One of the great losses of our current non-culture is the severe disconnect from the other world in our psyches. The loss of consciousness, which expands out to embrace the totality of life’s design, means we have lost the ways of courtship with the other world. 

The current cultural paradigm does not teach us to make presence with the other world, the unseeable world of energy and magic and mystery. In fact, we are very largely divorced from the kind of consciousness that allows us to know the other world, having us believe that we are the centre of our own universes, rather than a grain of sand within the great cosmic dance.

The effect is the aggrandization of our own egoic orientation. Where the world once occupied the centre of our psyches, this has now been replaced by our own self image. Bigger car, bigger home, selfies, all to affirm that we exist. To claim one’s existence through outside measures is to lose access to the humility required to bow at the feet of the mysterious and unnamable, unfathomable other to whom we truly belong. 

If we were part of a healthy, nature-based, intact culture, indigenous to the ways of our land, in tune with the cycles of life then our psyches would be primed to the mystical and mythical conversation with the world of the Gods. 

I believe there is a reemergence slowly happening on the outskirts of culture, creeping into the mainstream where the recognition of being in nature has a good effect on us. Slow is the uptake of our ignorant mainstream, that preaches by ways of rational hypothesis, millennia into our human evolution : we are recognising that being in nature is ‘good for us’.

How about we remember that we were in fact born from her, from nature – we cannot be divorced from her? Our very existence depends on our relationship with the natural world and the way we converse with her. Without the soil, we do not eat. Without the air, we do not breathe. Without the wood, we freeze. 

To not only recognise this consciousness but then to open one step further and incorporate that all of life is living and has sentience and intelligence. That life is constantly beckoning us back to connection, requesting a shift in paradigm : a walking towards ancient technology in our modern times.  

When we live with the forgetting of the other world, we lose the inherent and organic access to ecstatic pleasure. To be in touch with the other world brings an aliveness, a fullness, a magic, a mystery, a poetry, an unpredictability, an allure, a danger, a sense of being wielded by something much larger than our personal egoic prison. 

And it’s from there that we can once again touch the fruits of what it means to be truly alive. Thriving, rather than merely surviving. 

There we can taste the true sacredness of living.