Embodied Prayer, by Jeremy Berg
Incarnational Spirituality (IS) accepts all methods of assembling truth as valuable contributions to a larger understanding. This is not because IS would like to be nice to all the other systems and non-confrontational. It is because this system of thought requires it. IS is interested in knitting together wholes not deconstructing self or world. The question for incarnational theory is not so much what is true as when is something true and from what vantage point. Take, for instance, the understanding of the life and function of another species on the planet, say a bat.
One way of learning about a bat is to observe it in the wild. Another is to catch one and observe it in the laboratory. Or we could wait until it dies and dissect it learning all about its structure, biomechanics and the like. In short we could approach it as physical scientists using all the tools of physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, and the like. Note that however we approach the bat from a scientific angle we ourselves have introduced a new, subjective element – ourselves!
We could also take a shamanistic approach and try to communicate with the bat or a bat spirit. This assumes it is a conscious, sentient being with rights and power. This could be done through ceremony or could happen spontaneously through visions or dreams. How might this information be different or complementary to what we had learned earlier? What are the indigenous legends of the bat? What taboos have they inspired?
We might also consult Holy Scriptures to see what they say about animals, mammals, bats and man’s relationship to the natural world. This might give us insight into the ethics of our scientific methods. We could pray to be given insight into the life of the bat.
We could take a mystical view and appreciate the bat as one of God’s creatures and an expression of creative love. What is it saying about the nature of life on planet earth and God? What would deep contemplation of a bat as divine expression reveal?
We could see the bat as an ephemeral arising of itself in relationship to my perception of it. What does it say to me about us, about permanence, about life? Does compassion arise from our sharing of a moment of temporary existence? What would we learn from a lifetime of meditation on a creature like the bat?
Perhaps I take it upon myself to draw or paint or sculpt a bat. What will I learn from the process that I could not gain from any other method? Many a scientist has done just that. What music is inspired? To love the form of a bat is knowledge that cannot be gained in any other way.
And what psychological processes are stirred from seeing a bat? What fears, what joys, what thoughts? What do I learn about myself from seeing a bat on the wing at dusk hunting insects?
Does the bat teach me anything about manifesting a life, catching my dreams, hunting in the dark, or about adaptability in the pursuit of goals?
Is there a way to see the bat with deeper vision? What does a Clairvoyant see or hear around a bat? Did you know that a single bat mother can find her child upon returning from a hunt in a cave crammed with millions of bats? This was once though impossible but has been proven to be true. How do they do that in the dark amidst the cacophony on radar? What sight are they actually using?
What are the magical correspondences that a bat might conjure? Is it the moon or a planet? Is it one of the vital elements; earth, air water or fire? What is its role in the transformation of consciousness and of matter?
I hope the above stimulates some new feelings for the bat because I want to describe an experience I once had with a bat that changed my view substantially. I do this to illustrate one more way of knowing that to me has powerful implications for creating a more human and sustainable world.
When I was a boy, about 10 years old, I would go out at dusk sometimes in the field in back of our house in Grand Rapids, Michigan and throw a boomerang. When I did so frequently the bats in the area would dive at it, perhaps attracted by the whooshing sound it made as it went through its arced return flight pattern. Anyway, much later, not so many years ago, I found myself in a visionary state first in the fields back of my old house and then following a bat on the wing. Rather quickly I found myself sharing the chase of insects in the air from within the sensorium and consciousness of a bat! This was quite wonderful as the air was like a gel in which I could sense the movement of the insect as if they were connected to me by a string. I remember the moment of catching one of the insects (but not tasting it – probably a good thing as I might have developed a taste for mosquitoes). We landed and I stepped out of the body of the bat and looked back. There stood the “real” bat; as tall as me and constructed of living silver light, like moonlight or starlight. We were in a primeval forest, his mate was nearby and he was giving homage to the giant breathing trees. His life was like a living prayer, a reverent supplication and benediction to the deep spirit of the land, the forest, nature, the earth, and life itself.
Needless to say, this changed my feelings and understanding of bats. I love them to this day even to the point of accidentally bringing one into a cottage at night riding in my hair a couple of years ago in the Canadian northeast woods.
I relate all this to illustrate the possibility of another kind of knowing; that of shared being.
This experience of shared life and perception is not unique to me. I have several friends, including my wife Freya Secrest, who relate similar experiences. And incidentally, this was one of the many ways in which R. Ogilvy Crombie and Dorothy Maclean communicated with the intelligences of nature around the beginnings of the Findhorn community in Scotland.
Arthur Zajonc PhD an optical physicist in the physics department of Amherst College recommends that we change, “from an Epistemology of Violence to an Epistemology of Love” and lists several key elements as necessary to achieve that end.
• Respect
• Gentleness
• Intimacy
• Vulnerability
• Participation
• Transformation
• Building – education as formation
• Insight
He is in the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who said, in his book Maximen und Reflextionen,
There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory. But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age.
Here is Rudolph Steiner, a Goethe scholar, making a similar point:
Goethe’s thinking was mobile. It followed the whole growth process of the plant and followed how one plant form is a modification of the other. Goethe’s thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through.
–Lecture from August 30, Rudolph Steiner, 1921, trans. Craig Holdrege
And one final reference to this identification way of knowing from someone we all have heard about from the Arthurian legends; the 6th century poet Taliesin:
I have been a blue salmon,
I have been a dog, I have been a deer.
I have been a goat on the mountain,
I have been the trunk of a beech tree.
I have been an axe in the hand,
I have been a pin in the tongs...”
–A Constant Search for Wisdom. John Matthews, Lorian Press LLC, 2007
Let me end with the American educator and author, Parker Palmer who suggests that,
We are driven to unethical acts by an epistemology that has fundamentally deformed our relation to each other and our relation to the world.” And that science’s “mythology of objectivism is more about control over the world, or over each other, more a mythology of power than a real epistemology that reflects how real knowing proceeds.
The point is that from an incarnational perspective, all of the methods of appropriating truth can be employed BUT it is important to know when to use what tool! It is important to recognize the consciousness, potential for partnerships, sentiency and moral rights of those fellow beings that are the subject of our study. How different the world would be if we simply followed this suggestion.