Power and Dominance, Relational Communion

Friends,

It seems to me that there is a great tension in the world of human beings. The resolution of this tension in a new direction may open us to bring forth the life of compassion and creativity for which we have been loved into existence. Throughout time humans have struggled to listen to the beat of the Heart whose essence is the relational life of love and communion that Christians call Trinity, and Buddhists call the Trikaya. This Essence, the Eternal Life is the source of our true life and identity. The other side of this tension is the instinctual patterns of power and domination that we associate with patriarchy but also with those measurements of "success" in societies -competition, aggressiveness, acquisitiveness, territoriality.

The complex and pervasive ways that patterns of aggression, dominance, and competition are manifested may be culturally determined and historically conditioned. These patterns breed fear, violence, and xenophobia. We see evidence all around us in the religiously inspired violence and hatred, in the nationalist inspired hatred and violence, in the gender inspired violence and hatred. Will it cease, are we doomed to repeat this unconscious instinctual inclination, and ultimately cause our own undoing with wars and weapons of mass death or the death of the ecosystem that sustains us?

I attended a recent conference focusing on Jungian depth psychology. The conference was entitled, "Calling the Women of the Earth, Your Mother needs you." A great title.... In this instance the issue is not gender, but those ways of understanding and living life that we attribute to women. Life is relationship, life is being in harmonious communion with the other beings who share life with us, whether they be human or otherwise. And most of all it is relational communion with the Breath of our breath, the Life that is our true life. This is the mystic way. In this retreat year I am learning to discover and learn with greater depth the life of Relational Communion. I pray I may heal from the wounds of the world and be freed from my participation in inflicting such wounds on the body of God we all share, and thereby sink more deeply into and live the Beloved's Life in my own.
The Peace of the Beloved to all,
Bill Ryan