ARIADNE'S BROKEN THREAD

by Beata Bishop

The interrelated world which we want to serve is not interrelated within itself. The two great principles on which the Universe rests, the masculine Yang and the feminine Yin, are badly out of balance, and their imbalance endangers our very survival. Yang is about power, will, action, authority, purpose, leadership; it works through intellect, LOGOS. It's objective, extravert, creative, and can be overpowering, rigid, tyrannical, competitive. Yin is about feeling, relating, intuition, instinct, non-rational perception, respect for life, EROS. It's introvert, subjective, passive, cooperative, powerful, enduring, and can be chaotic, over-emotional, manipulative, possessive.

After a few thousand years of matriarchy, patriarchy took over some 5000 years ago and is still the ruling system, with women and especially the feminine principle very far from being equal partners. Yet unless a better balance is born, the world cannot be truly interrelated, and our survival depends on whether the feminine principle can be brought fully into the picture.

The title of my talk sums up our present situation. To take the myth first: Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete, the island where the monstrous half-man half-bull Minotaur was imprisoned at the centre of the dreaded labyrinth. The young hero Theseus volunteered to kill the monster; Ariadne fell in love with him, and before he entered the labyrinth, she gave him a ball of thread which enabled him to find his way out again after completing his task.

Moving from the myth to the here and now, let's consider the symbolism of the myth. The hero, Theseus, is a supremely masculine figure - daring, challenging, eager to show his worth, ready to rush ahead, fight and kill the monster. Ariadne represents the caring, loving, life-preserving feminine principle, gentle and wise enough to see beyond the immediate goal. The thread is a symbol of woman's work; soft, strong and flexible, but if it's overstretched, it breaks. In the myth it leads Theseus to safety. But now let's imagine that the thread is broken so that, even if Theseus kills the bull-monster, he will not find his way out of the labyrinth and must perish in its depths.

I propose that the thread, the feminine principle which is deeply linked with Nature, is broken. It snapped around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when instead of working with Nature, man began to subdue, conquer and shape it to serve his goals. And he went on doing it ever faster and ever more brutally, so that development first became over-development and then destruction - which is where we are now. The message from the labyrinth is clear: the hero, symbolising modern mankind, is in trouble, lost, caught between two dangers. If he goes ahead, he'll be destroyed by the Minotaur, the greedy, monstrous, profit-mad economic system and its vile child, the consumer society with its dumbed down, soulless pop culture.

On the other hand he is threatened by the abused, offended Earth whose backlash comes in the form of climate change, against whose consequences he is powerless. With the thread broken, he has lost contact with Nature, and Ariadne can't help him any more. Yet we, too, are small, frail parts of Nature: if we go on abusing it, we are destroying our only habitat in the Universe. Nature and the Earth can get on splendidly without us; the reverse doesn't apply.

All this concerns us here and now with the utmost urgency. The transpersonal world view demands that the moment we move beyond the purely personal, we automatically assume some responsibility towards the collective. The personal is the political : pursuing our inner development is not enough, we need to be involved, with open eyes and pure passion, in what goes on around us, knowing that all life is one, everything is connected to everything else within a vast global and cosmic unity. As the English poet Francis Thompson put it, "Thou canst not stir a flower without the troubling of a star."

Let me spell out how the overweening masculine principle is working against Nature and hence against the feminine principle which represents it. Take Terminator, the most vile invention of GM technology, a variety of seed that produces one harvest only, so that farmers are forced to buy new, equally sterile seeds every year from the same corporation that has destroyed life the eternal cycle of seed, plant, fruit and seed for the next season. Interrupting the chain of life is a direct attack on the life-giving ability of the feminine. It is a crime.

Or take nanotechnology, which works on an unimaginably small scale, on the level of the atom, manipulating/altering the structure of the building blocks of matter. Every realm of human experience, including natural phenomena, could be affected. Consider the Sci Fi possibilities of implanting a device into a human brain to turn it into a calculator, remodelling viruses to act as weapons, or merging computer networks with biological ones in order to develop surveillance systems. What it boils down to is increased control by the few over the many - all of us outside the corporate world. Total control over agriculture, medicine, industry and therefore politics, the way we are governed, brainwashed and conditioned - by the conditioned media.

There's also "Germline" genetic engineering which enables scientists to modify, delete or add to the genes of a week-old embryo, to make the future child more handsome, taller, brighter or musically talented, whatever its parents have ordered. The aim is to "improve" human beings by editing the sequence of DNA, the programming code of life, the way you can edit a document on a word processor, leading to the creation of a super-race - which is what the Nazis wanted to achieve by controlled breeding. To do it in the laboratory is more polite, but it would kill off what makes us human, destroying the mystery of individuality and the freedom to be ourselves. As a critic of the project writes, "Genetics is not some scary bogeyman, but one aspect of it raises the possibility that we will engineer outselves out of existence."

Clearly, much of cutting edge technology is moving CONTRA NATURAM, against Nature. Another sector, the industrial-military complex is producing ever more efficient tools of war, which don't serve the purposes of life and Nature, either, only the overblown negative masculine principle which wants to control, conquer, subdue and rule. This is Yang at its worst, stopping our world from becoming truly interrelated. Instead of creating, it destroys.

But there is comfort in the wisdom of the TAO: "When Yang has reached its highest degree, it withdraws and makes room for Yin." Besides, attacked Nature has a way of hitting back, and she always has the last word. Is Yin rising, to take her rightful place? It seems to me that the feminine principle is emerging here and there, as yet in a scattered and unorganised way, but with power and intelligence. The environmental movements are growing in influence. Consumers are realising that acting together they have enormous power. Organic agriculture signals a return to Nature, protecting the environment and human health. Alternative and complementary medicine, which attempt to heal by working with Nature, not against it, are making significant inroads in the area of health. Medical herbalism uses plants, not synthetic chemicals, to cure our ills: plants are the all-important bridge between the soil and ourselves, as parts of Nature.

And again, Nature's free gifts, sustainable energy from sunshine, wind and waves can free us from our dependence on fossil fuels. Yin is beginning to show us a truly other way to run our world. It can't be accidental that the first people to give her a voice were a few brave, far-sighted women: Rachel Carson who alerted us to the deadly dangers of DDT, Barbara Ward who was one of the first environmentalist, Lady Eve Balfour who launched the organic movement in the UK, Ruth Harrison who unmasked the horrors of intensive animal breeding, Vandana Shiva who is a leading opponent of GM agriculture, Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a scientist denouncing genetic engineering on impeccable sientific grounds. All of them work to protect life in all its manifestations. But they and their supporters are up against the big battalions which have the money, power and determination to run things their way. The battle has only just begun. And it concerns us all. Until and unless the split within the world's spirit is healed, until the feminine principle with its insistence on preserving life is given its rightful place, the world will not, cannot be truly interrelated.

What gives me hope it that it is precisely the Transpersonal work that can assist the healing, by cultivating the spiritual dimension and striving towards wholeness, by offering us a wider perspective, and spreading light into all areas of life where a rebirth is needed.

Perhaps Ariadne will find another ball of thread to lead the foolish, bumbling hero out of the labyrinth. Let us do our best to help her.