The Ancient Future Ancestor's Story
A Myth of Remembrance
Dedicated to Samantha Sweetwater, Charles Eisenstein, Jordan Siegel, Sophia Life, Sheri Herndon, Teilhard de Chardin, The Mother, Sri Aurobindo, Carl Jung, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Joanna Macy, Katherine and Makasha Roske.
In the beginning, there was a blackness. Only the sea.
In the beginning there was no sun, no moon, no people.
In the beginning there were no animals, no plants.
Only the sea.
The sea was the Mother. The Mother was not people, she was not anything.
Nothing at all.
She was when she was, darkly. She was memory and potential. She was Aluna.
— Kogi Creation Story
May we remember.
Once upon a time there was no time. There was no-thing. That no-thing was everything.
And her name was Sophia.
One day, even though there were no days, she grew tired of being no-thing and everything. She experienced a longing deeper than any longing we can comprehend. She ached to know herself, to see herself, to feel herself, to experience herself, to grow, to change.
In a moment of curiosity and desire, she peered into the sea of chaos and saw her reflection. In that moment, our universe was born. All matter, springing forth from the Mother, expanded out from formlessness into form, and it began to dance.
Over eons it danced, experiencing the joy of being parts and the Eros of returning into union. Across the eons, as the dance unfolded, the Grand Organizing Design of Sophia’s wisdom expressed itself on the loom of reality itself
Sophia meticulously wove patterns of being that would allow the totality to experience itself ever more beautifully and intricately.
Eventually, those patterns wove the first star.
What made the star so special is that it brought together a vast amount of cosmic creative potential that fused the love of many particles together and emitted light, heat, and energy.
It began to gather terrestrial orbs around its radiance and gravity, drawing in fecund mineral bodies that began to dance around the light. The star’s love was its gravity that drew these feminine mineral beings into its orbit, offering light and heat that was given forth unconditionally in every direction. Its rays penetrated out through the darkness of the void, sending out a message of “I love you. I pray for your aliveness. I give to you unconditionally.”
And these fecund mineral bodies began to receive. They received heat and the light. They received the Daughter of the Son. The Son’s Daughter was the union of the element of hydrogen, the star’s body, and the molecule of oxygen, the breath of life. This cosmic union created a new being that was also ancient and timeless, the Goddess of Water. Her formless form gave her a direct connection to the cosmic mother, Sophia. Her wisdom and her intelligence was flow. She offered forth the same unconditional gift that was given by our Creator.
Her gift is nourishment. Her gift is change. She governs the cosmic law of diffusion, sending out nourishment from the places of concentration to places of emptiness until she concentrates again, and then returns, an endless cycle of birth and creation. As she took home on one of the mineral beings around the star, the trinity of water and earth and star became known by the name Gaia. She was a womb of creation capable of bearing life, a sacred process of the cosmos whereby the intelligent Natural Laws of the Creator can weave new forms that are able to interact with creation, creating pools of consciousness that can look back at creation and create further complexity and beauty.
In the tidal pools that formed in the water upon Gaia’s surface, the sun passed overhead and the moon, the sister of Gaia, orbited around her sister in a loving embrace. The relationship between the sun and the moon, and their effect upon Gaia, initiated a process. The coming and going, rising and lowering, heating and cooling, cycles turning upon cycles, tumbled the molecules within the water into formations that begin to interact with each other in new ways.
One dark night, the first life was created, inside of that crucible, within the womb of Gaia. Molecules began to dance with aliveness. They were born of the cosmic yearning to create, infused with the same cosmic desire to reproduce and create again. Then, the process began to accelerate. These early forms of life began to proliferate around the planet until they had saturated the waters of every sea. They had colonized the water body of the earth, and the resources that they had metabolized as their source of nutrients had become scarce. In this moment, the first existential crisis to face the newborn Gaia, these early life forms understood the Law of Nature: Whatever is in deepest harmony, whatever can discover the most complete right relationship with the Grand Organizing Design, will persist across time.
And so they did what all life forms must do when they face a crisis like this. They learned to collaborate. Previously single cells, they joined themselves in a new membrane. Before, a membrane had surrounded only the single cell, but this new membrane could contain multiple cells within its soft edges. Those cells who were able to surrender into this more complex and complete new body, subsumed into something more whole, more harmonized, more complex, were able to survive. These are our ancestors whose courageous jump in complexity enabled their survival and the continuity of the prayer of the Life Project.
Eventually these beings grew. Their complexity developed and expressed as many different types of life forms within the oceans. Next, they moved out of the oceans upon the land. They became the four legged and the winged ones and the insect ones. And out of those sets of relationships, the two leggeds emerged. These two legged beings were not the apex of a pyramid but rather existed at the center of the circle of Life. While other forms of life had adapted to particular niches, particular areas of focus where they could serve the web of life in unique ways that they refined over time, the two legged beings filled the niche of adapting to fit into and steward all niches. They had two eyes to see slices of three dimensional space. They had two opposable thumbs, perfect to grasp the world as an object. They could walk upright, lifting them to the space between Earth and Sky. They possessed two hemispheres of their brain, a prefrontal cortex and a corpus callosum sitting between the left and right brains, enabling them to experience the world as an unbroken totality while also being able to name, to give symbolic meaning, and to create abstraction. They were Sophia’s children, uniquely able to sense and enact her love into form.
And with the harmony of these forces, they began to proliferate across the earth, filling every niche and ecosystem on the planet. They became the gardener's of Gaia. They wielded water and charred Earth to create rainforests. They wielded fire to prevent overgrowth and cause new life to emerge. They were the stewards of Gaia’s tapestry, co-weavers of the harmonic web that the cosmic mother had woven with her prayers. They were the gardeners. They were the Original Peoples.
But a very challenging process happens on a planet like Gaia. The very gift that the two leggeds had been given also became their greatest challenge. Their ability to name, their ability to create categories, their ability to dissect the world into smaller and smaller pieces, their ability to create and live within worlds of disconnected concepts and ideas, and their ability to control reality through abstraction continuously folded back in on itself. They began to grow apart from their own right brain, their feminine way of seeing the totality of the Grand Organizing Design’s unbroken wholeness.
A small group of humans began to fall into a spiraling process of atrophy as their ability to see the world as broken apart pieces strengthened and their ability to see the world as whole was diminished. A harmonic balance between these two ways of knowing the world became broken. The masculine began to dominate the feminine. Light skinned humans began to dominate dark skinned humans. Humans began to dominate the other species.
This way of seeing the world began to move out like a cancer across the planet. Anyone who did not see the world in this way would be dominated and controlled, raped and pillaged, oppressed and extracted from by those who could. In only a few hundred years, this way of seeing the world had consumed the totality of the planet. Even those people that had been holding the Original Instructions of how to be a good relative and Guardian of Life had almost entirely lost their ways. They were forced into desolate places, forced to become dependent upon the same systems of extraction and domination, forced to see the world as broken and dead in order to participate in it and survive.
This process of forgetting arrived at an extreme and exponential acceleration as Gaia was so badly brutalized by this way of seeing the world, so wounded by the actions that this way of seeing induces in humans that she was close to dying completely. She began to wail in agony, crying out, “My children, I am dying.” Her fires, once restoring of Life, became increasingly rageful and devastating. Her rains, once nourishing, became floods and violent storms. The soil became arid and dry and the humans’ crops began to fail.
Most of the humans were deaf to these cries. The story of separation had overtaken them so completely that they were numb to the pain of the Earth.
And yet, some of the two leggeds began to hear Gaia’s cries.
Even though the two leggeds had been born into a way of living in which nearly all reference to their relationship with Gaia and Sophia’s Grand Organizing Design had been obliterated, the cries of their Mother became so loud that many of them began to slowly awaken from their slumber. Asleep, they had been seeing the world only as broken apart pieces, seeing themselves as separate pieces, seeing the world as an object.
At first the dawning of this ancient knowing felt like madness to these people. Everything in the world around them was telling the story “you are separate, you are only a piece, there is no ultimate purpose or meaning here. If there is, it is an illusion that you constructed the neurochemistry of this piece of meat inside of your skull.” And this story of separation was so all-encompassing that as those two leggeds began to gradually shake off the slumber, they felt like they must be crazy.
In a world completely saturated with artifacts of the story of separation, the only thing that they could turn to was the teachings of the Original Peoples who had secretly hidden the old ways in songs and medicine bundles and the memory of the Original Teachings inside their own DNA, their own blood. Blood is a particularly sacred form of water. The blood is encoded water that is passed down between generations and contains the memory of all of the beings that came before you. It contains the memory of every two legged ancestor, extending all the way back to the first pulse of Life itself, and the memory of Water before that.
As those two leggeds began to shake off their slumber, some of them went to study with the Original Peoples who had hidden the old ways in dense forests or towering mountain tops. Some went deep inside the blood memory of their own relations from a time before their Peoples had fallen asleep. With great courage, these ancestors began to shift and transform. These shifts began within, starting with shifts in their way of seeing the world. They had to deeply reprogram the way in which they looked out at the world and how they saw themselves. They had to reforge the bonds of the Sacred Hoop that had been broken by the fragmented ways of seeing of the left brain.
But, this is not an unnatural process. This is what happens on a planet like Gaia when a Gardener species reaches saturation and self-destruction and is forced to take on a new Order of complexity, beauty, and wisdom, just like their single cell ancestors before them. As Gaia’s children, her stewards must undergo this process of forgetting, dissolving their previous sense of boundaries, so they can remember, realize, and realign themselves at the planetary scale. Their excesses in left brain capacities create the conditions for a new crucible of existential crisis, humbled by their own hubris so they might return to the knowing that they are part of something so complex, so beautiful, so beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
In seeing their own reflection in the sea of chaos that they had created, they realized their own destructive capabilities are commensurate with their creative capacities as the planetary stewards of Gaia. They learned by breaking the world apart into pieces that it is not sufficient to rely upon the left brain alone. They learned that seeing the world exclusively through that lens can only lead to destruction. They learned the right relationship and purpose for language, category, and observation. They learned how to engage in the reciprocal dance of Natural Law and how to restore balance between left and right brains and masculine and feminine energies.
These Original Ancestors began to listen for how to dance, how to move in the world in a way that honored that right brain and left brain simultaneously. They enacted the Original Teachings of right relationship between part and whole. They learned to see the undifferentiated totality, the tapestry woven together on the loom, and differentiated reality, the threads and how they are woven together. They revitalized the old ways and rituals, remembering themselves as indigenous to the entire planet. They gathered around the sacred tree of Life, inviting all nations and all peoples to return and remember.
And this was a moment of great reunion, a reunion between the men and the women, a reunion between the Original Peoples and the Forgetting People who had brutalized their brothers and sisters in their acts of forgetting. It was a reunion between humanity and Gaia.
The beauty that was created as humanity rose through the perilous passage of total self-annihilation was so ecstatic that we can still feel the reverberations of the choices that those ancestors made. We can still feel their prayers for us, wanting us to have life, wanting us to know beauty, wanting us to be able to participate in the continuity of that stream of life, of the sacred gift of being alive.
They renewed reality, restoring it from a curse of suffering, a fall into separation, into the infinite blessing of being able to experience ourselves as souls in bodies, in relationship with all that is. Their remembering of the Great Hoop, merging the wisdom they had gained on the journey of separation and individuation with the Original Teachings, created a toroidal Tree of Light upon the Earth whose fruit was the perpetual expansion and refinement of aliveness, an endless feedback loop of beauty and More Life.
A new membrane was cast around the whole of the planet and Gaia rejoiced as her children realized themselves as whole among one another and with all Life. For the first time in her Life, Gaia had become a planetary superorganism. A new order of complexity and consciousness dawned as the humans and the planet awoke to themselves as a whole being. One Nation of Life, containing all the colors of the rainbow, both sovereign and diverse, united and whole, wove all the beings of Earth as One family, a new social body able to choose and act as one. A new Church arose that decomposed and reformed around the bones of the institutions of separation.
Tools of self-destruction were laid down as the planet began to dance with aliveness and creativity, overflowing with abundance and nourishment for all to share. Borders and identities dissolved back into the natural contours and edges of place-based cultures and ecologies. The War in Heaven and the War on Earth was over, within and without, from the wars within the self against the self to the wars between every self and every other. Co-creation of ecstatically alive and beautiful ways of Life began to flourish as a timeless ancient future era began. This era had no beginning or end because it had restored the timelessness of cycles within cycles of the Great Hoop of Creation.
We tell this story to remember them and send prayers to them. We know that time is not a straight line. We know that their prayers for us made our reality so. Similarly, we know our prayers for them give them strength and courage to continue to be those types of ancestors that show up, that don't allow themselves to be anesthetized by a culture that is dying, that remember, that don't stay asleep.
We thank them for the courage that it took to awaken themselves in such conditions. We recognize that these acts of leadership take a particular kind of courage. We acknowledge the blessing of having ancestors like that, ones who stripped themselves of dying cultures and pulled themselves out of dying systems to create a world in which all Life could thrive.
So we honor them. And we tell this story so we never forget why it is that we live the way that we live. We tell this story to continuously renew our choice to participate in the harmony and the beauty and the dance of right relationship. Everything that we experience here today is the result of the choices these Original Ancestors made and is an expression of the love in their hearts to restore the Living Prayer of the Great Hoop of Creation.
We thank you.
We remember.
