Trusting the Web of Life
David La Chapelle | IONS Noetic Sciences Review | IONS Review #56 |(5 ratings)Clarence Darrow made this eloquent statement during a sensational murder trial in the late 1920s. As a child, Darrow had watched the burial of a Union soldier and had experienced an overwhelming terror of death on that occasion. His experience may help explain why he became an ardent opponent of capital punishment, and why he said that he would die himself if any of his clients were to receive the death penalty. (None of them ever did.) He reached national fame defending a teacher in Tennessee for teaching evolution in the schools. Though he was a confirmed agnostic, Darrow's awareness of the greater web of being underlay and informed his actions. He was a man of sharp and decisive ability who used his power to declare and uphold the connectivity of the individual to the collective. And he trusted in the existence of a power much greater than his own.
The web of being is not just an intuition of spiritual reality, but has scientific support and is found in the practical world of human events as well. The intelligence that knits together this universe is just that—intelligent. And if that is so, what action is required of us?
Consider the Lord's Prayer. The third line of this well-known prayer reads, "Thy kingdom come." In the original Aramaic (the language Christ spoke), malkutakh means both 'fruitful arm' and 'kingdom'—a dual meaning that conveys both the creative potential inherent in the Earth itself as well as that waiting to be unfolded by human action. Malkatuh (from the same root) shares connotations with the word for "Great Mother"—the concept name given by many preliterate cultures to refer to their experience and understanding of the world as interconnected body. The kingdom of which Christ spoke, therefore, is tied to the realization (the making real) of the inherent consciousness of the universe. And its coming has to do with a human awakening to the very reality experienced by mystics and described by scientists.
Most spiritual traditions speak of the need to surrender to the will of a greater aspect of creation. Unfortunately, because of the horrendous abuses committed in the name of religion, the true meaning of surrender has been lost or obscured. To surrender does not mean that we give over the integrity of our beings to another person or organization. To surrender means to release the identification we have with self-protection and our own personal dramas, and to find a greater identity in the whole of creation.
Trust is fundamental to the process of surrender. Without trust we are unable to give ourselves up to the infinite subtleties of the whole, since our habitual strategies of protection will constantly override any messages we receive. And yet, with surrender and trust, we all have the capacity to hear and respond to the voice of the whole. Most indigenous people will tell you that every location, every part of the Earth, has a spirit and is sacred. They would also say that this sacredness can be intuited, and can directly influence our choices. We can all learn from this wisdom.
I witnessed a powerful example of this a few years ago when I led a retreat for some Native Aleut men. We camped at the head of the bay away from the distractions and habits of village life. As we gathered in a circle the morning following our first night out, one of the men who held a position of importance in the village seemed agitated and out of sorts. I asked him what was wrong. He said he hadn't slept well, that the Earth had been angry with him all night, filling his sleep with bad dreams. The anger, he explained, was because of a decision he had helped make to cut trees for profit around the village.
When the Aleut man said that the Earth was angry with him, he wasn't just talking metaphorically. The distress in his eyes told me he was, indeed, experiencing the anguish of his decision as an emanation of the ground on which he had slept. In his sleep he had listened to the wisdom of the whole that was asking him to change his behavior, to surrender personal desire for a larger good. The web of creation had spoken to the man directly.
In the history of Christianity, St Francis provides us with a clear example of someone who trusted implicitly in the underlying supportive fabric of creation. A few short years after Francis egan speaking of his inner experience, five thousand brothers were arriving from all over Italy to the woods that Francis and his small band called home. The magnetism of Francis's conviction had reached into the impoverished lives of Italy's residents and called them to a new level of response.
St Dominic, a fastidious, disciplined man with a highly developed attention to detail, was one of the men who gathered in the woods. When St Dominic saw the hordes of men arriving by the hour, he turned to St Francis and chided him, saying, "Have you not prepared to house and feed all these men? It is irresponsible not to tend to their needs." Francis replied that he trusted the Lord would take care of the situation. When pushed, Francis would only say, "Wait and see." Shortly afterward, wagons full of food and bedding began to appear. From communities all along the Spoleto Valley came an outpouring of spontaneous generosity that would take care of the five thousand brothers. St Dominic was apologetic. "I have not had enough faith. I am sorry. You have shown the way, Brother Francis."
I like this story because it shows providence at work, but it also shows that results come from the seeds of action that we sow. St Francis gave of himself selflessly, preaching in small town squares throughout the area. He tended the lepers, and was notorious for giving away his father's wealth to worthy causes. His generosity seeded the garden of response in the hearts of his countrymen. If the web of connection supporting our world is to leap up into recognizable shape, we need to take selfless action. The many problems facing our modern world will not be solved by the intervention of fate but by effort. By serving the good of the whole, we are served ourselves—a simple but profoundly important principle.
Many times our acts will bring about unexpected consequences. A marvelous example is found in the story of a nineteenth-century farmer in Scotland who was out working his fields when he heard a cry from the bogs. He raced toward the sounds of distress and found a boy, mired in the mud and sinking fast. He pulled him to safety and, after comforting him, sent him on his way.
The next day, a coach pulled up at the farmer's home and a nobleman, the father of the boy the farmer had saved, stepped down to greet him. The nobleman offered him a reward, but the farmer would have none of it. The nobleman insisted. The two argued until they struck a deal: The nobleman would pay for the education of the farmer's son. The farmer's son, Alexander Fleming, went to medical school and, after graduating, became the man who discovered penicillin. Fleming's discovery was to save the life of the nobleman's son one more time. When Winston Churchill—for he was the nobleman's son—contracted pneumonia, penicillin saved his life.
Life is a symbol. If we move deeply into its heart with courage and integrity, then we begin to see the world as sacred, as a coevolving and intelligent field of being out of which events arise, giving structure and guidance to our lives. To trust is to experience the world as sacred.
When we assume responsibility for our own journey, the hand of guidance that steers us will be felt as both our own and not our own—its movement in our lives a mysterious marriage of the personal and the impersonal. In Western culture, we are habituated to assume that there is no problem that we cannot rationally solve. And yet this approach to problem-solving often ignores a more subtle understanding of the connection we each have to the web of life. Our willingness to follow the thread of guidance as it appears in subtle form in our lives will help bring about a fuller realization of both outer and inner worlds.
A lovely retreat site dedicated to all religions came into being as a result of this guidance. The site is located near the end of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Paramhansa Yogananda, the well-known yogi from India, had been wanting to find some land on which to build a retreat center away from the bustle of downtown Los Angeles. One day he received a letter from a stranger who offered to give him a parcel of land with a small lake near the ocean.
The man recalled that, while he had been staying with his wife near the lake, he had been awakened three times in one night by the same incredibly vivid dream, in which he was shown that the piece of land he owned was to be made into a church for all religions. The next day the man looked in the phone book, searching for such a church. The Self-Realization Fellowship, which spoke of the universality of all religions, was the entry that came closest to what he had been shown. He was so moved by his dreams that he decided to donate the land to the church. His wife thought him crazy, but the Lake Shrine stands today as a symbol of what can happen when the inner world, on the wings of inspiration and dreams, takes form in the outer world.
The marriage of inner work with simple outer action can bring about enormous changes in the world. St Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi, and Frederick Douglass each started a revolution with the simplest of acts.One day Brother Francis passed a run-down church on the plains below Assisi. He felt called to enter the church and pray. Prayer, for Francis, was not the pious execution of a few rote lines but an utter abandonment to the act of praying. It was his passion. So he went inside the church. As he prayed he heard the crucifix say to him, "Brother Francis, as you see, my church is in disrepair. Please rebuild it."
Now if you or I were to hear a crucifix talking, we might well label ourselves delusional and seek a quick exit. But Francis was a different man, and he lived in different times. He took the words as a command and began to rebuild the church of San Damiano stone by stone. As he labored he was joined by others who were attracted to his simple joy, love of song, and obvious spiritual intoxication. In a few short years their community had grown to include five thousand brothers.
Francis's obedience to an inner prompting, no matter how ridiculous it may have seemed, launched a revolution. The revolution was not about putting stones upon stones, though the revolution could not have come about without those actions. The revolution was about the emergence of a spiritual renaissance that would blossom and grow until it reached full flower in the efflorescence of humanism that began in Florence, Italy, and spread throughout Europe during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Francis changed religious practice to support the personal empowerment of the individual, and gave new hope to an entire sector of society that previously had been disenfranchised. When Francis laid the first stone at the church of San Damiano, he was laying stones for the future—a future that no one could have foreseen.
Some four centuries later, in India, a man picked up a simple object and began to spin the fabric of another revolution. Gandhi wanted to find a way to inspire self-respect in the common people of India. He was looking for a way to overturn India's reliance on British-made cloth and, by extension, to overturn British political and economic control. When Gandhi began to spin his own cloth he was exercising a spiritual muscle, but in a very concrete way. Spinning became one of the enduring symbols of his revolution—a revolution that freed India and proved nonviolent action to be a viable tool for achieving transformation.
Deep in the southern United States in the 1800s, when slavery was still the law of the land, a man picked up a scrap of paper and began the difficult task of trying to make sense of the letters and words he saw. Frederick Douglass, through his own intense effort and against active persecution, taught himself how to read and write—skills that were winnowed out of the fields of his toil and imprisonment. He took his skill with language to the national stage, and the clear and precise prose of his courage helped to guide our nation through the Civil War. The act was simple, but the will behind the act helped transform a nation. There have been many stone-layers throughout history, but there was only one St Francis. Cloth has been woven for centuries, but it took a Gandhi to spin a revolution. The written word has been handed down for generations, but it took a Frederick Douglass to express what a nation needed to hear in a time of pain and loss. In all three men, the joining of inner work with outer action facilitated large-scale transformation. Like them, our own willingness to marry our inner voice of guidance to our skills will pave the way for a true revolution in our lives and in our world.
Each of us possesses skills. When we are called upon to change, we need not build cathedrals overnight. Individual actions, taken one at a time in the reverence of our attention, will help us lay stones for our future. As the props of our material world are undergoing waves of stress from many points of disturbance, we are called upon to give our world the tender healing of our undivided attention. Such focus is the essence of simplicity, for in the act of devoted attention we render the world sacred. The most powerful antidote to the discontinuities of change is our capacity to reach through the shifting flux of our lives and make holy each moment with simple, undivided attention. By joining with others in a simplicity of attention and action, we look beyond the debris, fluctuations, and confusion of the exterior world and make visible the worlds that live as hopes within our deepest hearts. We can, in the waves of world-forming, become agents of change ourselves, co-creators of a new world.
David La Chapelle was raised amid glaciers, mountains and other pristine natural settings. He has studied and practiced numerous healing arts, led hundreds of wilderness retreats, and continually endeavors to give voice to the inner realms. This article is adapted from his most recent book, Navigating the Tides of Change, which can be ordered from the publisher, New Society Publishers (www.newsociety.com or 800-567-6772).
