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45. Restoring the Transformative Bridge: Remembering and Regenerating
our Western Transformative Ancient Traditions to solve the Riddle of our
Existential Crisis
Petra T. Buergelt1 & Douglas Paton1,2
1 University of Canberra, Faculty of Health, Australia
2 Charles Darwin University, College of Health & Human Sciences, Australia
petra.buergelt@canberra.edu.au
douglas.paton@cdu.edu.au
Abstract
Restoring the Transformative Bridge: Remembering and Regenerating our Western
Transformative Ancient Traditions to Solve the Riddle of our Existential Crisis
The apocalyptic cultural transition threatening our existence represents a transformative
opportunity. To facilitate realizing this opportunity, we synergized the knowledges of three
transdisciplinary transformative scholar-practitioners. The ensuing composite story suggests the
source of the crisis is spiritual and the consequence of millennia long domestication and
colonization in the Western culture that started with Plato advancing rationality and reductionism
which disconnected us from our true, primordial nature; the invisible, feminine spiritual world;
our ancestors and ancient Laws/wisdom. To move forward we need to go back and remember,
cultivate and live according to our sacred nature and Laws. Accomplishing this requires a
paradigm shift from the rational, reductionist physical towards an extra-rational, holistic spiritual
philosophical worldview by embedding several interconnected extra-rational transformative
pathways into everyday life.
Keywords: paradigm shift, philosophical paradigm, cosmology, ontology, epistemology, axiology, transformative
journey, quest, philosophical paradigm, ancient paradigm, Indigenous paradigm, Western paradigm, arts,
nature, individuation, soul work, reciprocal exchange with Indigenous peoples, commons, language, Greek,
Latin
INTRODUCTION
Instead of stepping forwards and looking into the future for solutions we have to walk
backwards into the place inside us all where the answers already lie and have always
been waiting
—Kingsley, 2018, p. 195
Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of
refugees severed not only from land, but from the sheer genius that comes from
belonging in a symbiotic relation to it. … Perhaps we need to revisit the brilliant thought
paths of our Palaeolithic Ancestors and recover enough cognitive function to correct the
impossible messes civilization has created.
—Yunkaporta, 2019, pp. 2–3
Increasingly frequent, severe, cascading, and compounding levels of disease, “natural”
disasters, pandemics, food and water shortages, climate change, and environmental destruction
highlight how we are living through an apocalyptic and challenging era of cultural transition that
could threaten all of existence on earth (Buergelt et al., 2017; Kingsley, 2018; O’Sullivan, 2002).
In parallel, we have become progressively less able to comprehend the extent of nor how to
resolve the problem (Buergelt et al., 2017; Griffith, 2014; Kingsley, 2018; Yunkaporta, 2019).
Consequently, if we want to live and want our children to thrive, we must urgently address this
situation. As many, including Einstein and Carl Jung, pointed out, it is impossible for the
mindset that created the crisis to resolve it; a paradigm shift, a transformation of our fundamental
cosmological, ontological, and epistemological beliefs, is necessary (Buergelt et al., 2017;
Kingsley, 2018).
We suggest that this existential crisis is a blessing in disguise—it creates what Mezirow
(1991) calls disorienting dilemmas that can spark individual and collective transformation. The
etymology of apocalypse supports this interpretation. While apocalypse has come to mean
universal destruction or disaster, the ancient Greek word for apocalypse ἀποκάλυψις means “an
uncovering” of prophetic revelations of ancient or Indigenous knowledges that can enable
humanity to engage in the transformative journey required for creating a new culture that restores
harmony/balance. This resonates with literature showing how ancient and Indigenous
knowledges offer ways to facilitate cultural transformations that culminate in sustainable and
more functional cultures (Buergelt et al., 2017). For instance, Yunkaporta (2019, p. 78–79) says
that diverse Indigenous tribes across Australia “have stories of past Armageddons, warning
against the behaviours that make these difficult to survive and offering a blueprint for transitional
ways of being, so that our custodial species can continue to keep creation in motion.”
Consequently, inquiring into ancient and Indigenous knowledges can identify sources of our
existential crisis, what needs transforming and how these transformations could be best
accomplished.
Building upon our work in the disaster risk reduction space (e.g., Buergelt et al., 2017;
Buergelt et al., in press; Paton & Buergelt, 2019; Paton et al., 2017), we start this inquiry by
weaving together knowledges from three diverse award-winning, transdisciplinary, and visionary
scholar-practitioners of transformation: Peter Kingsley, Jay Griffith and Tyson Yunkaporta. Peter
Kingsley (PhD) is an historian and philosopher who is internationally recognized for his ground-
breaking transformative work which complements Carl Jung’s work. Jay Griffith is an astute
researcher, writer, and author who weaves together eloquently vast and diverse knowledges
spanning her own extensive, in-depth experience of living with Indigenous peoples around the
world, Indigenous and scientific knowledges, and literary works across deep time. Tyson
Yungaporta (PhD) belongs to the Australian Apalech clan and is an academic, artist, and author
who is bridging worldviews, knowledges, and practices from Indigenous culture and Western
knowledges to transform thinking in ways that heal and enable sustainable, harmonious living for
all creatures. The thinking of these scholar-practitioners developed independently, but each
individuals knowledge corroborates and complements the others in ways that create a more
comprehensive and compelling story. Thus, we meld their perspectives into a single narrative. To
avoid constant citations distracting, we will only provide citation when an idea is particular to
just one of them.
The synergy we offer supports transformative learning literature reaching beyond the
rational discourse advocated by Mezirow to more holistic and extrarational ways of being and
knowing, particularly through nature, creative arts, and soul work/individuation; it further
expands and connects these passageways. We aspire to show that the holistic, extrarational
approach can be understood more fully in the context of an extant Indigenous paradigm that still
exists in some world cultures but also preceded the emergence of the western paradigm. We hope
that exploring the Western and ancient/Indigenous paradigms in relation to transformative
learning will enhance awareness of how their contrasting fundamental philosophical beliefs
about the origin and development of the cosmos/universe (cosmology) and the nature of reality
and knowledge (ontology and epistemology) influence us and how we live. This enhanced
awareness may facilitate new opportunities for scholars and practitioners to theorize
transformative pedagogy and improve transformative practices. We start our inquiry with
exploring the sources of our existential crisis to uncover what needs transforming and discussing
Indigenous ways of being-knowing-living to reveal what we have lost. We then utilize this
knowledge to delve into how the required transformations could be achieved.
WHAT ARE THE SOURCES FOR OUR EXISTENTIAL CRISIS? WHAT NEEDS
TRANSFORMING AND WHY?
All three authors agree that resolving our existential crisis requires identifying the source.
Kingsley (2018) argues that doing so requires our going back in time. Mounting evidence
suggest that our crisis developed gradually over millennia, with its origins deriving from Plato
and Aristotle using reason to force our mind to separate from the psyche, and orthodox
Christianity suppressing the wisdom of our pre-Socratic ancestors. The emergent Western
philosophical worldview created a culture that gradually domesticated us and conditioned us into
ways of thinking and living that disconnected us from our ancestors and ancient universal laws—
our true natural, primordial sacred/divine nature and the sacred, invisible, feminine, spiritual
realm. That means, the source of our existential crisis is essentially spiritual. Consequently, to
rectify the consequences of abandoning our ancestors and their knowledges, it is of great value to
ask: who are our ancestors, what does their ancient knowledge say, what is our true nature and
how did we lose it all. This knowledge will lead us ultimately to what needs transforming.
The roots of our Western culture are ancient and precede the pre-Socractic Greek
philosophers such as Empedocles and Parmenides who lived over 2,500 years ego (Kingsley,
2018). Rather than being primitive rationalists, which HIStory made them out to be to hide the
path back to our innate power from us, they possessed great ancient wisdom. They followed the
orally-transmitted lineage of mystics and healers that traces back to those in the Gnostics or
Hermetic tradition who acquired extensive knowledge; were able to shift/transform into states of
consciousness that enabled their accessing the invisible, spiritual realm and to bring from this
realm wisdom into our physical world; and could invoke and interpret divine guidance offered
through visions and dreams. The Greek word knôsikos, meaning “having knowledge or insight,”
points to Gnostics being able to not only see outwardly into the physical world (sight) but also
directly inwardly and experience their divine nature (insight). The Gnostics are our intimate
spiritual family. Their teachings are the real source of Christianity, but they have been
suppressed to serve religious interests.
Gnostic wisdom, like any other ancient/Indigenous culture across the world, holds that all
creatures originate from the same universal consciousness of the essential creative life force, that
all matter is alive and conscious, and that there exists two intertwined worlds that create each
other: an outer, masculine, visible physical world that can be known via the body’s eye and an
inner, feminine, invisible spiritual world that can be known to the mind’s eye via insight. The
spirit world is the deeper true realty of the realms of our ancestors, gods, or the dead, and mirrors
our authentic nature, psyche, or soul. Our natural ancient laws say that we exist in a dialectical
relationship with the ancestors/gods/dead in which we co-create the world and universe/cosmos
with them; they create us, we create them, and together we create the universe/cosmos. If that co-
creative relationship is interrupted, as it was in the Western culture, the universe/cosmos and
ourselves collapse.
These beliefs are reflected in our ancient Greek ancestors calling us Anthropos, meaning
both women and men being “made in the image of God,” with God being a synonym for
ancestors/dead (Kingsley, 2018). This meaning reminds us that our true primordial nature is
sacred/divine and that we have a boundless inner potential. Our true nature or self has been
called many names including cosmic force, psyche, soul, daemon, passion, calling, muse, stream
of lava, or divine mêtis, internal fire or flame. The Latin word psyche means “breath of life, soul
or spirit” and is symbolized as a butterfly. The Greek goddess psykhê symbolises the archetype
of the Goddess of the Soul, who represents feminine spiritual and psychological growth or
maturation. The soul, Sophia in Greek and Sapientia in Latin, is symbolized as an ambiguous,
extraordinary, mysterious feminine being. Carl Jung called the archetype of the inner feminine as
anima (Kingsley, 2018).
Our psyche-soul is our instinctive, inner, infinite heightened alertness which enables us to
adapt to the constantly subtly changing existence and to transform (shape shift) between the
physical and spiritual realities. Our psyche-soul contains detailed guidance for living, compels us
to seek our destiny within ourselves, and steers us towards wisdom, expressing our unique gifts
and experiencing true happiness. The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia with eu
representing “good, pleased,” and daimonia referring to daemon/daimōn meaning “guardian,
genius” suggests that to find happiness we need to hear and follow our inner daemons (Griffith,
2014). When we find our daemon, we experience a eureka moment, indicating that
transformation is needed to access our true nature.
The pre-Socratic mystics used ancient transformative techniques of alchemy/magic to
carry us over into another state of consciousness that silenced our rational thoughts to enable us
accessing and becoming conscious of the sacred, ambiguous spiritual realms of the
ancestors/gods/dead, our true nature and the primordial, aboriginal sacred law (Kingsley, 2018).
When we experienced the sacred reality, we realized that we no longer belonged to and lived for
ourselves but became a source of life for others. Living according to the ancient law meant
learning to live harmoniously with our nature and nature.
However, Plato introducing rationality started us stopping to identify with our primordial,
archetypical nature and forgetting the purpose of our lives (Griffith, 2014; Kingsley, 2018;
Yunkaporta, 2019). Over the next centuries, the ensuing Western culture’s troika of patriarchy,
capitalism, and Christian church continued to hinder us from connecting with our unique genius
and ancient ways of knowing by deliberately suppressing us from accessing and transforming
into our innate nature. This troika used diverse interdependent strategies to destroy the conditions
that are, according to Indigenous cultures and Western science alike, vital for transformation and
the maturing of our both soul/psyche/spirt and mind. These strategies, which we will explore
later in detail, create the spiritual crisis that is at the core of our existential crisis, indicating that
one key access to turning the tide lies in us becoming present to these strategies and
remembering, reviving, and living according to our true nature and ancient/Indigenous Laws.
To start this process, we invite you to join us on a journey back in time to offer deeper
glimpses into the worldviews, knowledges, and ways of living of our Western ancestors that
relate to transformation, how our Western culture suppressed and exploited us over millennia,
and the impact this Western culture had on us. Drawing on common key aspects of contemporary
Indigenous worldviews, knowledges, and practices that corroborate the Gnostic wisdom, we
outline how such knowledges to complement and add to understanding how transformation was
and is at the heart of and in all aspects of our lives.
OUR ANCIENT/INDIGENOUS WAYS OF BEING-KNOWING-LIVING
Like other Indigenous cultures around the world we had an ageless need to find the
wisdom of the ancients within us via accessing our true nature, psyche, or soul (Griffith, 2014).
Finding the ancient wisdom demands embarking on a physical, psychological and spiritual quest.
During the quest we transformed from children to adults because the challenges forced us to
draw out
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the qualities of the psyche and the ancient wisdom. Freely interacting with nature
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Note the parallel to the etymological meaning of education deriving from the Latin educare, “to draw
out, bring up,” and ducere, “to lead.”
provided us with the challenges, accidents, and failures required for developing our competence
and capabilities that kept us safe and enabled us to respond to the irregularity and
unpredictability of nature. The quest entailed going alone into the wild woods; to transform into
being adults we needed to reach beyond our limits, and journeying through the woods alone
required learning to find and rely on ourselves in ways that opened possibilities for our seeing
things differently and making new connections, and enabling us to find our path through life.
Intimately discovering our true self required solitude in wild undefined, infinite places
that allowed reflecting on own undefined selves (Griffith, 2014). These places are in nature and
nature reflects our self. We used primal ways to create scared spaces (fire, water, food) which
allowed us to spin a cocoon for our emerging psyche where we could, like butterflies, facilitate
the transformation of our psyche in its own time by reflecting on and transforming our lessons.
The fully developed adult butterfly stage is called an imago—an imagination and magic
incarnate—reflecting our true nature. Simultaneously, being in nature infused us with the diverse
ways of knowing contained within nature. The quest developed our capacity to be with
ambiguity, heightened our awareness, and cultivated deeply listening to everything that might
guide us, especially messages and signs from the ancients and the imagination. Without going on
this transformative quest, we are lost, experience illness, and engage in damaging behavior.
Similar to other Earth-based original cultures, we believed control was against the ancient
law of nature; that nature, including human nature, was good; that every creature needed to be
respected; that adults were not superior to children; and that people needed to be governed by
themselves and nature as the will was the life force — we allowed and facilitated everybody to
be their true self to express their spirits/soul/daemon (Griffith, 2014). We knew that only when
were self-willed could we be true to ourselves. To prevent people from following their will
selfishly and harming others, we socialized them into cultivating their insight and nature
knowledge; both taught them to be aware and respectful of the will of others and to consciously
regulate their own will to maintain good relations and ensure the health, safety and wealth of
both individuals and the community. We knew people experiencing their will being valued and
respected led to them valuing and respecting the will of others.
We were able to fulfil our custodial role through thinking holistically and understanding
complex systems and seeing reality or creation as an open, infinitely complex, interconnected,
self-organizing, dynamic, subjective, and self-renewing system of life (Yunkaporta, 2019). We
believed in being integral to this system and in being the designated custodial species of this
reality whose role is to sustain creation by caring for and looking after all of creation. We knew
that all entities, including ourselves, interacted in reciprocal relationships and thus each
interaction impacted the whole system. Hence, ancient/Indigenous law perfectly continuously
balanced the needs of all parts of the system. We knew that complex systems were composed of
equal parts—members carried the intelligence of the whole, were autonomous yet
interdependently connected, and were interacting freely within complex heterarchical patterns of
relatedness and communal obligation. We understood that systems, and their parts, were self-
organizing, patterned and adaptive in ways that maintained the balance/harmony of the system
and members and that to ensure the balance of the entire system, the patterns must emerge
organically.
To allow creation to emerge through the free movement of all systems parts, we created
governance processes that surrendered control, respectfully observed, and interacted in non-
intrusive ways with diverse systems in ways that enabled autonomous self-organizing and
adapting in ways that maintained balance (Yunkaporta, 2019). Thus, our governance systems
were participatory, distributed, and monitored collectively. We finely honed our holistic thinking
by examining things from many points of view, especially those opposed to our own, and
through deliberately interacting with people who held different viewpoints.
This process was sustained by knowledge keepers who maintained and enacted processes
culminating in attaining higher knowledge in ways that ensured that each member expressed
themselves as fully as possible (Yunkaporta, 2019). Knowledge was living because we
continually created knowledge through our everyday two-way interactions among and between
spirit-ancestors, land-place, people, and groups of peoples. The resulting complex ecosystems of
practice were transformative and innovative open systems which were constantly naturally
adapting. We knew that “any attempt to control the system from a fixed viewpoint outside is
misaligned intervention that will fail. […] Creation is in a constant state of motion, and we must
move with it as the custodial species or we will damage the system and doom ourselves. […] you
have to move and adapt within a system that is in a constant state of movement and adaptation”
(Yunkaporta, 2018, pp. 45–46, 49). Consequently, our emergent holistic thinking enabled us to
create and maintain diverse, interacting open systems to fulfil our role as custodial species such
as our kinship system.
Like in other ancient/Indigenous cultures, our ancient kinship systems were designed so
that everybody was related to everybody within and across generations, regardless of our genetic
relationships (Griffith, 2014; Yunkaporta, 2019). Our kinship system naturally constantly
reinforced and intertwined the past, present and future, ensuring cultural consistency and
adapting; this led to transformative education being embedded in every interaction in ways that
sustained the cumulative wisdom of our ancestors knowledges and the essential life energies. We
balanced feminine and masculine energies in every aspect of life in sophisticated ways
(Yunkaporta, 2019). Our women and men were equal partners with complex and layered
independent, interdependent, and complementary identities, roles, and relationships involving
both friction-conflict and union-cooperating. Friction-conflict is being the force/fire that
continuously creates the universe; union-cooperating is continuously keeping the generative
force/fire burning. Our ancient law provided our women and men with knowledge of which
behaviors supported them fulfilling their roles and which did not, the consequence of destructive
behaviors, and how to grow beyond and keep in check these destructive behaviors.
Time in our ancient culture was sacred, mythic, subtle, ambiguous, and merging past-
resent-future (Griffith, 2014). Time was alive (changed in the reciprocal interactions among and
between us and other creatures); existed within the land and nature’s processes; was cyclical; and
was diverse (many times). The quality of time mattered. Time connected us to nature and its
wisdom. Our language constantly connected us to nature time. Because time was mirroring both
nature and our psyche/soul, by learning about wild time we learned about both, leading to our
growing up more self-reliant, less obedient, and less malleable to outside forces. Following our
inner nature, time also created the space for reverie. Doing nothing, daydreaming, and imagining
was crucial for our spirit/soul to breath, reflect and self-fertilize. Reverie was our natural wild or
undomesticated state during which our mind became highly active in brain areas associated with
creativity and complex problem-solving. Reverie created the space for us experiencing
epiphanies during which we access our true nature, our daemons, that guide us.
As in other Indigenous cultures, education, reflecting its Latin roots educare, “to draw
out, bring up” and ducere, “to lead,” cultivated both our spiritual and physical faculties and
virtues. Hence, education’s purpose was to “lead a child into the world and enduce from the child
its own wisdom […] to draw out what is in the child, the immortal spirit” (Griffith, 2014, p.
234). Our education was about understanding life in all its expressions, holistically and in-depth,
and was aligned with how the mind learned naturally. We understood the importance of nature
for us to mature, and used nature, along with metaphors and arts (stories, dance, song,
ceremony), to continuously access deeper layers of the spiritual, invisible world (Griffith, 2014).
We saw nature as our teacher and university. Anthropomorphism, shapeshifting, and
metamorphosis, for instance, opened dialogue with nature and increased our sensitivities and
knowledge of nature. We saw the transformations during shapeshifting as the “ur-metaphor”
(Griffith, 2014, p. 87). Animal metaphors facilitated our mirroring nature; each animal taught us
diverse characteristics and skills, expanding our repertoire. Interacting with animals increased
our imagination, empathy, sensitivities, diversity of viewpoints, self-esteem, self-control, and
autonomy. Fully developing our psyche required interacting with many different animals directly
or through ceremonies, song, dance, and music. Western science increasingly confirms this;
interacting with nature facilitates our realizing who we truly are, greater self-confidence,
independence, and self-belief, increases awareness and social skills, helps focusing and
concentrating, encourages positive attitudes towards learning, enhances physical stamina and
coordination, and leads to greater insight into and greater respect for nature (Buergelt et al.,
2017).
We also saw free play in nature as being at the core of our human nature and learning
(Griffith, 2014). We knew that play was vital for the growth of our spirt and mind, health, and
wellbeing because it was engaging the deepest creative energy and was elemental for us to
discover our uniqueness and inner abundance. We saw the imagination involved in free play as
crucial for us learning to control our emotions and behavior which was critical for the
functioning of us as individuals and our entire society. We believed that play was connected to
art and knew that art was rooted in true knowledge. We referred to arts as the knowledge of the
ancestors or inner wisdom. The Latin artus means “joints and connecting the parts,” pointing to
ability of arts to connect ideas holistically and to carry them across. Kunst, the German word for
art, has its source in kennen, “to know, knowledge” and können, “to know how, to be able.”
Thus, like other ancient/Indigenous cultures, we embedded arts in diverse forms, including
telling stories, painting, singing, and dancing, in all aspects of our everyday life, to encode and
carry over the spiritual, ecological, and ethical knowledges critical for our spiritual and physical
survival.
One form of art we used was fairy tales
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for they mirrored the true but invisible, spiritual
world. The Latin word for fairy and feärie is fata, meaning “the fates.” Fairies symbolize and
impart an imaginative, metaphoric mindset full of inner meaning. Feäries are metaphors that are
true to, and provide an access to, the psyche/soul. Metaphors reflect our true nature, give life to
the mysterious realm, and nurture curiosity, wisdom, and empathy. Metaphor is how the human
mind thinks; it weaves together and exchanges facts-physical world and feäries-spiritual world.
Metaphor is a metaphor for imagination, which can only be found within our psyche/soul by
transforming the physical reality. Metaphors also enabled us to easily carry meaning from
something we knew to something new, assisting us to adapt effortlessly. We were masterful in
thinking in, understanding, expressing, and applying metaphors naturally.
We used fairy tales to encode and implicitly teach ancient knowledges including the
origins of the universe and the nature of realty and knowledge. Fairy tales encoded in our ancient
law reminded us to live in harmony with nature; explained how to live in connected, harmonious
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Fairy tales are also called folk tales, legends, sagas or myths in other ancient/Indigenous cultures.
relationships; and reminded us that each action has consequences. Fairy tales also taught us the
importance of seeking knowledges, emphasized the importance of nature, and instilled the
understanding of nature as indefinitely complex ecological system. Because we were an oral
culture, we co-created fairy tales together with the storyteller, enabling us to adjust fairy tales to
psyche and situation, and to refine them to incorporate new knowledges in accordance with
changes in our environment.
However, the inner power associated with our ancient/Indigenous knowledges and ways
of thinking threatened the existence of the Western culture; it thus tried for centuries to maintain
the status quo by suppressing and invalidating our true primordial nature and ancient wisdom.
This domestication and oppression process started according to with the founding father of our
Western culture, Plato (Griffith, 2014; Kingsley, 2018; Yunkaporta, 2019). It is to a discussion of
this process we turn now.
THE DOMESTICATION AND OPPRESSION OF OUR TRUE, PRIMORDIAL SELF
AND ANCIENT KNOWLEDGES
Plato took the ancient knowledges from the Pythagoreans and systematically altered,
excluded, and concealed the ancient teaching that letting oneself be carried into the most
feminine, most unconscious depths of our selves gave access to the sacred wisdom, and replaced
the sacred ancient laws with human reason (Kingsley, 2018). Plato created the scientific method,
which promotes rationality and reduces interconnected complexity to separate parts. He banished
wildness/nature, arts, metaphors, and emotions, and advanced the view that ancient knowledge
be extinguished by schools, focusing instead on the rational, literal, and measurable (Griffith,
2014). He promoted breaking children’s wills and affinity with nature, and introduced hierarchy,
control, obedience, and violence to create a passive and disciplined workforce to further
imperialism and class-division.
By pushing our surrendering to reasoning, Plato eroded our caring for our gods/ancestors
and contributed to our forgetting the sacred purpose of our culture, and that our culture needed to
be cultivated according to nature laws to fulfil its purpose (Kingsley, 2018; Yunkaporta, 2019).
Rationality blocked our access to direct experience of our divine nature and undermined holistic
and extra-rational thinking (Griffith, 2014). The greatest ancient pre-Socratic western
philosophers and mystics perceived people breaking up reality into pieces as being blind and
deaf (Kingsley, 2018). They also believed that reasoning crushed ambiguities, leaving control to
reign unchecked. Plato’s rationalism was then championed by other Western rationalists and
through the Christian church, agriculture and capitalism, creating a culture that suppressed and
domesticated us.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the wealthy perpetuated the divide between people and
nature by privatizing and fencing common land, to control the land and its resources to make us
work every day (Griffith, 2014). These enclosures extended the loss of our intimate and
reciprocal relationships with nature and hampered our coming into knowledge about our true
nature and ancient law and knowledge. Without experiencing this kinship and education, our
souls became sick and nature became unsafe. The abolishment of the commons seized our
communities, stole our homes and our independence as we could not maintain ourselves any
more. Our memory of what it was like growing up and living in nature has been deliberately
suppressed over centuries. How we grow up now, and living separated from nature enclosed
indoors occurs was unthinkable just a few generations ago.
To support capitalism, the Western culture disconnected us from nature time and our
nature, and created exact time measurement to control us (Griffith, 2014). Universal time that is
linear and abstract and could be quantified and measured was created and constantly reinforced.
Our lives became ruled by clocks that connected us to linear time that created a fear of the future.
By controlling our time, the Western lifestyle is overriding and eroding our true nature and
power as relentless speed, inputs, and demands suffocate the psyche/soul, exhausts us and create
a sense of failure, low self-esteem, distress, and depression. Our Wes tern languages, especially
English, veil the ancient truth of reality and who we are and perpetuate the Western worldview
and thinking (Kingsley, 2018; Yunkaporta, 2019).
The Western culture also realized that to keep itself alive it needed to maintain the
Western paradigm by creating a workforce that was easily controllable yet capable of keeping
the economy running (Griffith, 2014; Yunkaporta, 2018). This process was reinforced by
developments in public education. In the 15th century, church schools deliberately and
systemically humiliated, dominated, and oppressed our children until their wills were completely
broken. Schools were designed to imitate factories and education was designed to instill
subservience (Yunkaporta, 2018). Our development was limited to “safe” levels; enough to
enable us to breed and work, yet low enough to see hierarchy, obedience, discipline, control, and
competition as natural. To keep these closed systems alive, the past was manipulated and
alternative worldviews, knowledges, and practices—such as those of nature, ancient/Indigenous,
women, children, diverse cultures—were suppressed. While more humanistic in orientation,
contemporary Western mainstream schooling retains a focus on creating a workforce and
consumers, perpetuating imperialist histories and corporate colonialism, and cloaking the source
and nature of the problems we experience (Griffith, 2014; Yunkaporta, 2018). Our predominant
reductionist education separates and reduces life into subjects and focuses on what can be
measured, and ignores what cannot be measured, which is not inhibiting us fully developing and
maturing into adults, robbing us of our innate knowledges, suppresses embodied ancient
knowledges and undermines holistic thinking.
The combined forces of rationalism, reformation, Protestantism and Catholicism,
capitalism, and the industrial revolution further eroded our belief in and ability to access the
invisible, spiritual world (Griffith, 2014). They further perpetuated the Western worldview that
held that only physically visible things are true and that the world needed to be interpreted
literally. Literalism is against our nature and hence paralyses our mind. These forces severely
repressed free play and arts to force us to engage in productive work and commodified play to
profit (Griffith, 2014). They changed the meaning of arts around the 18th century to narrowly
mean artistic activity of humans, and to be contrary to nature, and weakened the value of arts and
artists. They changed the meaning of daemon to mean something evil and belittled feäries to
subdue our inherent power.
Over the course of a several hundred years, we, especially women, have been cheated out
of the inheritance of fairy tales, and thus of ancient knowledges, for many oral fairy tales have
been rewritten to pave the way for and maintain the current misogynist and patriarchal Western
worldview (Griffith, 2014). The original oral version of Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, is
a story of a courageous, smart girl who defends herself against attempted rape, providing
guidance on how to recognize and respond to rape. Our ancient fairy tales were replaced with
literal and predefined images to suppress our pathways to the metaphoric. Over centuries, the
disconnection from nature, oppression of play and arts, and public education gradually
domesticated us, deteriorated our minds and capabilities, and conditioned us to think in
reductionist and objective ways (Yunkaporta, 2019). Western science increasingly evidences our
genetic, physical, and mental deterioration over millennia (Hood, 2014).
Importantly, research shows a decline in people in Western cultures being able to move
beyond concrete operational thinking. For example, only about 11 % of British high school
students attained formal and post-formal operational thinking in 2007, which was a drastic
decline from about 21% 30 years earlier (Shayer & Ginsburg, 2009). That is, increasingly less
people can see the invisible, spiritual reality; can think holistically and see relationships between
aspects; perceive the world as process integrating past-present-future; can take others’
perspectives and view things from multiple perspectives; engage in both inductive and deductive
reasoning; can think hypothetically and critically question information; are receptive to new and
contradictory ideas; can understand symbolism; and reflect.
This Western culture is also sustaining itself by creating a closed system via hierarchical,
concentrated, and centrally organized patriarchal power and governance structures that suppress
two-way feedback loops and consensus; nations with borders; religion being institutionalized,
cutting people of from their direct experience of the divine and missionizing people into the
Christian and Western worldview; violence creating fear and Western education and science
generally enforcing the Western worldview being right (Griffith, 2014; O’Sullivan, 2002;
Yunkaporta, 2019). These diverse colonizing practices have, and still do, created the conditions
that have created and intensified our existential planetary crisis (O’Sullivan, 2002) and eroded all
aspects that facilitate our individual and collective health/wellbeing, resilience, and adaptive
capacities (Griffith, 2014; Kingsley, 2018; Yunkaporta, 2019). Our being separated from our
nature, each other, and nature means we are cut from the source of our power and
health/wellbeing and thus have no power nor security (O’Sullivan, 2002).
However, the domesticating, conditioning, fading memories of the past and oppressing of
different perspectives make it difficult for us to realize what has happened and is happening.
Gradually, our reality has become distorted and we have slipped away from living in harmony
with the ancient laws and our true nature without noticing it. We have largely become obedient,
individual workers with specialized knowledge and little shared understanding who are, unable
to realize what we lost and to connect to join forces to challenge the system and reclaim our
power. We don’t question what is happening and we have lost the capacity to understand the
connections required to regenerate our well-being. Now, we even don’t remember who we are
and the ancient ways. That is, the Western culture both contributed to creating our existential
crisis and undermining us understanding the crisis to perpetuate the status quo (Griffith, 2014;
Kingsley, 2018; O’Sullivan, 2002; Yunkaporta, 2019).
When we lost our connection to our inner sacred nature, we also lost our inner life force
and guidance system which led to us individually and collectively losing the sacred, invisible,
feminine, spiritual reality that exists in virtually every other culture especially in
ancient/Indigenous cultures (Kingsley, 2018). This loss within us is the source of all disasters
outside us. If we continue to disregard the ancient/Indigenous law, we will continue to oppress
the natural cyclical and reciprocal processes designed to support the renewing and balancing of
life. This will lead to the systems supporting us increasingly breaking down, creating
disharmony, crisis, disasters, and disease, exacerbating our existential crisis, and leading
ultimately to our extinction (O’Sullivan, 2002; Yunkaporta, 2019). Given our knowledge that
transformation was central to our ancient worldviews, knowledges, and harmonious living, they
might also point us to how to best use the transformative opportunity the crisis entails. In the
next section we explore that possibility.
WHAT ARE TRANSFORMATIVE WAYS OUT OF OUR EXISTENTIAL CRISIS?
For all three scholar-practitioners, recovering our power as custodial species by
remembering and reviving our ancient spiritual practices, reconnecting with our true primordial
nature, and living in harmony with our nature and with nature is the solution to our existential
crisis. However, for reasons introduced above, this solution is not recognized in Western
cultures, which only seek rational solutions in the physical world and prevent seeing alternative
perspectives. Yet, rational solutions have proven ineffective and people are increasingly
searching for alternatives. Transformative learning is one such alternative that could play a vital
role in facilitating people in Western cultures expanding their narrow rational and reductionistic
philosophical worldview to an extra-rational and holistic ancient/Indigenous philosophical
worldview.
Our exploration indicates that achieving this transformation would require facilitating
Western peoples engaging in a transformative journey that comprises two interconnected
transformative processes parallel: (a) reflecting, uncovering, acknowledging, and deconstructing
our current Western worldview and its sources and impacts; as well as (b) rebirthing,
remembering, reviving, and strengthening the ancient-Indigenous worldview and creating a
paradigm that transcends both paradigms. Interestingly, a cultural transformation is consistent
with our ancient knowledge.
Gnostic wisdom says that when cultures evolve from one age to another, they go through
a natural death-rebirth transformative process. According to all three scholar-practitioners, we
are in the midst of such a cultural transformation. And, as Kingsley (2018) points out, because
our current Western culture has become dysfunctional and is dying to rebirth more functional
worldviews and ways of living, it would be not only be pointless but damaging to keep our
Western culture alive. Consistent with O’Sullivan (2002), he suggests that to bring a new culture
into being, it would be of value to first consciously collectively experience, mark, and honor the
passing of our Western culture and rational self by completing lose ends, letting go, grieving, and
celebrating the ending.
Kingsley (2018) emphasizes that successfully transitioning between ages requires
carrying over the ancient wisdom, unbroken, to connect the past and future to ensure cultural
continuity and learning of the lessons of the previous age fully. Building upon Jung, Kingsley
(2018) advocates for our collectively looking back and into ourselves by deliberately getting to
know our real ancient Western culture and to come to terms with the truth of our divine, sacred
nature that we lost, why we lost it, and how this impacted us. Jung and Kingsley (2018) suggest
that recognizing that we are conditioned into and undermined by the Western worldview is
critical, as is finding ways to shield against it. Both propose that the essential task of people in
Western cultures is to give up reasoning and rationalizing and take on valuing, accessing, and
living in accordance with our own unique nature and truth; reviving the ancient Western practice
of respecting, honoring and caring for our ancestors and elders; and following and protecting the
ancient law and passing it on. This task is achieved by allowing being transformed inside to
rebirth our ancient true nature in our current era. The vital question is how we can facilitate this
individual and collective transformative transition between ages.
All three authors suggest that a feasible pathway to facilitate this transformation is to
remember the ancient/Indigenous knowledge; we did not lose the knowledge, we just lost access
to it. Regarding how to regain access, the teachings and practices of our ancestral, mystical pre-
Socratic Gnostic and Hermetic tradition of current Indigenous Elders provide trustworthy access
to the wisdom capable of facilitating the transformation of our unconscious (Kingsley, 2018).
We can restore this bridge to the past by going straight to Jung’s Red Book, which was finally
published in 2009, as it contains the ancient mystical Gnostic and Hermetic knowledge (that has
become institutionalized and lost in translation within a few years).
Reacquiring the ancient knowledge is about the process of becoming and being one’s true
self/psych/soul, which Jung called individuation (Kingsley, 2018). Individuation is a
transformative process during which people unlock their Gnostic inward experience of vision or
in-sight so they can directly experience their true original primordial nature, listen to the voice of
the divine/sacred/ancestors speaking within them, and care for the divine. Individuation entails
encountering and integrating all inner faculties and the sacred, spiritual, feminine reality
consciously inside oneself. Finding one’s truth requires facing and completely shedding one’s
personal self.
Individuated—or true—humans are connected to and consciously relate to their own
divine reality/awareness deep inside us without any inflation or identification (Kingsley, 2018).
They are freed from the physical reality, and internally balanced/harmonious and grounded. They
experience the interdependent, synchronous co-existence of the outside and inside (union). They
follow their own authentic paths as guided inwardly by their souls or daemons regardless of the
consequences.
Consciously living this archetypical life is the life that we are meant to live and which
leads us to experience harmony, health, and wellbeing. This way of being and living remains the
way of being in Indigenous cultures (Griffith, 2014; 2015; Yunkaporta, 2019). According to
Kingsley (2018), Jung asserted that we either engage in this transformative journey to mature
collectively and become adults, or we continue living meaningless lives and stay on the
unconscious path of struggling, suffering, and destroying ourselves and all of creation.
Recognizing individuation as a key transformational pathway in the wider context of
remembering and reviving ancient Gnostic knowledges to reconnect with our true nature to
address our existential crisis adds further weight to the work of transformative learning scholars
engaged with expanding the spiritual passageway led by Dirkx’s (2012) work on soul or inner
work including individuation.
Restoring nature as teacher and diverse forms of creative arts as essential aspects of
formal and informal education, indeed of everyday life, will be critical for extending awareness
(Buergelt et al., in press; Griffith, 2014). These two transformative pathways are consistent with
transformative learning scholars developing the transformative learning passageways of nature
(e.g., Lange, 2012;O’Sullivan et al., 2002) and creative arts (e.g., Kokkos, 2014; Lawrence,
2012) as holistic, symbolic, imaginative, creative, and emotional ways of experiencing and
knowing that transform, individually and collectively, rational knowing. Transformative learning
scholars and practitioners connecting with and utilizing transformative, healing, decolonizing,
emancipatory, participatory, critical social constructionist paradigms that emerged in the Western
culture as well as Indigenous paradigms would also support people in Western cultures
expanding their worldviews (Denzin et al., 2008; O’Sullivan et al., 2002).
Given that thinking and language create each other, being able to remember and access
our ancient wisdom will be greatly facilitated if we shift our language by using the original
languages of our Western culture, such as Greek and Latin (Kingsley, 2018). Transforming
universal, linear clock time will be supported by (re)connecting with nature time (Griffith, 2000).
Governance systems based on ecological principles that facilitate us self-organizing as open
systems and which thus create the conditions for individual and collective transformations to
occur will be central for expanding our worldview. Sociocracy seems to fit this bill (Buergelt et
al., in press).
Finally, given the commonalities of the ancient roots of our Western culture and those of
Indigenous peoples, our genuinely and respectfully engaging in equal, reciprocal learning with
Indigenous peoples and braiding our respective worldviews, knowledges, and practices would
facilitate our remembering and coming into ancient/Indigenous knowledges (Buergelt et al.,
2017; Yunkaporta, 2019). These cross-paradigm interactions also hold great potential for creating
transformations that can illuminate new passageways for transitioning into sustainable ways of
living.
CONCLUSION
In essence, the synergy of knowledges from Griffith (2014), Kingsley (2018), and
Yunkaporta (2019) argues that our existential crisis is spiritual in nature and is a consequence of
centuries-long Western cultural domestication and colonization which disconnected us from our
true nature and ancient laws and wisdom. This process domesticated and conditioned into a
patriarchal, totalitarian, rational, reductionistic, and objective worldview for several centuries
starting with Plato, and is sustained by patriarchy, the Christian church, and capitalism. As a
result, we have been living disconnected from our true divine, sacred nature, and from nature,
which has created disharmony, ill-health, and destruction. This suggests that the survival of all
life on Earth will depend on people in the Western culture transforming their current
fundamental cosmological, ontological, and epistemological beliefs towards matriarchal,
metaphysical, holistic, spiritual, ecological, equal, and subjective beliefs individually and
collectively by remembering, cultivating, and living according to our true sacred nature, our
ancestors and the ancestral laws. Our existential crisis creates opportunities for deeply and
critically reflecting and inquiring into the origins of this existential crisis and transforming the
source.
Accessing our true, primordial nature and our ancient Gnostic and Hermetic knowledges
can be accomplished by engaging several interconnected transformative pathways: going on a
quest or individuation journey and then listening to and following our
psyche/soul/daemon/flame; interacting with and learning from nature, the land belonging to all
(commons), and caring for country; playing; immersing ourselves in diverse forms of arts;
uncovering our original faëries; learning our ancient languages; restoring nature time; and
engaging with Indigenous peoples in equal, reciprocal ways. This set of transformative practices
is consistent with and strengthens the turn of transformative learning theorizing towards
extrarational, spiritual knowledges, and practices. Synergizing this set of extrarational, spiritual
transformative practices and connecting it so that it can be collectively utilized to facilitate
people in Western cultures expanding their narrow rational worldview to the holistic, spiritual
worldview; in so doing we can resolve our existential crisis and fulfil our role as designated
custodial species of this reality.
We hope that this journey has been transformative for you and that it inspires you and/or
strengthens you to courageously be a transformative agent (Yunkaporta, 2019) or “contrary”
(Kingsley, 2018) who, because they remember and can see what others don’t yet notice, turn
everything upside down, bring up what nobody wants to see, make people question everything
on a deeper level, and embody a sacred/divine force others are not aware of. We are the ones
who we have been waiting for, and it is high time for us to courageously step into being
transformative agents (Yungaporta, 2019) or contraries (Kingsley, 2018) who wake people up.
As Kingsley (2018, p. 444) says, “It’s the time for learning our primordial or original
instructions, as Native Americans have referred to them for centuries, all over again; the time to
turn around and face our ancestors … its only be shedding everything, including ourselves, that
we sow the seeds of the future.”
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