Welcome to our planetary Rite of Passage!
I’ve been writing, making films, and giving talks about the archetype of initiation, of Rites of Passage, for 20 years. I’ve also been studying, and to some extent, preparing for so-called “Collapse” for about 15 years. But I never expected this!
The entire planet is now going through a Rite of Passage (ROP). We have already crossed over from the first of three phases – Separation – and are well into the 2nd phase, known as Ordeal or Threshold. Separation is when we let go of all our attachments to traditional ways of being. In indigenous cultures that often meant initiates were violently separated from their everyday life. For boys, it sometimes meant the elders came for them in the middle of the night and, if necessary, ripped them from the arms of their mothers. Mothers would know this was coming. They knew that without initiation a boy would forever remain a boy and would never become a man, so they would play along by weeping and making a big show of separation. The boys would be taken away to the forest, the jungle, the outback, the desert, escorted to the secret and sacred sites of initiation.
Initiates are separated from all the objects they hold most dear. Today that would mean cellphones. But it can also mean house and car keys, money and credit cards, IDs, billfolds, photos, even clothes, time pieces, and wedding rings… all the treasured belongings that establish identity. All those things that signal to the world “I am me.” Yet those are only outward symbols. Patterns of everyday behavior are also completely disrupted. When, where and how initiates sleep, eat, socialize, work, even go to the bathroom, are all upended. Even knowing the exact time suddenly becomes impossible. The initiate is forced to rely on the sun and stars – the basest universals of human life. Shifting reliance back to life’s most basic essentials is part of initiation’s purpose.
I hope the parallels between the archetype of initiation and the world we presently find ourselves in are already becoming clear. Normal work life? Gone. Normal patterns of shopping, socializing, exercising, entertainment, spiritual or religious practice… all gone. Sense of safety? Gone. The once familiar world is now totally unfamiliar.
The job of initiation it to shift humans away from all their traditional ways of knowing and belief, at least those culturally determined. Everything is challenged. Even Chronos – that linear sense of time – one second follows another, into minutes, hours, days – is under attack. The center cannot hold. Fortunately, the Greeks had another word for time, a word that points the direction into the dark: Kairos. Kairos time is mystery time. It’s subjective time. It sometimes runs in circles. It’s the bending of time that occurs in altered states, whether under the influence of psychedelics or communing in a cave with god. It can mean an hour feels like a second or a week feels like a year. It can mean indeterminate or unknown lengths of time, like the span of a human lifetime, or the time it takes for trees to know when to drop their leaves, for salmon to swim upstream, for a star to die and a black hole to be born. Cosmic time. So not only are the traditional ways of doing things torn away, all the traditional ways of thinking and experiencing are gone too. The initiate is forced into a liminal state – an in-between time, Kairos.
Now we find ourselves in that liminal state, between the worlds. Like most ROPs, we initiates – the entirety of the human race – did not ask for this. This time was foisted upon us by an intricate web of circumstances. How it got here is less important than the fact of its arrival. It is here now. Our task starts with accepting this new reality, doing whatever we need to grieve the passing of the old. Anger and rage at losing everything, fear of losing one’s job, home, livelihood, shame at all the bad prior life choices… all emotions are to be welcomed. But then they need to be safely and consciously offloaded and eventually put to rest. After that, we can try to resist – we can scream, moan, never get out of bed, medicate ourselves with drugs, alcohol, TV and movies, repeat the mantra over and over in our heads “this shouldn’t be happening, this shouldn’t be happening…” None of it will do a damn bit of good. Resistance is futile. Our new reality has arrived.
We are now on a collective journey through the Underworld. We are in the belly of the whale, the Dark Night of the Soul. Phase 2 of initiation is upon us. This is The Ordeal. After Phase 1 has stripped everything inessential away, The Ordeal fundamentally tests everything we have left – everything we are as human beings: our morals and values, our belief systems, our understanding of the meaning of life and death. Even though we didn’t choose this ROP, we nonetheless have important choices to make. “What do I need to let go of in order to live most meaningfully? What in me needs to die in order to be reborn?”
Initiation confronts us with death. It forces us to wake to the preciousness of life by threatening our life, sometimes even taking it away. Is there anybody you know right not who is not concerned about their health? Not obsessed with their health care providers? Not losing sleep over the insurance they have, or worse, don’t have?
Death calls everything into question. But along with the possibility of real death we have to face metaphoric death. All the systems of human interaction and belief are now up for grabs, hanging in the balance. Politics? Democracies are shaky and some are crumbling. “Neo-feudalism” is ascendant. Dictators and plutocrats are seizing more power worldwide. Economics? The inherent inequities of winner-take-all capitalism have never been clearer. Poor people are dying in greater numbers because they don’t have health care, don’t have sufficient living space to maintain separation, don’t have jobs, money in the bank, or food to put on the table. They don’t even have schools to put their kids in. And the homeless? Indigenous people like our own Navajo? For years, the oppressive social realities of millions of indigenous and homeless people have been ignored. This new reality may mean a death sentence for them. Religion? Some say these are the end times. I disagree. Despite the even greater environmental crises that may still come, I’m confident human life on the planet will survive. The question becomes what kind of world do we want to live in?
The dominant ethos of Western society for hundreds of years has been “me, me, me.” “I’m looking out for #1. To hell with the other guy.” We can try to persist with this worldview but COVID-19 has already exposed its illogic, harmfulness, and impracticality. Just look at how connected every human being on the planet has become in a brief few months to a wholesale food market in Wuhan! Whatever might have happened there is impacting us all. It’s breathtaking.
To deny the reality of our interconnection and interdependence going forward is downright dangerous. I heard stories in the 1980s, perhaps apocryphal, of people infected with AIDS taking out their frustration on others by infecting them. That is extreme shadow behavior. “I’m hurt, therefore I’m going to hurt others.” Yet that’s how many of us live our lives. We have to grow up. We have to make wiser, more compassionate choices. The choices we make with COVID-19 are a matter of life and death for others, and the choices they make could mean life or death for us. We simply and literally cannot survive without each other. “Us, us, us” is the only way forward. Through initiation, the universe has graciously, if painfully, invited us to grow up, to step into full adult maturity and adopt this way of living that indigenous people practiced for 1000s of years – oneness with the environment and all living things. Health care workers, having already accepted the credo of “us, us, us,” are dying by the 100s, maybe 1000s. I call that service to the greater good deep maturity. What about you? Do you accept the invitation?
Read Part 2