Learning to Speak Light Language, Part 2
An offering of peace
Colleen Glenn, a reader of this Substack and a fellow writer whose voice I respect recently commented on my post, “The Freedom in the Wound: Reimagining Patriarchy as a Necessary Agent of Evolution.” I wrote this essay in an attempt to inspire readers to search for a third way beyond the competitive and hostile reactions programmed into us by patriarchy which gains its authority through a “power over” structure. My intent was to offer a re-framing of the Greek origin story at the root of Western Civilization combined with teachings I’ve integrated into my own life through various esoteric studies, most recently pua’aehuehu, Mū Hawaiian fern medicine and the Mū doctrines, specifically Heka, Mū Hawaiian magic, that could act as breadcrumbs leading down an as yet unknown path through the forest of amnesia that currently affects our species. Her comment really got me thinking about how I can best be of service through language and if writing is a form of expression that can only sow more conflict in the world. Colleen gave me permission to use her name and quote her exact words:
“If I can respectfully insert myself into this discussion; I can’t bring myself to thank the patriarchy for the suffering it’s caused women since the beginning of agricultural civilizations. Women are not free of our chains yet, so I don’t feel like it’s time for acceptance or to be grateful for where the patriarchy has brought us. We’re still in it and this stage of our development as a species calls for female rage, not peace. M*le ego has brought us to the very brink of destruction, as you mentioned. Did you know that there is nowhere in the world now where rainwater is fit for human consumption? The patriarchy itself is not what gave us the tools to fight back—that came from somewhere else. The patriarchy is designed specifically to use women for our sacred ability to create life. It’s worth noting that the divinity of Zeus’s children began with the suffering of women, first by rape, and then the torture of a forced birth. Dionysus is not worth fem*le suffering to me.”
I think her words were a response to this portion of the essay:
“This is not an essay on the evils of patriarchy, rather it’s an exploration on why it’s been necessary, and should be honored for what it has contributed to human evolution. Born from the union of Sky and Earth, representatives of the patriarchy gain more agency with each generation. Cronos kills his father Uranus who won’t even let him be born. Rhea feeds her husband a stone and saves her son Zeus. Zeus kills his father and frees his swallowed siblings and then goes on to mate with all sorts of creatures, many of them not human, and these women give birth to children like Dionysus who gift us with the ecstatic path to direct divine communion.”
“And that’s where we’re all headed. It may not seem ecstatic at the moment. Chaos is actually terrifying. But the breakdown occurring on our planet now is leading to the completion of the patriarchy. If we don’t resist it, if we choose to thank it for the opportunities it’s given us to reclaim our agency by eschewing any ounce of victimhood in the realization that we are all aspects of the Creator, as in we created all of this, we could move on to our next iteration of being with grace.”
“Honoring the patriarchy for what it’s contributed to our evolution will allow us to complete it and move on to the next widest circle we can discern, the one that becomes more visible each day to those who have the eyes to see it. Like the Fates tell us, our transition to this wider sphere is inevitable. How much we suffer as we expand is up to us. Like Chiron, we have the choice to sacrifice our wound and invoke something bright as a star. And invoke we must. If we don’t the wound will consume us and we’ll be a sacrifice without purpose. The holes we leave behind could be filled with anything. Why not choose to fill them then with beauty, with belonging, for accepting the gift Cronos gave us to live for a time on Earth?
I completely understand why someone would find the above paragraphs controversial and I am not writing this essay as a refutation or to deny anyone’s emotional experience. Rather, I want to clarify some of my ideas because I recognize that I failed to be precise enough in the conveyance of my ideas. I’m not even sure they are conveyable in English, but out of respect for Colleen’s emotional journey, and any other reader who might disagree or be triggered by what I said, also because I genuinely want to know if it’s possible, I’m going to try.
Through my own personal emotional journey and through contact with many esoteric traditions, most recently pua’aehuehu (click here to read my transmissions from the ferns), I’ve come to view the human struggle as it plays out through politics and personal dramas through a very broad view that has enabled me to find a certain level of peace in the chaos of what’s now transpiring on Earth as our systems collapse and the war culture rolls on. I am highly aware that some of the viewpoints I express could be misunderstood as spiritual bypassing, the distancing of oneself from uncomfortable emotions through spiritualizing the experience, and want to make clear that I value the emotional experience embedded in all the struggles of a human life as the greatest teachers we have on the spiritual path. This is the path of aloha mā (self-reflective love, acknowledgment of one’s self as an expression of God) outlined in pua’aehuehu, and I am dedicated to it with all my heart.
According to the Mū doctrines, as humans, we must journey through all the emotional experiences available to us. This is both a choice and not a choice. As agents with free will we have the right to choose if we want to engage with an emotion or not, and how we want to engage with it. We can push it away or we can enter into such a deep relationship with it we become so enmeshed that it rules our life. When this happens we become stuck and can’t integrate the emotion’s gift and move onto the next emotion that wants to teach us. What is inevitable is that aloha mā, self-reflective love, (absorption in God/Source/Creator) is the final destination for all of us. In that we have no choice. Debate me all you want, but on that I won’t budge.
In my life, this recognition has led me into deeper bodies of water where I am continually led to stop resisting and surrender to avoid drowning. This has not been easy, and in the beginning I was forced to do it through the collapse of my physical body. In 2009, I became ill with ulcerative colitis and have had to surrender over and over again almost to the point of dying a couple of times. I am still in a relationship with this disease. I’ve still got surrendering to do, and of course I’d prefer it not happen through my physical body, but I do my best not to resist it, dive into the emotional work and use my intellect to create frames that enable me to comprehend the disease from a hawk’s eyes.
I have learned through this disease how to stay in my body while also looking down on it. I do my best to move through the emotions it brings up and employ my mind to help me understand my journey in a holistic way. By that I mean that all aspects of it are parts of a whole that is here to serve my evolution, and that my evolution (yours too) serves all of humanity moving outward to evolve all of Creation.
How do I know that? How did I come to believe we live in a world where there are no mistakes and everything is designed for our evolution, and that evolution ends in the same destination for anyone regardless of what they do in moral terms as a human-absorption in the Creator-who is a synonym for love? Not from anything I learned in school or from religion. I earned this trust in the process of life through establishing my inner safety through deep communion with my ‘unihipili, the inner feminine in Hawaiian.
This was not a spiritual bypass. There was a tremendous amount of suffering-enough to get me to the breaking point where I wanted to die numerous times, and even then I needed my body to break down in order for me to face the painful emotions I didn’t want to experience because, without faith, I didn’t believe I could survive the pain.
Some notes on emotions:
Before I discovered the ferns, my world completely shifted in therapy through the work of Karla McLaren, whose book, The Language of Emotions, taught me how to work with uncomfortable emotions like my anger and shame by understanding what they were trying to communicate to me. While this is going to be different for everyone, some generalities have been observed. For instance, anger is a sign that one’s boundaries have been violated.
“Anger arises to address challenges to what you value: your standpoint, your position, your interpersonal boundaries, or your self image.”
-Karla MacLaren
Colleen is totally right to say that rage is an appropriate response to the suffering created by the patriarchy, which has most obviously violated the boundaries of human women and our planet through ruthless extraction of resources, has violated indigenous cultures through colonialism that is still ongoing, and enslaved people of all genders, mostly those who are not white, though that could be debated in the case of women worldwide. Patriarchy has also enslaved what I call the feminine and masculine principles, the energetic manifestations of the original polarity that came into being when the Universe was born. This enslavement has resulted in distortions of both principles not dependent on one’s gender identity.
In my view, the great quest of our time is to heal those distortions from within. Like any quest, this is not and should not be easy.
Remember, to come into this world requires labor-our mothers work hard to bring us here, sometimes with great suffering. The work of becoming, as Martín Prechtel says, “a fully-cooked human” who can make the contribution only they can make is difficult and requires sacrifice. Some might say the same measure of sacrifice our mother’s made to give us form. Sacrifice is part of the deal of being human. What we’ve forgotten however, is something Heka (Mū magic) has remembered. Our lives are governed by sacrifice, a requirement that is beyond our control, but we have been given the gift of invocation, voices that can define what takes the place of the holes left in the world by all the sacrifices. We can also voluntarily make sacrifices and invocations. This ability has been mostly forgotten, at least in Western Culture. This may sound scary or abstract, but it can be as simple as praising and blessing something every day. At this point there are so many holes it’s amazing life hasn’t totally drained out of the world, yet the Universe, or the Creator, or God, or whatever you want to call the higher power that both exists and doesn’t beyond the world of duality and may have set this all in motion, keeps filling the holes up with whatever’s handy. Why to help her/him/it out and shovel in some blessings?
MacLaren offers a theory that emotions offer us gifts. According to her, anger, which we’ve seen arises when our boundaries have been threatened or destroyed and need to be restored, offers us the gift of intense feeling because “it takes intense energy and resolve to rebuild yourself after your boundaries and self-image have been damaged.”
How do we apply that to an entire culture? An entire planet? It seems impossible, right? In the face of such a daunting opponent-patriarchy-rage is necessary to motivate us to action. I want to suggest, that what isn’t necessary is the expression of rage.
How do we set a boundary without expressing anger? Lao Tzu has good advice:
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?”
-Tao Te Ching
Of course this changes when our lives are genuinely in danger, which I will explore further on. Meanwhile, I want to circle back to pua’aehuehu.
In pua’aehuehu, there are 103 emotions and qualities currently known and coded in the ferns. Most likely there are other emotions and ferns we don’t know about yet because we are not collectively available to experience them. In fact, one was discovered on Kauai recently in the form of Pe’ahi, Emotional Chaos. This discovery was on the mainstream news and conservationists rejoiced that the fern was still alive. A person fluent in ferns would recognize this as a sign that humanity is being invited to come into conversation with Chaos because enough of us have reached a point where we are able to receive its codes and integrate them into the human experiment.
Viewing chaos as a beneficial teacher may sound counterintuitive, but if one studies the creation stories of most human cultures (at least all the ones I know), life on Earth is born out of capital “C” Chaos, a concept from Greek mythology that is worth looking into deeper. Here’s some insight from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Chaos, (Greek: “Abyss”) in early Greek cosmology, either the primeval emptiness of the universe before things came into being or the abyss of Tartarus, the underworld. Both concepts occur in the Theogony of Hesiod. First there was Chaos in Hesiod’s system, then Gaea and Eros (Earth and Desire). Chaos, however, did not generate Gaea; the offspring of Chaos were Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx. Nyx begat Aether, the bright upper air, and Day. Nyx later begat the dark and dreadful aspects of the universe (e.g., Dreams, Death, War, and Famine). This concept tied in with the other early notion that saw in Chaos the darkness of the underworld.
In the later cosmologies Chaos generally designated the original state of things, however conceived. The modern meaning of the word is derived from Ovid, who saw Chaos as the original disordered and formless mass, from which the maker of the Cosmos produced the ordered universe. This concept of Chaos also was applied to the interpretation of the creation story in Genesis 1 (to which it is not native) by the early Church Fathers.
Let’s break this down so it’s really clear.
In the beginning there was Chaos. Hesiod, the earliest Greek chronicler says Chaos has no parents. The origin of Chaos is unknown. To know Chaos is to accept the spiritual principle of mystery as a guide. This requires faith, which translated in fern language means we have to feel safe. Safety is a requirement of true faith. Safety does not come from anything outside us, but from within, and looks different for everyone. Pua’aehuehu offers a path to this kind of safety through resolution of emotions that keep one circling in fear.
Hesiod also tell us Gaea (Gaia) had no parents. Was she the consort of Chaos? I don’t know. Just putting out there as a genuine question. Who created Earth? Is she so powerful she created herself?
The children of Chaos are respectively masculine and feminine aspects of darkness, Erebus and Nyx. Nyx gave birth to day and night and their corresponding manifestations as metaphorical processes like illumination and war. Nyx, as a personification of Night, contributed to the association of the feminine with “darkness,” i.e all that isn’t of the light. The light is associated with the masculine. These categorizations played out, and are still in action, in current ideas about gender and are the foundation of the power dynamics of patriarchal society which values light over darkness, forgetting that darkness is where we all came from. Recovering this memory from our collective amnesia will be essential for us to evolve beyond judging this duality. The duality itself is neutral. It’s just a fact of this world and the proof of this can be found in all the ancient stories and even religious texts if you look closely enough. For instance, in Hawaiian culture we learn that Ao (Time/Light/Day) and Pō (Chaos/Darkness/Night) share the peak of the triangle that represents the astrophysical realm. They were both there at the very beginning.
Later in time Ovid reduced the immensity of Chaos as mystery to “the original and disordered formless mass,” associated with the feminine, and female bodies, in world religions. This formless mass is structured through a masculine Creator, paving the way for male-bodied humans to claim their divine right to control the world.
Where am I going with all this? That’s not a rhetorical question. My best thinking is done on Pegasus’s winged back. I don’t plan what I’m going to write. If I’m lucky, I’m riled up enough to really take myself, and hopefully you, into new territory, which might be happening here. One thing I do know is that I do not want to use words as a weapon, which for me means not only abstaining from attacking anyone’s viewpoint or opinion, but also from defending myself.
Although at this time on Earth, in some countries, writers’ lives are in danger if they express something their government views at a threat, this is usually not the case right now for me as a white middle class U.S. citizen. I recognize my white privilege in being able to say this. The same may not be true for black people or members of the Lakota Nation, or any of the other ethnic groups indigenous to the North American continent. A hundred years ago it was illegal for Hawaiians to speak ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, their own language. Those who did were punished in school, though I haven’t heard of anyone that was killed for it.
However, we must recognize the collateral damage. Just because someone wasn’t killed outright for breaking a law, doesn’t mean their punishment could not have led to an internalization of shame that externalized as rage, that took the form of crime or the self-abuse of drug addiction. (Topics I will be exploring in my upcoming book Piko: A Return to the Dreaming.) This is the legacy of colonialism and enslavement that is easy to overlook if you, like me, have white privilege. It’s easy to overlook because white people are statistically the least in danger, however, in the patriarchal system, which I translate as the culture of control, none of us are truly safe because our society is founded on a distorted vision of the masculine whose highest values are possession and dominance.
All of us in patriarchal systems no matter how we self-identify are entangled in this pattern.
We have to compete in some way to earn a living to survive. However, I call upon all of us who are privileged in any way, whether that be through race, class, gender, neurotypicalness or a low ACE score (a new measurement to determine adverse childhood experiences that contribute to CPTSD) to consider the effects of their emotional expression on the entire world-not just on our human family, but on the tree and stone people, the winged ones and creepy-crawlers, on the finned ones who swim in the rivers and oceans; consider the effect of your expressed anger on all that we’ve deemed other and labelled as nature. How is the outward expression of your rage helping? What if you were able to engage your intellect to extract the lesson you needed to learn from anger and restore your own boundary before violating someone else’s first? (A simple way to say this is hurt people hurt people. Substitute nature in all its glorious manifestations for the second half of that equation and you can see how we’ve come to our current point of potential climate collapse.)
Weapons are the tools of violence;
all decent men detest them.Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn't wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?-The Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
For these reasons I didn’t want to write this essay. I did not want to refute Colleen’s justified stance or disrespect anyone’s emotions, or get in a debate, because to do so felt like using language to create more division in the world, when my aim, exemplified by the corpus callosum, the gray matter that acts as a bridge between left and right brain hemispheres, and the inspiration for this Substack, is to be a unifying voice in the world. After reading Colleen’s comment I even considered abandoning the essay form, feeling I would never be able to accomplish my goal, and that perhaps I would be doing harm by sowing discord by continuing on with this form.
I considered writing a poem or lyric essay in which I could convey my ideas in metaphors like Lao Tzu that would reveal themselves to those who either intuitively understood what I was saying or took the time to let the images penetrate their consciousness. The Hawaiian are experts at this and even have a linguistic concept known as kaona, which means “hidden meaning.” Words in Ōlelo Hawai’i have multiple meanings and combined in phrases, the language conveys meaning from the practical to the esoteric, often incorporating the comic and ribald, too.
According to Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals, my mentor in pua’aehuehu and the Mū doctrines, modern languages are considered “reverse dialects,” because they evolved in post-cataclysmic times in order to help humanity organize to survive. Spoken language was created by the brain so the humans who survived the last round of catastrophic earth changes documented in myths around the world as The Flood could communicate danger and organize themselves to survive in a dangerous world. Communal repetition of these tones used to signal danger, thereat or deception were established as the roots of the languages most of us speak now.
Because they are founded on survival these languages-the one I’m writing in now-are warring broadcasts. That is why conflict is built into our modern languages even when our intention is peace. The warring tones provoke people to defend or attack based on competing opinions. Can you see why I’d want to take refuge in metaphor? In allusion, I feel safe. No one can attack me if I’m not direct. I also run the risk of not being understood since most in our culture have lost the ability to perceive the kaona, the hidden meanings and connections. In allowing logic to dominate us, we’ve crippled our imagination.
But would I be hiding if I conveyed this essay to you in poem form? I really wasn’t sure until I sat down today and began writing if this was the right thing to do. Maybe it isn’t and I will erase all these words and you’ll never read this, but when I ask myself the question that I use as my guide, is this a contribution that could expand the mind and open the heart of my readers, right now I’m hearing yes. The goal of this publication is to re-establish the bridge between imagination and logic, right brain hemisphere and left, through stories, poetry and mythology. Most likely I would be less of a target and feel less anxious when I hit send if I shared only myth and poetry with you, but the fact is most of us today are operating with a damaged right hemisphere and have a deficit of imagination. As a bridge, I recognize sometimes I am going to have to articulate my ideas with the logic of prose because that is how most people today translate the world.
This gets me to thinking about what our world look like when we were a right brain dominated species.
Again, according to Ke’oni, in pre-cataclysmic times, telepathy was the primary source of communication for our ancestors. Spoken language was mainly ceremonial and used for incantation and music. Many of us may have been led to believe through popular culture where people claim special privileges to assert their dominance or secure their place just to survive in the patriarchy, that they are not telepathic because they are not getting messages in words. I’m telling you, if your soul is housed in a body that is available to experience sensations, you are telepathic and capable of awakening from the trance of logic that traps us in the left hemisphere, unaware the right hemisphere, who according to neuroscience, is actually running the whole show, even exists. (For more very detailed scientific evidence of this read The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist.)
My kiakahi, my purpose, is to be the bridge, to experience all the sensations I can and translate them in whatever medium I can, be it the warring broadcast of the English language, or through a shamanic dance frenzy ignited by my brother’s band The Starfish Enterprise at The Old Island Pub.
Not even looking for affirmation I was doing the right thing by writing this essay, I nevertheless received it this morning when I opened an email from Richard Rudd, the mastermind behind The Gene Keys saying how the frequency of this coming week is ruled by Gene Key 17, known as “The Eye.”
The Gene Keys are another incredible system of navigating life that has come through at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. (Unfortunately, far too complex to go into here. Follow the link.) But I can tell you that Gene Key 17, “The Eye” has three aspects: shadow, gift and siddhi (most transcendent expression).
It’s important to note that like in pua’aehuehu, everyone is meant to experience and evolve through all of the expressions. They are not hierarchical, but non-linear stages of evolution that all must pass through on their way to transcendence, however you choose to define that. The first stage, the Shadow, is opinion. The second, the Gift, is far-sightedness (the hawks’ eye view I mentioned earlier). The third, the Siddhi, is omniscience. According to Rudd, “Through the 17th Siddhi of Omniscience the human mind will finally see the perfection and beauty of our oneness with all existence. In order to get to that point one must pass through the shadow. No one can escape this. It’s not a punishment or a sign of failure or being less spiritual.
Here’s Rudd again:
“It is only through the 17th Shadow that this basic drive of human dissatisfaction is twisted to serve the left brain, where instead of serving the whole it serves the parts, thus creating more and more division in the world. Because this shadow is so adept at understanding structures, it is the prime organizing agent within the human brain, allowing you to structure language, use numbers and see things in levels, bands and hierarchies. In its power it also creates the language of your individual reality and that language is built upon a dualistic linguistic structure that does not allow transcendence. The moment you upon up the structure of your inner language to the third level that lies beyond the two contrary opinions-democratic or republican, conservative or labour, male or female-you ignite the power within your DNA to exist the Shadow frequency together.
In summary then, the 17th Shadow holds human thinking at a dualistic level, and it does this through overemphasizing the left brain approach. It makes the logical intellectual view the lynchpin of your neuroscience-linguistic reality. In this sense it compromises and represses the holistic right brain, a process described in detail through the 11th Shadow. It is only through combining these two viewpoints that a third transcendent view opens up to you.”
What to do? As a bridge, right now I am committed to continuing to use language. What form that takes will be determined as my own path unfolds. One thing that I might explore is something Ke’oni suggested, to begin hosting my inner dialogue in light language.
Light language is a pre-cataclysmic dialect that vectors from the electrical grid from the heart. You might have experienced it in the new age spiritual community or in a Pentecostal church where people speak in tongues. You might say it’s gibberish and dismiss it, but remember how language comes to be in the first place-agreement. In a way, light language, generated through electricity streaming through the heart, cannot be contained by the word language whose etymological source, the Latin word lingua, means tongue. The tongue, essential to vocal expression which enabled us to survive when we were hunter-gatherers who faced daily physical danger, has served us well and for that we should be grateful. If you are here reading this your ancestors survived the last round of cataclysmic earth changes. Look around. Is your life in imminent danger? If it is, by all means, use your tongue. Speak up. Scream. Loud. If it’s not, consider seeing through the eyes of your heart. Say nothing. Wait.
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
-from “Keeping Quiet,” Pablo Neruda, trans. Alastair Reid
Can the heart speak in language? Does the heat need a tongue? How can you translate this primal electricity in an authentic way that doesn't imitate something you saw on TV or a movie? What does it mean to speak from the heart?
Generally, I think we conclude it means to be authentic, but I’m suggesting, for once, that we get more literal.
Feel all the feels, even the uncomfortable ones. Shake, rattle and roll like a snake dancer in a Southern Pentecostal Church or a Santeria priestess biting off a chicken head in a trance, but say nothing. Try letting your body speak, like a hula dancer telling the story of rain falling down a mountain. Most likely you won’t be understood at first, but eventually you will. Maybe not in your lifetime, but that doesn’t matter. What matter is that when the river called you to leap in you didn’t resist.
Yesterday in a workshop on the Mea Ne’e, our plasmic ancestors, I noted something Ke;oni said: “Time is not an enemy. It’s a resource. This is a world without error. Only our translations make it so. Change the translations.”
This has been my path since I was first diagnosed with ulcerative colitis 14 years ago, and I’m still on it. There’s a possibility I might always be on it. I might always have this disease and this could be the last essay I ever write. I know I feel both exhausted and exhilarated from writing it. I also know there are numerous holes in it that anyone well-schooled in logic could use to destroy my thesis, except I don’t have one.
That’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to say in an essay, but it’s the truth. All I have are these two hands blessed with motion and the ability to experience sensation. I feel the setting sun lifting them off this keyboard and I must go.
You won’t be able to see them spiral and curl in the air, moved by the spectrum, but my prayer is you feel as I am moved by the light, your own body’s sensations; that you translate those sensations through a clear heart and become a vector of awakening, first for yourself, and then for us who want to hear you.
Click here to listen to audio of “Keeping Quiet” by Alastair Reid.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light