Preparing for Parousia 1

Preparing for Parousia: Spirituality and Consciousness in the 21st Century
Blog Post 1 - March 2021


The Palaeolithic - Bedrock of Human Spirituality


Welcome to this series of monthly discussion and spiritual practice groups over the coming year in which we gently explore our spirituality and consciousness in the light of the human story.  Both concepts are now very important.  Consciousness is a leading edge and frontier in science.  And spirituality has emerged as the idea that is supplanting institutional religion for many people.  


There has been an assumption that our modern consciousness, influenced as it is by rational thought and science, is obviously a much more evolved and progressive state than the conscious life of the ancients.  The way we see the world is the truth; the way they did was mythical.  But others are seeing that there is a huge price to pay in modern consciousness that needs to be addressed urgently.  The ancients had a sense of personally participating in a universe alive with life and meaning.  We have largely lost this.  Moderns inhabit a mechanical world made only of matter which we manipulate with our technology.  We have prized our objectivity and failed to honour our subjectivity.  As Jo Marchant puts it:
Personal experience has been swept from our understanding of reality, replaced by the abstract, mathematical grid of space-time. Earth has been knocked from the centre of existence to the suburbs; life reframed as a random accident; and God dismissed altogether, now everything can be explained by physical laws. Far from having a meaningful role in the cosmic order, we’re just ‘chemical scum’, as physicist Stephen Hawking put it, on the surface of a medium-sized planet orbiting an unremarkable star. Critics have fought this mechanistic view of humanity for centuries, often rejecting science wholesale in the process. But now even high-profile scientists are voicing concerns that until very recently were taboo. They are suggesting that perhaps physical matter isn’t all that the universe is; all that we are. Perhaps science is only seeing half of the picture. We can explain stars and galaxies, but what about minds? What about consciousness itself? It’s shaping up to be an epic fight that just might transform the entire western worldview. (10)


How do we recover a subjective, participatory sense of the Universe, without rejecting what we have gained objectively.  Can we understand science better, and appreciate what the ancients had that we need?  If Marchant and others are right this is a matter of the highest importance.  It involves us being prepared to re-think ourselves within the human story and our relationship with the world and the cosmos, and to take our subjectivity very seriously. It means understanding how our relationship with the world has changed and just what a critical state we are now in, when our planet and all life on it are so deeply threatened.  The ancients could listen to the cosmos, and take wisdom from its Presence, as some indigenous peoples still do.  Can we recover this capacity ourselves.  Can we relearn how to live with and within the world, not over and against it.  Can we Prepare for Parousia?


As I have explained elsewhere, I am using Jo Marchant’s recent book The Human Cosmos as the framework for these groups.  She focusses principally on the role of the sky and the heavens in the shaping of human consciousness, and all that goes with that, such as,
the eclipse-obsessed Babylonians; the Egyptian pharaohs who built pyramids to guide their souls to the stars; the Roman emperors who fought under the banner of the sun. Ideas about the cosmos have shaped the modern world, too. These influences are still deeply ingrained in our society – even if we’ve forgotten their origins – in our parliaments, churches, galleries, clocks and maps. Beliefs about the sun, moon and stars played a central role in the birth of Christianity, and in Europe’s exploration and domination of the planet. They guided the rebellious lawmakers who founded the principles of democracy and human rights, the economists who developed the frameworks on which capitalism depends, and even the painters who produced the first abstract art. (9)


Now, lest you think this is all bit much, let me assure you that Marchant’s book is very readable; a ‘good yarn’ one friend said.  And our group will dance lightly over it all, with the primary focus on what we can learn from past human experience to build our spirituality and consciousness for the future.  Perhaps for some of you, the even better news is that you won’t need to have read the book to participate in the presentation.  Reading the blog will be enough.


We begin our journey with our fellow sapiens of the Upper Paleolithic (from around 50,000 to 12,000 years ago), those who bequeathed to us truly wonderful cave paintings and artefacts around the world, but particularly in southern France and northern Spain.  They had a way of life that grounds important aspects of human spirituality.  This is a bed-rock for us, I am suggesting.  Although the upper paleolithics are many thousands of years further on from when humanity first emerged from the womb of unconsciousness, they have not strayed far from that womb.  Life under the starry skies and the bright light of the sun is balanced by life in the warm embrace of the dark caves to which they always returned.  And there is evidence that the two, the sky and the cave, were strongly linked in their consciousness.  


Hunter/gatherer groups in the Palaeolithic were small groups, rarely more than 30 adults and children.  It has been argued that they were largely egalitarian, with shared leadership between men and women.  The gods had not yet been born.  But the world was full of energies and life that were discerned and related to as personal being. Division between their inner worlds and the external world barely existed.  Their religion as such was shamanic, with altered states of consciousness easily entered into, a process that the darkness of the caves probably enhanced.  Possibly the most striking aspect of their spirituality is that their awareness is focussed principally on animals and geometric designs.  With one known exception, humans are not depicted in the multitude of cave paintings we know about.  They were absolutely part of all they surveyed and perceived, personally engaged.  We (the human race) were not yet over and against the world at that stage.  We were only dimily aware we have something different going on in our consciousness.


What can we take for our spirituality and consciousness from the palaeolithics?  How can we incorporate the starry heavens and the warm embrace of complete darkness into our spiritual practices, activities and insights.  How can we re-awaken the deeper life and wisdom within each one of us, as we face our uncertain future, and so feel more at home personally within the cosmos?  Come and join the discussion and spiritual practices.