Beyond Sacred Perception: Intergenerational Responsibility

Intergenerational Responsibility

Awakened, Sound, Divining

The Buddha needs us for awakening, understanding and love to be real things and not just concepts. They must be real things that have real effects on life.      Thich Nhat Hanh

 

The Fox as Visionary evolved inner relational wisdom. As the Lover turned inward, he can now contemplate the enormity of his relationships, developing far-reaching understandings, musing about his connection to what is grander than himself. This path can be full of pitfalls and slippery slopes. But he has been the Awakened Child, the Artist, the Lover. And from the peaks of Mindfulness, Flow, and Attunement, he is open to spiritual energies. He sees his impact on life and feels a real imperative to act morally.

Why this painting:

With a capacity for Sacred Perception, in the days and weeks and hours following a period of deep Work, we may best grasp in our Heart the need for Intergenerational Responsibility. This is a wisdom often attributed to Native Americans, specifically the Iroquois Confederacy, who believed that each generation has an obligation to preserve and protect the natural world for future generations, recognizing that short-term gains should not come at the expense of long-term consequences. Beyond any practical notion, it reflects a deep respect for the interconnectedness of all life.

Inside out:

Spiritual awareness can unchain us further from self-sabotaging patterns and survival fears, allowing what happens to us to have less of a grip on us. With freed senses, as O’Donohue recalls to us, we begin to understand in our Heart that we’re another being amongst an infinite variety, allowing us to reenter the symbolic garden. From the inside out, we find that we’re One beyond the forms we take, above the roles and rules we have adopted, beneath the surfaces that seem so myriad and foreign. We can step in and out of other beings, whether they wear shoes or not. We come to know and trust a deep state of energetic belonging. We experience what can best be described as an awareness of the sacredness of real things.

As the Visionary we seek to answer the question, “What does my Heart call me to cherish and preserve?”

Upside down:

I worshipped then among the depth of things…

I felt, and nothing else. I did not judge,

I never thought of judging, with the gift

Of all this glory fill’d and satisfied.

                   William Wordsworth, The Prelude

A state of Awe that grows Sacred Perception and Intergenerational Responsibility is not religion.  Indeed, as we embody the Visionary, we see most clearly how cult figures, religious or otherwise, block us from recognizing anything Holy. For too many of us, our childhood religious community proclaimed dark fantasies and apparitions that could not be questioned, and attendance felt like an inquisition where the outspoken child was adjudicated, intimidated and silenced. Such groups use scriptures— “sacred texts”—as a codified rationale for hurting the defenseless, enslaving or even abusing parishioners. Justifying divisions.

Injured by religiosity, we can understandably want to reject any notion of something greater, with spirituality seeming to be a con game or a fool’s errand. And I will admit, I often do wonder about the faith that some non-spiritual, or barely spiritual, or greatly spiritual individuals or non-traditional religions seem to place in “going high when they go low.” It seems a naive and an unwarranted presupposition that Love will be returned in kind, as if you just need to put enough Love out there for a transformation to take place. But I have seen little evidence that simply staying in a higher consciousness and heart-felt openness will soften the apish bullies and predators or miraculously foster a wider and deeper moral development in the world around us or in us. The irrational does not respond rationally to the rational, and the depraved do not respond with compassion to the compassionate, however much I might wish it would be so.

Intergenerational Responsibility suggests to me that indeed we do want to stay in Love and Play, because that is congruent with our Inspired life, and, as it evolves into Powerful-play, we see more of reality, growing in our Heart a deepening sense of what is important to support and to protect. And what is important to stand clearly against. And, yes, to fight against the darkness. Even to meet aggression with aggression to contain the abuse of Power. This is not meant as a theological or ideological theory I find any need to defend. And these thoughts may be only revealing of my small journey, revealing, if nothing else, why I have been so drawn to the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists who never put forth a code of ethics, but simply cherished art and creativity and Nature and understood that the imagination can see what is True and Beautiful in ways that reason or codified morality cannot grasp. Traveling among the mountains becomes symbolic for the Inspired Heart that can pass with humility, unconditionally loving and worshipping. “I felt and nothing else.”