact, just how significant an experience of reality could an attitude of intellectual detachment provide even at the best of times? And yet, that is the attitude to which the abstract-loving hetabrain devotes itself and fetters us in turn.
Understanding that the world of ancient man was five-dimensional—suffused with Mind—we can better understand the findings of Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist whose work reconfigured our view of Stone Age Europe. The Stone Age began with the Paleolithic period, which lasted over two million years and was characterized by hunting and gathering and the use of simple stone tools. The Neolithic or ‘New Stone Age’ was marked by the emergence of agriculture, the domestication of animals and permanent settlements. A popular view considered Neolithic Europe to be the precursor to real civilization, but Gimbutas countered that civilization ought to be gauged by “its degree of artistic creation, aesthetic achievements, nonmaterial values and freedom which makes life enjoyable for all its citizens, as well as a balance of power between the sexes.”284 By those standards, civilization thrived in Neolithic Europe—especially in the period prior to the arrival of what has been called the Kurgan influence, which we shall look at later; Gimbutas referred to the period of pre-Kurgan, Neolithic civilization as Old Europe.
What we know about Old Europe has been methodically pieced together on the basis of archaeological discoveries ranging from the Atlantic coastline to Russia. Gimbutas points out, for example, that many settlements in Old Europe were unpalisaded villages that were typically located on sites endowed with natural beauty: people usually chose the most enjoyable places to live without consideration for how vulnerable they might be to attack—even though there is some evidence of warfare and, as the eminent specialist J. P. Mallory has noted, “even mass slaughter on a few occasions.”285
Their arts and culture, too, suggest that life in Old Europe was generally characterized not by fear and enclosure, but by a wakefulness to the great sustaining forces of nature and a sense of belonging to them. As Gimbutas observes, “celebration of life is the leading motif in Old European ideology and art. There is no stagnation; life energy is constantly moving as a serpent, spiral or whirl.”286 Those images, which recur throughout Neolithic art, represent Being as a sensational gathering and dispersing: at the center of the world’s transforming energies is its self-aware stillness.
On the basis of its art and culture, Gimbutas concluded that Old Europe worshipped a Great Goddess. Modern scholarship disputes her thesis of a single Goddess worshipped by Old Europe—and, in fact, the very notion there was worship of objectified goddesses. And from the point of view of this book, the idea of an individuated goddess runs contrary to what one would expect from a culture attuned to Being, for Being suffuses all the world’s particulars and speaks through them as the One Unbroken Whole; objectification results from perspective, the male strength. If there was no sense of an objectified goddess, though, there is ample evidence to suggest that Old Europe was matrifocal. If, then, we take the literality with which Gimbutas describes Old Europe’s relationship to the Goddess to be instead a metaphoric description of their relationship with the Divine ‘Thou’ of Female Being, then what Gimbutas has to say acquires a renewed significance and poignancy. For instance, she tells us,
In fact, there are no images that have been found of a Father God throughout the prehistoric record. Paleolithic and Neolithic symbols and images cluster around a self-generating Goddess and her basic functions as Giver-of-Life, Wielder-of-Death, and as Regeneratrix.287
In a culture that is attuned first to Being, it is natural that representations of female being should preponderate. And as for the lack of a hierarchical “father figure,” we might consider that in the Mosuo community in China, one of the few matrifocal societies that still exist, there is not even a word for “father.” Other aspects of the matrifocal realm also seem strange to us: time was not linear but cyclic—there was no death that was not followed by regeneration. Bones were compared to seeds, and burials represented a return to the fertile womb of the earth. Divine Female Being lived through nature and was physically manifest in all its phenomena: she was the source and power of all life.
We get a sense of the central concerns and sensibilities of the matrifocal culture if we look to its art. In an overview of the findings at Catal Huyuk, the largest Neolithic settlement to have been studied, Ian Hodder noted that women were usually depicted in three dimensions—think of the famous ‘Venus’ figurines—and are naked; they are not ‘doing’ anything: they just are.288 Men were usually depicted in the more abstract medium of two-dimensional wall paintings; in general they were clothed and engaged with the living mystery of life and death through activities such as hunting. Man’s daily agriculture or domestic tasks were not the subject of this art: its focus was the power and fluid mystery of wild nature.289 This strikes a contrast with the contemporary art of our own patrifocal culture, which tends to gather around and celebrate new ideas.
If we go farther back in time to the Paleolithic, we find that the male prerogatives of doing and abstract planning played an even smaller role in how man related to his world than it did in the transitional Neolithic. People of that era were concerned first and foremost with noticing what is. When shelter was needed, they would gather the branches of Divine Being that were waiting for them and build a hut, or find a cave and crawl into her womb. When food was needed they would walk into her abundant meadows and forests and notice and gather what she provided; or they would take up a spear and ask her to bless its throw. The tangible companionship of Divine Being was the dominant feature of their world.
Paleolithic Being gave way to Neolithic doing. In light of their developing technologies, we would expect “the entire environment, psychic and social” of emerging Neolithic societies to undergo an unprecedented upheaval; and in that our descriptions of the world derive from how we experience the self, we would also expect a change in their descriptions of nature. Let’s look first at the message that was conveyed by the medium of Neolithic developments, and at how it transformed the user.
The domestication of plants, for starters, reorganized every realm of human activity so profoundly as to leave no activity untouched by it. In order to plant in the spring, you need to have gathered and stored seeds the previous fall. You need to prepare the earth for the seed by cutting and hacking at what you know to be her living bosom. By virtue of your work, you stake out and assume ownership of the planted land and its crop, which had always belonged to the seamless domain of Divine Being. Certain of her animals are now seen to be vermin, robbing you of crops, as certain plants are now seen to be weeds. And when you do finally harvest, you are harvesting the fruits of your own labors. That isn’t to say that Divine Being is not a part of it all—the harvest still depends on her blessings of sun and rain—but her role has been scaled back. Sustenance is no longer just what appears on the trees and bushes of her magical groves and rivers, or on the hillsides and meadows that manifest her Being; it now appears mainly by dint of a whole new perspective that is fortified by knowledge and craft and planning and labor. Man appropriates land and transforms it willfully; and the manpower of ‘doing’ that is needed to create a successful crop on that land is quite distinct from the goddess power of ‘Being’. Attention has started to shift from noticing and respecting to imagining, planning, dividing, subduing and reshaping.
The cycles of planting, cultivation and harvest required people to settle in one place. In the Paleolithic era, people largely sheltered in caves or huts they built for themselves, and moved according to seasons and food supply. In Old Europe, by contrast, Gimbutas tells us that there were
towns with a considerable concentration of population, temples several stories high … [and] spacious houses of four or five rooms.290
And so the idea of transient or found shelter gave way to the concept of the year-round man-made house. That provided a potent new perspective on what it is to be human—and so changed what it is to be human. Consider this: the permanent space a house defines is not borrowed from Divine Being, but appropriated, and so establishes for the first time in man’s experience a substantial division between his realm and the realm of nature; and that independence from nature is self-achieved, to revisit Joseph Campbell’s term, like the tyrant’s. The purpose of a house is to effectively and securely shut out the world of nature—its sun and rain and cold and wind and animals and plants; when you close the door of your house, you are deliberately closing the door against the world of Divine Being. You are shutting her out of your space. And to be fair, that space isn’t exactly a house of death—but it is, by design, less amenable to life.
The construction of a settlement alters the look of the very landscape, which eventually proclaims the accomplishments of “Man” rather than the transformations of Divine Being. Construction also encourages man to look at her forms—her trees and rocks and mud and grasses—as raw materials voided of any sacred presence, to be reshaped and used willfully. And those raw materials are shaped first not by hands, but by the imagination. The most wondrous part of building a house is to watch as what has lived only in the imagination acquires dimension and form and eventually stands before you for all to see. Just as God conceived of a world and created it, so it was with man and his house. By his own efforts he created a space for himself that was governed by will and secured against Nature’s fecundity. By his own efforts man was becoming godlike. Suddenly, when the storm raged, it and the Divine Being it expressed were ‘other’; they were out there, battering at the border of one’s protected space in here. So crucial was the house in defining our relationship to the world that we call nature the “outdoors.” In time, the enclosure of the house became a metaphor for the self, and the whole of what lay outside of the protective barrier of the ego became ‘other’: by his own efforts, then, man created in the body a space for the self that is governed by will and committed to doing, and which secures the door against the fecundity of Divine Being.
The house so radically redefines what it is to be human that some aboriginal tribes identify white men just by reference to their houses. When the Indians of North America portrayed the white men on their sacred wampum belts, they depicted rows of houses. To the Warumungu of Australia, white men were Papulanyi, “enclosure dwellers.” Those tribes couldn’t have found a more appropriate symbol for our peculiar idea of the walled-in self. Freud and Jung also recognized it—both spoke of “the house of the self” as a fundamental metaphor for who we are and how we see ourselves—but I don’t think either of them examined the extent to which that metaphor is a cultural construct.
Neolithic man also domesticated animals. To get a sense of what that step meant is to start to untangle some of our most basic assumptions. Paleolithic man lived in a world teeming with creatures, each a revelation of Divine Being. He hunted a few of them—and if the flight of his spear was blessed, the hunter would give thanks to Divine Being and also to the prey. Contrast that to the Neolithic development of taking a fellow creature captive and keeping it for breeding and slaughtering. That act turns the animal into your property—it becomes subject to your will; it is alive to serve your needs. The effect on your psychic and social environment is incalculable. When you assume ownership of an animal, you also assume the role of the deity, and some of her power. You, rather than Divine Being, determine the moment of the animal’s death, and, having made the decision, you rather than Divine Being are the bringer of death. You decide when the beast will feed and what it will eat; often you dictate where it goes when. Often you also decide if the animal will breed, and you may select its partner; and if it has offspring, you always consider those fellow creatures to be your property as well.
The very lives of domesticated animals were to become man’s first great symbol of personal wealth. When we say someone is impecunious, we are invoking an Indo-European root thousands of years old that tells us he is “without cattle.” Robert Graves also suggests that the name Laius comes from the Greek leios, which means “having cattle.” The kind of entitlement that the ownership of animals encourages is at the heart of the Laius Complex; and just as the pastoralist herds and manages cattle, the Laius Complex herds and manages the sensations of the body. The domestication of animals seems to grant superiority to the male element both in the self and in a society: Margaret Ehrenberg has pointed out that in all societies in which animal husbandry plays a large role, women are the subservient gender.291
These three main developments in the Neolithic era—the beginning of agriculture, the building of houses and the domestication of animals—each radically reconfigured man’s relationship to nature. Each made the mysteries of Divine Being more banal or less immanent; each increasingly defined the realm of man as something set apart from the realm of nature; and that newfound apartness promoted the emerging fiction of four dimensions. Man was climbing into the role of a ‘doer’ on structures of control provided by new perspectives—perspectives that enabled him to systemize the cycles of agriculture, and imagine new tools to make it easier; to organize the design of a large house and the materials and steps required to erect it; and to manage the herding and penning and feeding and breeding of animals.
Because we can recognize ourselves in the descriptions we give to nature, we would expect the changes wrought in man by acquiring agriculture also to give rise to some changes in the way Divine Being was described. Sure enough, Gimbutas tells us that the Neolithic Earth Goddess acquired a male partner
who appeared in the spring, matured in the summer, and died in the autumn with the vegetation. This God cannot be traced in the Paleolithic and is associated only with the cultivation of agriculture.292
That new male partner, in other words, came to life when the male element of doing was needed in the spring, and died when the harvest was complete. He represented the emerging reality—which dawned with agriculture—that Divine Being was self-sufficient only in the dead of winter. That change in the perception of Divine Being was also shown by other new companions: figurines of animals noted for their strength, such as the dog, bull and he-goat. There is something slightly out-of-sync in those animals attending the metaphoric goddess, for they facilitate doing and are impotent to assist Divine Being, which just is. But the male element of doing had to express itself somehow: like a newly discovered muscle, it was flexing its fresh powers and seeing the world with new eyes. And those new powers, notably, were all used in service to abstract concepts. A new hierarchy was being established. Quite simply, the successful implementation of any abstract concept establishes its supremacy over the material world: an idea is born, and the material world is then refashioned according to its dictates. The implications of that supremacy are made more profound when we remember that our word material comes from an Indo-European base that means “mother.” By dominating the material world, we are demonstrating our superiority to female Being.
To even imagine achieving control over the material world is already to stand apart from it, so that the seamless, subtle consciousness—the felt dimension that binds all things to the processes of the unknown world—vanishes from sight, like Eurydice; and then the pieces of your world suddenly appear to be stand-alone objects rather than manifestations of the Great Swirl of Divine Being: doing over being leads to matter over mind. In their life-deprived abstraction, stand-alone objects appear to be knowable, things you can explain, anticipate, regulate, divert and transform; but being products of neglect, they also breed neglect.
The more power you have, the more control you can assert—so the acquisition of power and of the emblems of power become ends in themselves. Also, the more power you acquire, the greater is the level of systemization you need to sustain and implement it. The hetabrain comes into its own, and once it develops a taste for manipulating Being and beings to its own purposes, it doesn’t take long before it turns its attention to its own being—because the systemization of the world ultimately requires the isolation, ownership, patterning and control of the self. And then the die is cast: doing gains supremacy over Being, because control is chosen over sensitivity. Control even attempts to masquerade as freedom. But, of course, they are not the same: control rules the self, the way the helmsman steers the ship or the rider the horse.
If we are to unlock our unipolar consciousness and awaken it to the hub of our being, we have to reacquaint ourselves with the energy of the pelvic bowl. This exercise, more than any other I know of, slowly but surely stirs its sensitivity to wakefulness. I learned the exercise from the great Butoh performer and teacher Yumiko Yoshioka. Butoh is a modern theater/dance form that originated in Japan.
To start, stand in a relaxed but alert position and imagine a steel ball at the midpoint between the navel and the coccyx (tailbone). Keeping the steel ball centered in the pelvic bowl, slowly move the hips from side to side on a plane parallel to the floor so that the steel ball traces out a figure eight. Let the path of the figure eight gradually diminish in size, and the movement of the ball become gradually faster, until to an outside observer you would not be seen to be moving at all, so tiny is the figure eight that is being traced out by the speeding ball.
Then do the same thing with a figure eight also on a plane parallel to the floor, but which moves from front to back. And next with a figure eight that moves up and down perpendicular to the floor and aligned with the plane of your body, also getting gradually smaller and faster.
The final step is to connect the three figure eights, so that the ball traces a large figure eight side to side which leads into a front-to-back figure eight, which leads into an up-and-down figure eight, which leads again into a side-to-side figure eight. Again, the figure eights gradually diminish in size and the speed of the ball gradually accelerates, until eventually the casual observer would think you had stopped moving. I find that at the end of the exercise, if I just stand in a fairly neutral position, the energy in the pelvic bowl remains vividly present, the steel ball a calmly pulsing, bright-burning point of awareness.
