The Wild Reed: 2023

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Andrew Harvey on Our “Divine Identity”

One of the books I’m reading during my current Australian sojourn is Andrew Harvey and Mark Matousek’s Dialogues With a Modern Mystic.

Following is an excerpt that particularly spoke to me. It’s accompanied by Indigenous Australian artwork. According to Andrew Harvey, such artwork reflects people and cultures aware of and living from their “divine identity as children of the Divine Mother and Father.” In many ways, these Indigenous cultures, Harvey writes, embody “that ancient, eternal, natural way of harmony, peace, adoration and reverence that underlines, permeates and subtly illumes some part of all the major religions, however far they have strayed from it.”

________________________

The Divine exists. Humankind is being helped. There are realized [spiritual] masters on the earth. However, it is essential that we not be distracted from the real task ahead by a misunderstanding of the laws of the absolute reality, or spiritual diversion. The light can save us, but we must work with it.

. . . If we had only the external sciences to rely on, the game would already be lost. Fortunately, there exists another empiricism altogether, interrelated technologies of spiritual transformation developed by all the major mystical traditions and still, miraculously, intact and available to us. It is time that Westerners realize that mystics are scientists in their domain, that mystical union and transformation obey laws as inexorable as those of the physical universe. These laws are documented by systems of the most sublime sophistication which can help us take the journey into truth.

Vedanta is such a system, so are Sufism, Kabbala, Taoism, Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism, and the disciplines of such highly evolved cultures as the Kogis and the [Australian] Aborigines. So is the system that could be developed in the Christian tradition from the meditation techniques of the Desert Fathers and the writings of, among others, Ruysbroeck, Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, Hildegard of Bingen and St. John of the Cross. These technologies have in common the knowledge that the Divine Self is the one essential fact of the cosmos, the ways to reveal and realize it are known and have been charted. Maps of the most helpful accuracy exist and can be interpreted with the help of those who have taken the journey. Astonishing similarities in the laws that each of these great systems honor – laws of meditation and contemplation, faith and devotion, clarity, resignation, surrender and adoration – prove their legitimacy.

These are the laws of the only science that can reveal to us the essence of what we are and the essence of reality. If these laws are not widely known and respected and acted on, it seems obvious now that the human adventure will soon end.

. . . The chaos and tragedy we are surrounded by makes it clear that the patriarchy has failed, that scientific rationalism and the cult of technological progress taken to fanatic lengths are suicidal and that humankind dissociated from the wisdom of nature is doomed. Everything now depends on whether we as a race can restore ourselves to sacred balance and find again that ancient, eternal, natural way of harmony, peace, adoration and reverence for being that is still walked by the Kogis, Yamomamis, Native Americans and Aborigines and that underlines, permeates and subtly illumes some part of all the major religions, however far they have strayed from it. If we do not learn again our divine identity as children of the Divine Mother and Father, our inter-dependence with everything that lives and our responsibility for all our actions and for nature itself, we will destroy ourselves and our world.

– Andrew Harvey
Excerpted from Dialogues With a Modern Mystic
Quest Books, 1994
pp. 40-41 and p. 58

– Alma Nungarrayi Granites

For more of Andrew Harvey at The Wild Reed, see:
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Andrew Harvey
• Andrew Harvey on Radical, Divine Passion in Action
• A Dance of Divine Light
• Remembering and Reclaiming a Wise, Spacious, and Holy Understanding of Homosexuality
• Jesus: Our Guide to Mystical Love in Action – Part I | Part II | Part III

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Toby Johnson on the Mysticism of Andrew Harvey
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• Returning the Mind to God
• Being the Light
• Guidelines for a Universal Mysticism
• Christmas for Mystics
• Easter for Mystics
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Marianne Williamson
• Matarika
• “Meaning Transfigures All”
• Recognising and Honoring Australia’s First Naturalists
• Spirit Dreams
• May Balance and Harmony Be Your Aim
• Seeking Balance
• Prayer of the Week – November 14, 2012

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Guruk

Australian Sojourn – March 2023 • Part 4

I’m currently in the New South Wales coastal town of Port Macquarie, which for the Birpai, the Indigenous people of the area, is known as Guruk.

I was last in Guruk three-and-a-half years ago when, in August 2019, I returned from the U.S. for my Dad’s funeral. I’d previously been back in April 2019, at a time when Dad’s health was failing.

My parents moved to Port Macquarie from out hometown of Gunnedah in 2002. Mum still lives in Port and we’ve been enjoying our time together since I arrived from Melbourne (via Goulburn and Sydney) on Monday, March 13.

As I mentioned, the area around Port Macquarie (Guruk) and the Hastings (Doongang) River has been home to the Birpai Aboriginal peoples for tens of thousands of years.

Traditional Birpai life changed forever with the mapping and naming of the area by Surveyor-General John Oxley in 1818. Three years later in 1821, Port Macquarie was founded as a penal settlement for convicts sentenced for secondary crimes committed in New South Wales. The region was opened to free settlers nine years later.

Above: Tacking Point Lighthouse, Port Macquarie – Wednesday, March 15, 2023.

Port Macquarie was declared a municipality in 1887, but the town never progressed as a port owing to a notorious coastal bar across the mouth of the Hastings River. South of the river, over twenty shipwrecks occurred in the Tacking Point area before the lighthouse which still stands today was designed by James Barnet and built in 1879.

Paul is a young French backpacker whom I met on the train from Sydney to Port Macquarie. When we arrived in Port, Mum and I gave him a lift to the backpackers hostel at which he will be staying for the few weeks. On Wednesday, March 15, I picked him up and drove him to a number of places of interest in the area, including Tacking Point Lighthouse (above) and Grants Head (below), which we climbed.

Above: With Mum and some of her Port Macquarie friends – Wednesday, March 15, 2023. From left: Chris, Cec, Mum, me, Cheryl and Geoff.

For previous Guruk/Port Macquarie-related Wild Reed posts, see:
• Family Time in Guruk . . . and Glimpses of Somaliland (2019)
• Return to Guruk (2019)
• On Sacred Ground (2019)
• Guruk (2019)
• Guruk Sunrise (2017)
• Guruk Seascapes, from Dawn to Dusk (2017)
• Last Days in Australia (2017)
• Return to Guruk (2017)
• Port Macquarie (2016)
• Port Macquarie, Wingham, and Ellenborough Falls (2015)
• Port Macquarie Days (2014)
• Christmas in Australia (2010)
• Town Beach (2010)
• Swallows Ledge (2009)
• Port Macquarie (2008)
• Everglades Exhibition (2007)

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

When Neutrality Is an Inhumane Choice

I’ve recently come across two great commentaries on the Gary Lineker/BBC controversy in the United Kingdom. The first is by a fellow Australian I’ve long admired, Craig Foster (pictured above). A retired soccer player, human rights activist and sports analyst, Foster had an insightful op-ed in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald. Following are excerpts.

In sending a tweet critical of the UK’s Australian-exported approach to asylum seekers and refugees, which prompted suspension from his profession as sports host with the government-funded broadcaster, Gary Lineker raises important questions.

When is speaking out against government policies that are contrary to accepted and adopted international law, that put people at extreme risk by forcing them into either persecution or destitution, and challenging the language designed to turn a public against an entire cohort of people, inappropriate, partisan or partial?

The answer is that there is a fundamental difference between calling out human rights abuse and being politically partisan. While there is confusion around whether Lineker is technically and legally an employee of the BBC, others are rightly expected to be politically impartial. But there is no “impartiality” on human rights abuse. How can one be impartial to the stoking of division and hate?

There is no such thing as taking a “neutral” approach to racism, to the marginalisation of groups, to hate speech. Human rights, independent of any party, politician or government, provide us with true neutrality.

Criticising policy that compounds these dangers is a duty we all hold. Otherwise, when does our profession start and our humanity end?

These are not new concepts to Australians, since we underwent the same process. We should be deeply ashamed that our own policies – that have cost billions and destroyed many lives – are now travelling the world and taking our reputation with it.

The Sunak government [in the UK] has copied Australia’s policy right down to the simplistic, diversionary slogan: Stop the Boats. Of course, it’s boats that must be stopped, rather than desperate humans in them.

Language has proven highly successful in numbing the Australian public to the reality of human mobility and suffering. To ensure that ordinarily caring Australians would turn a blind eye to suffering and death, it is fundamentally necessary to portray a group as unworthy, improper, criminal and dangerous. One must also take their identity and thereby their humanity by giving them numbers, ensure that no media can access them, even criminalise doctors who uphold their Hippocratic oath and call out the human cost, as Australia did with the Border Force Act of 2015.

It helps when the government lies to the Australian public about mothers throwing their children overboard, turning concern into revulsion, compassion into heartlessness. Thus, the legal act of entering another country when seeking safety must be called illegal. Immigration becomes border security. Regugee camps are given military designations such as Bravo and Delta, as though we are at war with innocent people.

Lineker pointed out that terms being used by the UK government ministers are “not dissimilar” to those of Nazi Germany. He is right. He did not compare the treatment of refugees with the 1930s but correctly pointed out that UK government rhetoric is changing to normalise the agenda of exclusion, hate and division.

. . . The support of Lineker’s colleagues in refusing to broadcast in his absence is exemplary, however, standing in solidarity with his right to champion human rights, while commendable, shouldn’t obscure the underlying issue that sparked the furore, the abuse of refugees themselves.

If legends such as former England internationals Alan Shearer, Ian Wright and Alex Scott stood against the demonisation of innocent people, the UK would have a powerful chance of avoiding the 20 years of harmful policy and thousands of lives destroyed, a period from which Australia is only now emerging.

And if the extraordinary outrage against a public figure who is challenging the policy and language of hatred was reserved for the mistreatment of refugees themselves, Britain, Australia and like-minded countries could commit to solving a complex and worrying escalating issue rather than attacking some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

– Craig Foster
Excerpted from “Gary Lineker’s Red Card from the BBC
Exposes a Shameful Contradiction”
The Sydney Morning Herald
March 14, 2022

The second worthwhile commentary on the Gary Lineker/BBC controversy that I share today is from English actor and comedian Tom Walker via his fictional political correspondent Jonathan Pie. (NOTE: During the following 4-minute video, Pie critiques the rhetoric of British Home Secretary Suella Braverman.)

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Jeet Heer: Quote of the Day – March 10, 2023
• Demanding Justice and Embodying Compassion for Separated Families
• A Prayer for Asylum Seekers Being Tear-Gassed at the Border
• Jeremy Scahill on the Historical Context of the Trump Administration’s “Pathologically Sick” Anti-Immigrant Agenda
• “What We’re Seeing Here Is a Tipping Point”

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Quote of the Day

Marianne Williamson is running against Joe Biden. It would benefit the entire country if he had to defend his record on issues both foreign and domestic.

. . . Whatever you think about Williamson, she’s advocating vitally important policy positions.* If you believe that the voting public should get to make an informed decision about the issues – if in other words, you believe in democracy – then you shouldn’t want to see a candidate most Democrats wish would sit this one out renominated without even making him defend his record in debates.

– Ben Burgis
Excerpted from “Will Joe Biden
Debate Marianne Williamson?”
Jacobin
March 10, 2023

* Notes Daniel Marans:

Williamson’s policy platform, which is remarkably detailed for a candidate just beginning to hit the trail, combines a by-now-familiar list of progressive demands with some unique Williamsonian touches.

Williamson is running on enacting a single-payer health care system, paid family and parental leave, free child care, and tuition-free public college or vocational school, as well as banning the oil and gas extraction method known as fracking and speeding up clean-energy adoption targets.

She is also proposing the creation of a host of new federal agencies, including a Department of Climate Change, a Department of Technology, and a Department of Childhood and Youth. And Williamson wants to provide at least $1 trillion in reparations to Black Americans that would be distributed by a council of Black American leaders.

Related Off-site Links:
Marianne Williamson: “Anything Is Possible” – John Nichols (The Nation, March 8, 2023).
Marianne Williamson Says Democrats Need to Fix “Unjust” Economy to Win – Andrew Stanton (Newsweek, March 12, 2023).
Williamson Launches Progressive Challenge to Biden in New Hampshire – Andrew Sexton (WMUR 9 News, March 12, 2023).
This Time, Marianne Williamson Wants to Be Taken Seriously – Daniel Marans (The Huffington Post, March 13, 2023).
Biden Shouldn’t Blow Off Marianne Williamson – River Page (Pirate Wires, March 14, 2023).
Marianne Williamson Deserves to Be Taken Seriously – Nathan J. Robinson (Medium, March 14, 2023).

See also: Marianne 2024 Official Site | About | Issues | News | Events | Blog | Donate

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Marianne 2024
• Progressive Perspectives on Marianne Williamson’s Presidential Run

Image: Joe Biden talks with Marianne Williamson on the campaign trail in August 2019 in Clear Lake, Iowa. (Photo: Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images)

Monday, March 13, 2023

Photo of the Day

Related Off-site Link:
The Magpie-lark (Peewee)

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Ascension
• Photo of the Day – June 15, 2017
• Come to Me . . .
• Photo of the Day – May 29, 2012
• “Can You See the Lark Ascending?”

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Friday, March 10, 2023

Quote of the Day

The disorienting fact about the 21st century is that, even as the calendar moves forward, actual social and political reality is in a state of regression. Evils that were once thought long-vanquished are returning with a vengeance. Instead of Francis Fukuyama’s promised “end of history” leading to an expanding global system of liberal democracy, we’re living through a revival of authoritarianism and Great Power imperial conflict. Thanks to anti-vaxxers, the United States and other countries are experiencing a return of measles, mumps, whooping cough and chicken pox. The health achievements of the past century are threatened by a malfunctioning global health system that is becoming more vulnerable to pandemics. The rollback of social democracy that began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has led to levels of income inequality surpassing the era of robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie more than a century ago.

Child labor now has to be added to this list of resurgent horrors.

“Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country,” writes journalist Hannah Dreier, in an in-depth investigation published by The New York Times last month.

– Jeet Heer
Excerpted from “The Horrifying and
Shameful Return of Child Labor”
The Nation
March 10, 2023

Melbourne

Australian Sojourn – March 2023 • Part 3

I’ve spent the last four days in Melbourne, visiting family and meeting for the first time my two great nephews.

I also attended the annual Alliance Française French Film Festival at which my brother Chris and his partner Viv and I (pictured below) watched the festival’s opening night film, Masquerade.

Oh, yeah, and I got to catch up with Poppy! (Pictured with me at right.)

Above: Meeting my great nephews Ramy and Jacob, both born since my last visit to Australia.

Above: Jacob and his dad Ryan, my eldest nephew and godson.

Above: Ramy and his grandpa, my eldest brother Chris.

Above: Jacob with his mum.

Above and right: My nephew Mitch and his spouse Charmaine – Thursday, March 8, 2023.

Above: Ramy with his Uncle Brendan, my youngest nephew.

Above: Catching up with Cathie.

Above: Cathie and her youngest grandson Jacob.

For previous Melbourne-related Wild Reed posts, see:
• Australian Sojourn – May 2016: Melbourne
• Australian Sojourn – May 2016: Hanging Rock
• Australian Sojourn – March 2015: Family Time in Melbourne
• Australian Sojourn – March 2015: The Great Ocean Road
• Australian Sojourn – March 2015: A Wedding in Melbourne
• A Visit to Melbourne (2014)
• Where the Poseurs Are

Thursday, March 09, 2023

Progressive Perspectives on Marianne Williamson’s Presidential Run: “There’s No Downside to Her Doing This”

I have to say that The Humanist Report’s response to President Biden’s Press Secretary’s mocking of Marianne Williamson and her presidential candidacy is spot-on.

I also appreciate David Doel’s take on Marianne’s candidacy, a candidacy I wholeheartedly support. Observes Doel:

Marianne Williamson’s challenge of Joe Biden, if it’s properly covered by the media, has the potential to move the conversation during the Democratic primary; it could move Joe Biden to address many of the economic issues being addressed by Marianne Williamson. So regardless of what you think about Marianne, [her running for president] is a net positive; there’s no downside to her doing this.

Also worth a look-see is Kyle Kulinski’s critique of the members of the congressional progressive caucus and their support of Biden over the “thousand times” more progressive Marianne Williamson. (As one wit commented in response to Kulinski’s piece: “With progressives like these, who needs centrists?”)

The congressional progressive caucus are all in for Joe Biden. They know Marianne’s running; they know that what Marianne supports is much closer to what they say they support. But they’re all in for Joe Biden. . . . For the best of them, and I’m being so kind in saying this, the reason they support Biden is, We think he’s inevitable, we want to make some change in the direction that we prefer, and the way to do that is to play the game, back the guy who we know is going to win, and hope that [it will be a case of] I supported you so you’re now going to support me and some of the things I prefer. . . . None of them are acting from principle. If they claim that they’re in favor of [the range of progressive policies being championed by Marianne Williamson], if they claim those things and actually meant it, then the principled thing to do would be to say, Who’s close to my actual positions? Ah! It’s not even close! Marianne’s a thousand times closer to my actual positions. I’m going to support her. Not a single one of them is acting based on principle.

And finally, despite it being primarily a jaded hatchet-job, Nic Rowan’s March 9 Washington Examiner piece on Marianne can’t help acknowledging the political progressivism and inspiring humanity at the core of her presidential bid. Following are excerpts.

[Marianne Williamson] wants universal healthcare, free college and the cancellation of all existing student loan debt, a raft of family policies, a wealth tax, prohibitions on “dark money” in politics, and a transition to a green economy. These were certainly not Trump’s priorities. And while Biden may give lip service to some of them, Williamson sees him and other Democrats as limited by an “oligarchic system” in which “corporate profits take precedence over the good of the people [and the planet].” Her vision is different and, she says, untainted by the nihilism and cynicism that has marked Washington politics since World War II.

Williamson would know about cynicism since she is a Washingtonian herself. She moved to the city shortly after dropping out of the 2020 presidential race and became a fixture on the activist circuit. She told reporters that she was just keeping “an ear to the ground” and learning about the mechanics of politics in the Capital, but she was always preparing for another run.

. . . Insofar as Williamson does have a constituency, it has always been made up of people driven by conscience. . . . Williamson is one of these people herself. She was raised by parents who took public morality very seriously, to the point that her father once flew [the family] to Saigon to demonstrate the grave evil of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. When she was still beginning her career as a spiritual and self-help [teacher and author], she raised her profile in Los Angeles by giving speeches around the city to raise awareness about the AIDS crisis. And during the darkest moments of Bill Clinton’s presidency, she served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton, organizing retreats and counseling sessions for the beleaguered first lady.

In the past few years, as Williamson has become more enmeshed in Washington, she has grown beyond her old world. But her spiritually inflected self-help attitude still animates her approach to politics, often in ways that positively distinguish her from her rivals. Unlike most other professional politicians, Williamson’s posture is perfect, her skin luminous, and her suits well-brushed, never wrinkled. She does not sweat. She always stays on message and speaks from memory. (“Never, never a teleprompter,” a staffer told me.) When she wants to move through a crowd, it parts before her as if on command.

. . . “I am not naive about the forces that have no intention of allowing anyone into this conversation who does not align with their predetermined agenda,” she admits. Still, she begs her audience to “reject within ourselves the nihilism, reject within ourselves the cynicism, reject within ourselves the personal anger,” and march with her to battle the forces of injustice and, maybe, defeat them.

NEXT:
Ben Burgis: Quote of the Day
– March 14, 2023

Sunday, March 05, 2023

Goulburn

Australian Sojourn – March 2023 • Part 2

I’ve spent the last four days in the Southern Tablelands city of Goulburn, staying with my dear friends Cathy and Gerry whom I’ve known since my teaching days in Goulburn (1988-1993) prior to my relocation to the U.S. in 1994.

It has been a wonderful time of reconnecting with friends and taking in the sights of Australia’s oldest inland city, a place I once called home. The strong and heartfelt connection I still have to Golburn and to my former teaching colleagues and friends is quite something, especially given that I lived here for just six years 30 years ago. I am deeply grateful for all of these connections and friendships.