Kindling Spirit

"Healing is essentially a spiritual expedition, not a physical one." Beautiful story about the path of healing.

The Relationship of Evolution

Really great article, stretching our preconceived ideas on evolution.
"The Reenchanted World"

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health
By Charles Eisenstein for Reality Sandwich

This article is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1 here.

What is a human being? A human being is a nexus of relationships: the sum total of the connections among his or her cells, organs, and inner ecosystem; connections to other human beings that define the psyche; connections to the rest of nature and this living planet that allow life to exist. Modern thought, recognizing only a small subset of these as intrinsic to our beingness, offers us a much smaller self: the separate self of the selfish gene and the economic man, the skin-encapsulated ego and the Cartesian mote of consciousness. Rendered small, we are rendered sick.

We are relationship. The connected self that is the true human being has been reduced at the hands of civilization, leaving an isolated remnant that is not whole. Innumerable configurations of this unwholeness, or lack of health, afflict the members of our culture, each in a unique way. Depending on the vagaries of nurture and genetics, we each adapt differently to the onslaught of Separation. As Part 1 of this essay describes, some of us embody our culture's self-other confusion on a literal, somatic level as an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system attacks part of the very organism it is meant to defend and on which it depends, much as we do to planet Earth.

The loss of self that lies at the heart of our civilization manifests in many less literal ways as well, physical and social. Consider cancer: cells that have forgotten their proper function, and instead devote all their resources toward an endless growth that eventually kills the host, and themselves as well. Modern humanity appears to be behaving exactly so in relationship to the earth. It is by no coincidence that the toxic byproducts of our collective iniquity are precisely what cause cancer in the individual.

As is the case with self-rejection and autoimmunity, a psychological level mediates between the collective and the somatic. In fact, in economically developed countries (i.e., those in which the conversion of nature, community, and culture into money has proceeded the furthest), the primary manifestation of the wound of separation is psychological: feelings of loneliness, alienation, anxiety, depression, anomie, and muted rage. They are the interior image of the starvation, physical desperation, torture, military violence, imprisonment, and genocide that go hand in hand with our power, waste, and empty wealth. These primary psychological conditions, in turn, engender physical and social conditions that draw the suffering outward into a tangible form.

To put it more simply, the things we do to hurt the world hurt our own souls, and hurt souls create sick bodies and a sick society. I will illustrate how this happens via the example of obesity.

It is not surprising that the lonely, diminished self of modern civilization should crave to restore something of its lost being. We have been shorn of the connections that make us whole. Your ancestors in a hunter-gatherer tribe or agrarian village lived in a matrix of connections that we can barely imagine today. At least I can barely imagine it, and not without weeping. In those times, every face you saw day-to-day was a familiar face. The relationships that sustained life were personal relationships. You knew the person who grew your food and cooked your food, you knew the person who built your house and made your clothes, you knew the person who sang your songs and performed your entertainment. Most likely, you knew them intimately, as they knew you. You knew each other's histories, who your first love was, your narrow escape from death at age four, that embarrassing incident at age 12, your pranks and your personality; you knew the stories of each other's parents and grandparents as well. You were woven together in a rich social tapestry that defined who you were. Being intimately known by others, you knew yourself as well. Furthermore, any action reverberated in a very tangible way out into the community, and back again to you. It was obvious that what you do to others, you in fact do to yourself. The Golden Rule was not originally a rule at all, but a description.

Today these relationships still exist in some sense: as before, we more or less depend on other people to grow our food, cook our food, make our clothes, build our houses, and provide our entertainment. But today, these people are strangers, and the relationships are no longer love relationships, but money relationships. Today, as some 60% of all meals are prepared outside the home, even the person who cooks our food is often a stranger. Outside a very narrow realm, our relationships become superficial: if all our needs are provided by strangers, what indeed is there to do together? Friendship becomes a matter of getting together to consume something: food, drink, a movie. Joint consumption brings out nothing of our real selves. We cannot know or be known. Yet this is an essential human need; it is essential to our very identity. If we are not intimately involved in each other's life stories, we suffer a deficit of being. We are not whole.

We are similarly bereft of intimate connection to the land, to nature and to place. Our ancestors knew their place in the web of life, knew each animal and plant species as a distinct individual, each hill and stream, and the relationships among all of them. This web of relationships defined who they were. Today we live in a machine world of deliberate uniformity, a world of standardized products and identical right angles, words and numbers and dollar signs. Inevitably we too feel like a cog in the machine, a standardized component with a standardized education, job description, degrees, credentials, and technical skills, and suffer a consequent loss of identity. Who am I and what makes me different? In a generic, uniform world, we cannot know.

Tormented by the alienation and loneliness of a diminished, isolated self, we do our best to add on to that self. There are several ways to do this. The most literal way is to enlarge the body. We become fat, literally expanding our physical selves. But of course, no amount of added corpulence can compensate for the grievous loss of being that comes from cutting ourselves off from the social and natural universe.

If you are not fat, maybe your attempt to compensate for the cutoff of your larger self takes another form. Another way to extend the small self is through money and possessions. Why are people so greedy for these things, far beyond their objective utility? Greedy for the things we call "mine"? It is yet another futile attempt to remedy our deficit of being. The separate self grows and grows, assuming bloated proportions, but this hypertrophied agglomeration of flesh or possessions still falls infinitely short of the connected self, whose being partakes in that of the whole universe.

In the last five decades, the average size of a new American home has more than doubled. Beyond the body, the home is the most immediate extension of the self. It has grown in tandem with the decline of community, civic participation, and public space. As the social dimensions of the self have atrophied, the home has grown in fake compensation, and life has moved indoors. Unfortunately, this expanded private realm is all the more lonely, driving further acquisitiveness. We gape at the super-rich, wondering, aghast, how they could have so much and still want more, wondering how much will be enough. In fact, no amount is enough. No amount of house or money or possessions or status or prestige or power or fame can ever meet the need to reestablish intimate relationships with human community and nature.

As is well-known, obesity is correlated with low social class. The usual explanation is either that poor people are ignorant ("less well-educated"), or that they can only afford crappy, fattening food. I disagree. I think a deeper explanation is that the rich person's means of expanding the separate self -- large house, money, possessions -- are unavailable, so the poor person can only expand the body.

All of this, of course, is unconscious. All the individual is aware of is a hunger, a need for something more. The fact that obese people often eat when they are not physically hungry offers a clue to what is going on. Indeed, they are hungry -- they just aren't hungry for food. They are hungry for connection. Food is the most tangible, direct confirmation of our connection to a living universe that loves us. On a primal biological level, the act of eating tells us, "I exist" and "I am loved." Indeed, food is the most basic expression of love, a token of intimacy, of bringing an outsider into the realm of self. That is why it is customary in most countries to offer food to a guest, and why it is rude to refuse it. To feed another is, in this sense, an intimate act, an opening of the sacred boundaries of self. When, as today, this intimate act has become a subject of commerce, and food a commodity, the entire food system reeks of obscenity. Ha ha, now it seems that I am likening restaurants to brothels and chefs to prostitutes! I don't want to demean either of these ancient professions, so let me just say that to offer either sex or food casually and carelessly is an affront to the divine Giver of these sacred gifts. Speaking now only of chefs, and leaving the reader to draw whatever other conclusions he or she likes, I will observe that to offer this sacred gift without love -- that is, without care, attention, and artistry -- feels sordid and emptying. That is why I steer away from, ahem, restaurants that seem motivated primarily by profit, that want to merely gain off my deep biological and emotional needs. Some things are too sacred to sell, whether for money or for some intangible emotional currency. One feels used. That is not to say a restaurant should not charge money, nor that we should not gain emotional highs or self-esteem from sex -- it is just that these should be secondary. The same is true of anything we give to the world. When it becomes "for the money" we cease being artists.

The need for connection is intertwined with the need for love, since it is love that opens the boundaries of the separate self to let in a bit more of the world. When I love someone, his or her self-interest becomes my own. That is why the environmental movement signifies such a profound shift in human consciousness. Separate too long in the world of the Machine, we are falling back in love with the world.

Consigned by modern civilization to a tiny, isolated self, we suffer from a powerful unmet need for love and connection. To meet this need is more important than life itself. People will do almost anything to meet it. It is time to release our condemnation of the people with bloated bodies, or bloated bank accounts, houses, egos, or other enlargements of the separate self. They are merely trying to meet their most beautiful needs. They are trying to connect and find love, in whatever tiny way is available at the end of the Age of the Machine. As I described in the Miracle of Self-creation essays, it is foolish and futile to try to fight the expression of these needs, whether in ourselves or others. If food is the only way someone has to show herself love, would you impose a diet on her and take away even that scrap of self-love? No, it is much better to do what you can to meet the need directly. The same is true for all those greedy people in SUVs, or whoever else happens to be the favorite target of our derogation. Meet the need -- the need for love and connection -- directly. It is easy if you see the true source of the behavior. It is easy to see people with eyes of love, if you know that they are simply trying to meet their beautiful needs.

Specifically, this might mean encouraging and validating the very behavior that appears to be the cause of the trouble. To do what you already do (and cannot stop doing) without guilt magnifies its effect as self-love, and breaks the pattern of indulgence followed by self-blame followed by more indulgence to comfort the blamed self. I describe these dynamics and how to undo them in more depth in my short book, Transformational Weight Loss (still in beta edition). Essentially, conventional restrictive approaches to dieting (which fail 98% of the time) are based on the idea that the problem is too much: too much food, too much greed, too selfish, too indulgent, too lazy, too weak. In fact, the problem is one of lack. A diet imposes more lack, and ultimately intensifies the driving unmet needs.

Obesity is usually taken as a symptom of excess, but in fact the reverse is true. Obesity, and the other enlargements I have mentioned, are actually symptoms of the most profound destitution ever to visit the human race. The bloated lifestyles of the American rich harbor an inner poverty exactly equal to the Third World poverty that enables those lifestyles. Half the world cannot get enough to eat, and the other half cannot get enough no matter how much they eat. It is a complete tapestry, perfect and horrifying.

Thankfully, this tapestry is unraveling today. The world built upon the separate self is collapsing around us, as we see in the converging crises of money, energy, health, education, politics, and environment. Each crisis contains the rest. For example, it is no accident that the cutoff of our true selves is a great business opportunity: we must buy the substitutes for the missing parts of the connected self. The same Separation that is at the root of obesity is also at the root of global economic exploitation, as it as at the root of the current wave of thinly-disguised fascism. Here is a passage from The Ascent of Humanity:

People who are firmly ensconced in a local, kinship-based community are less susceptible to consumerism and fascism alike, because both base their appeal on a need for self-identity. Therefore, to introduce consumerism to a previously isolated culture it is first necessary to destroy its sense of identity. Here's how: Disrupt its networks of reciprocity by introducing consumer items from the outside. Erode its self-esteem with glamorous images of the West. Demean its mythologies through missionary work and scientific education. Dismantle its traditional ways of transmitting local knowledge by introducing schooling with outside curricula. Destroy its language by providing that schooling in English or another national or world language. Truncate its ties to the land by importing cheap food to make local agriculture uneconomic. Then you will have created a people hungry for the right sneaker.

I hope it is clear now how obesity and its consumerist equivalents are a symptom of poverty, not wealth. In essence, we have been robbed of something so fundamental to our humanness that we are left ever hungry. We live with an ache than can never be assuaged, a hole that can never be filled. So of course we eat and we buy, spending the proceeds from the sale of our very being. We have lost our selves, and received mere money in return, if even that. And the robbery continues apace, and, driven by the relentless engine of an interest-based money system, must proceed until there is nothing left to sell. This is the point of utter destitution we are fast approaching today. As with nature's goodness and beauty, as with our cultural heritage, as with our human relationships, our health too we have pawned away. The epidemics of our time show the extent of our pauperdom.

The point of utter destitution is also the point of turning, the turning of the age. We can no longer endure the pain of separation. We are beginning to experience the softening and expansion of the separate self. Many readers I am sure have been through this process themselves, probably more than once: trying to hold everything together with increasing control, and eventually giving up, letting the world in, softening and expanding, reclaiming lost connections through the medium of love. Is it too much to say, as multiple crises reach their fulfillment and plunge masses of people through this process all at once, that we are entering an Age of Love?

Necessarily, I have written of the obesity epidemic in a very general way, but of course each person is separate in a unique way. Each of us is missing different parts of our true connected selves. Therefore, the path to healing is unique as well. The overeater is hungry for something that food can never satisfy, but what? The answer is individual, but healing will usual involve loving yourself (and therefore something outside yourself) in a way you have not before. The true self must expand for the separate self to shrink. The same is true whether your inflation is corporeal or via some other type of consumption. Forceful attempts to conquer the ego are therefore no more successful than going on a diet. I do not want my description of the plunder of the self to evoke more fear, more control, more desire to "fight evil". The horror of our circumstances is very real, but its end is nigh. Please do not misunderstand me to be advocating inaction. There is action that is not fighting. That time is nearly over. The action to take now comes from remembering and reminding; from that, powerful, courageous actions spring unstoppably. The love that comes with the crumbling of the separate self is not a mere sentiment.

A paradise on earth is available right now, easily, closer than close. It is a shift of perception away. The epidemics of our time show us that, too. A prodigious energy will be freed when we end the War against the Self encoded in autoimmunity. A magnificent abundance will become available when we stop consuming things we don't need in compensation for the things we do. And these shifts together come as a result of the pain of the diseases themselves, and of the other ills of our age. The illness is the medicine. The true nature of the connected self, love, is beckoning in every realm. It is your true nature and it is mine. Let us relax into it.

Energy and the Family Tree

Energy and the Family Tree
By Jonathan Phillips for Reality Sandwich

For those on the healing path, going home for the holidays can be a true challenge of heart and spirit as old energy patterns kick up dust from the floorboards of our childhood. In this podcast, I discuss how the energy field of our families is stronger than we might imagine and how family constellation work can help us heal and forgive electromagnetic blocks within our own ancestral lines.

I also share a recent experience of transcending familial patterns this Christmas during a surprising ecstatic moment at the Comfort Inn in Branson, Missouri. And I encourage RS participants to share their own moments of family healing, realization, and transformation in the comments section below.

To listen to the podcast follow the above link through the article...

Resignation Letter

"Amidst the chaos of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, one head-honcho of the financial industry has decided to turn over a new leaf. Andrew Lahde, the now-former head of California-based hedge fund Lahde Capital Management, recently quit his job despite posting gains of 870 percent over the last year.

His resignation letter reflects his disillusionment with both the financial industry and the federal government, and contains scathing criticisms of American materialism, economic deregulation, and the philosophical fortitude (or lack thereof) of our country's leaders."-Over the Hedge


Letter: Andrew Lahde, Lahde Capital Management
Posted in the FT.com
By Andrew Lahde
October 17, 2008

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

There are far too many people for me to sincerely thank for my success. However, I do not want to sound like a Hollywood actor accepting an award. The money was reward enough. Furthermore, the endless list of those deserving thanks know who they are.

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they lookforward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out. Please do not expect any type of reply to emails or voicemails within normal time frames or at all. Andy Springer and his company will be handling the dissolution of the fund. And don’t worry about my employees, they were always employed by Mr. Springer’s company and only one (who has been well-rewarded) will lose his job.

I have no interest in any deals in which anyone would like me to participate. I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years. I am content sitting on the sidelines and waiting. After all, sitting and waiting is how we made money from the subprime debacle. I now have time to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself over the past two years, as well as my entire life – where I had to compete for spaces in universities and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management – with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not. May meritocracy be part of a new form of government, which needs to be established.

On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal. First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government. Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt. George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher. My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly. I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken.

Lastly, while I still have an audience, I would like to bring attention to an alternative food and energy source. You won’t see it included in BP’s, “Feel good. We are working on sustainable solutions,” television commercials, nor is it mentioned in ADM’s similar commercials. But hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the U.S. Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female. The evil female plant – marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other addictive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week. Please people, let’s stop the rhetoric and start thinking about how we can truly become self-sufficient.

With that I say goodbye and good luck.

All the best,

Andrew Lahde

A Reconnector to the Wild Within Us and Around Us

All Hallows Eve
By Charles Eisenstein

Once upon a time, our distant ancestors were animists who believed in the innate divinity of all things. Spirit was a property of matter, and all things possessed it: not just plants and animals but also rocks, clouds, lakes, wind, places, and every natural thing and process. I said all things possessed spirit, but that isn't quite what the original animists believed. Spirit was not something separate from matter, to be possessed or not. Matter was inherently spiritual.

As the human realm gradually separated from the natural (in perception if not in reality), we began to separate spirit from matter. The first step away was to believe all things to possess spirit. This is the belief that characterizes the pagan religions. In ancient Greek religion, for example, everything from the ocean and the sky down to the smallest shrub or stream had a divinity associated with it. The ancient pagans still lived in a fully enspirited world where everything was sacred.

As time passed and the mentality of agriculture tightened its grip, the human and natural realms separated still further and we began to believe that some things possessed spirit and others did not. Spirit became increasingly abstracted from matter, culminating in twin developments at the dawn of the modern era. On the one hand, Protestantism reduced the participation of divinity in the world to the sole figure of Jesus Christ, replacing the Catholic pantheon of saints with a single divine individual, just as the saints had replaced the even more participatory pagan panentheism. On the other hand, scientists like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton reduced Creation to a single event as well in their conception of a clockwork universe, created and wound up by God to tick on, mechanically and everlastingly, henceforward. In the equations of Newton, the ongoing participation of a divinity in naure was no longer necessary.

The late stone-age people and early agriculturalists that we call pagan recognized, perhaps unconsciously, this progressive desacralization of the world. They knew that the separateness of the human realm is an illusion, that we too are bound by the laws of nature and that it is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves of that. It is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves of the sacredness and divinity of all things. It is necessary sometimes to reconnect to the Wild. Rituals developed to meet these needs. Some cultures recognized this explicitly, such as the Yurok of the Pacific Northwest who, in the words of Joseph Epes Brown,

"believed that, in the beginning, the world was inhabited by the wo'gey, or Immortals, who knew how to live in harmony with the earth. The wo'gey departed when the humans arrived. Yet, because they knew that humans did not always follow the laws of the world, they taught them how to perform ceremonies that could restore the earth's balance." [1]

Halloween originates in the same spirit. The holiday we celebrate today has roots in the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhuinn, which, in the words of Philip Carr-Gomm, was

"a time of no-time. Celtic society, like all early societies, was highly structured and organized, everyone knew their place. But to allow that order to be psychologically comfortable, the Celts knew that there had to be a time when order and structure were abolished, when chaos could reign. And Samhuinn, was such a time. Time was abolished for the three days of this festival and people did crazy things, men dressed as women and women as men. Farmers' gates were unhinged and left in ditches, peoples' horses were moved to different fields." [2]

The agricultural mindset divides the world into two parts, the domestic and the wild, and seeks to maintain and expand the former as it conquers the latter. The domestic is good, the wild is bad. The corn is good, the weed is bad. The sheep is good, the wolf is bad. The orderly is good, the chaotic is bad. But the pagan farmer recognizes that this division is not the ultimate reality, and seeks to maintain a healthy connection to the underlying panentheistic truth, lest she forget that she too is governed by nature's laws. For she knows that to forget this spells doom -- the very doom we are facing today as we seek to maintain a system in flagrant violation of that primary natural law of cyclicity: that one being's waste must be another being's food.

The Samhuinn that Carr-Gomm describes is precisely such a reconnection. Here the order of the separate human realm was thrust aside. The inner Wild expressed itself as an abandonment of social structures, while the outer Wild was allowed to usurp the ordering of the land into domesticity. Animals were let loose and gates were ripped down. This was a time when all the wild spirits once again roamed free, wreaking mischief on the human realm.

The ancient farmer still believed in these wild spirits and knew they had to be propitiated. Can you see how the ceremonial offerings to the spirits became the goodies we offer trick-or-treaters today? These offerings were once an affirmation of our debt to the wildness of Nature, all-providing, as well as a token reminder that Nature's wild spirits must be respected lest they wreak havoc. How did these offerings devolve into mere candy?

Under the Catholic Church, divinity retreated from "all things and processes," but still resided in a wide pantheon of saints and holy objects that more or less corresponded to the original nature spirits. Samhuinn became All Saints Day or All Hallows Day, but people still believed in a colorful bestiary of spirits and magical beings. The Protestant Reformation removed divinity still further from the world, as science and the Machine completed the desacralization of nature. Ghosts and goblins, fairies and vampires, became mere children's toys, nothing adults took seriously. Halloween became a game arranged for children.

Why do the spirits we associate with Halloween have the reputation of being evil? The Church's effort to vilify pagan religion is only part of the explanation. In fact, the very concept of evil only arose with agriculture's division of the world. Before then there was no such thing as an evil spirit. Each being enacted its role to perfection in the harmonious operation of a greater whole. But when a separate human realm grew that needed to be maintained, with great effort, against natural forces that seek to reduce a field to weeds and a house to ruin, then the Wild indeed became a foe: a source of trouble, mischief, and even death. Tempting it is, then, to see Nature as an enemy to be dominated and conquered. The pagans, understanding the disaster inherent in such an attempt, therefore enacted rituals and festivals to keep their own connection to the Wild alive.

What began with agriculture accelerated with the ascendency of the Machine. From the perspective of the Machine, wildness is evil. Chaos, unpredictability, individual variation are at odds with the values of the Machine: uniformity, regularity, standardization. Modern religion, as servant to the Machine, abets its values by associating the divine representatives of nature's wildness, nature's infinity, nature's superiority to man, with evil. Saturn, the Devil with his horns and ram's foot, and numerous other mythic figures representing evil started out as deities from matriarchal nature cults, and became symbols of evil as nature became man's foe.

Halloween was not the only festival that attempted to maintain a connection to the Wild. Christmas and May Day were two other times when the Lord or Lady of Misrule took over and presided over the festivities. Christmas was very merry indeed: common surnames like "Prince," "Lord" or "King" are traces of the illegitimate paternity of children conceived in the merry Yuletide revels. On May Day, various pagan deities were fit onto the personas of characters from the Robin Hood tale. Madness reigned: "mad-merry marriages 'under the greenwood tree', when the dancers from the Green went off, hand in hand, into the greenwood and built themselves little love-bowers and listened hopefully for the merry nightingale."[3] Surnames like Johnson, Jackson, Robinson, Dobson, Hudson, Hobson, and so on remain with us as evidence of these revels, during which the usual social mores and civilized rules of conduct were suspended. During these times, the figures representing the newer patriarchal gods, representing order and control, were ritually overthrown, and the earlier matriarchal gods and goddesses took over.

Although patriarchy was well-established by their time, the ancient pagans understood that the shadow side, the uncivilized, out-of-control side of the human being, must not be completely suppressed. A society in which order over-dominates cannot last; nor can a farm that ignores ecological principles. Some wildness has to be let in, some chaos. When we lose this balance, then sooner or later Nature will provide a correction. The stricter the repression of the wild, the more violent that correction. When the wild breaks out today it can be violent indeed, whether in its human or environmental aspect, yet we respond by tightening its repression even more. More curfews, longer sentences, school lockdowns; higher levees, more pesticides, higher fences.

From this perspective, Halloween begins to look like a mere imitation of a holiday. Every vestige of wildness has been excised from it. No longer an interlude of chaos to reconnect us to the reality beneath our civilized forms and structures, Halloween has been made safe and orderly in every respect. No longer a "time of no-time," today even trick-or-treat takes place between the official hours of six and eight. In my own lifetime I have seen the last stage of this transformation. When I was a child, parental supervision of trick-or-treating was unheard of. We left home right after dinner, or even before, returning and going out again until we grew too tired to continue. Today I see children as old as ten or twelve walking up to each house as their parents wait for them at the end of the driveway or follow them around in the car. Needless to say, the pranks and vandalism of Mischief Night are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Halloween, All-Hallows Eve, a celebration of the holiness of all, has become yet another occasion for orderly consumption and profit. Like other holidays, it has become almost entirely a purchased celebration. The homemade costumes of my childhood have given way to bought ones, often of television and movie characters. The same is true of yard decorations: pumpkins, bales of hay, spooky dolls. Homemade treats are viewed with suspicion; only store-bought candy is acceptable.

I am not telling you pagans and animists out there to keep your children inside on Halloween night. I want you to know, though, that you are participating in a sham. The pagan roots of the holiday don't validate its present incarnation. They show us instead what has been lost. Lost to what? To the insatiable world-devouring machine, driven by usury, that cannot and will not stop until it has consumed every last vestige of natural, cultural, and spiritual wealth. Forests and seas, customs and traditions, stories and songs, communities and cultures -- all are grist for the machine that takes in beauty and spits out money.

Nothing can save or reform that machine, but as its furnaces consume the last bits of our heritage capital, it begins to sputter and stall. You can hear it choking already if you listen. Soon, from amidst the cold, dead hulk of its wreckage, a new culture will grow. Its seedlings, too, are visible already to those who care to look. They are the recovery of our lost connections. Through them, our animistic and pagan connections to a fully enspirited world will blossom into a future where control-driven technology retreats to its rightful place as one of many modes of creativity. In that future, our spirituality will, like that of the Samhuinn celebrants, function as a frequent reconnector to the Wild within us and around us that is the true source of all wealth.

In that spirit, let us not attempt to redeem today's commercial parody of a holiday that we call Halloween. Let it sputter on toward its final demise as we create something new alongside it. Something that truly invokes the deep-buried, paved-over Wild within us and around us. Something to remind us that the structures we have created are but temporary artifices, castles of sand aside an ocean of being. Better not lose ourselves in attachment. All will be swept away one day. As in the ancient traditions, death is an appropriate theme for the new Halloween. Death. The other side. The spirit world. The shadow. The unseen. The scary. The unknown. All that the temporary structures we have created exclude. We need occasions to remind ourselves that these structures are not the whole of reality, and indeed that the part they exclude is infinitely the greater. Whether it is inspired by the ancient traditions or something entirely new, let us find a way to go Wild this All-Hallow's Eve.