...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 5-4: The New Robins

Tengri smiled grimly. He was very familiar with the Ravens. "I sometimes think of them as the New Robins, heads tucked under wings, intent on hiding from their own truth." He was pensive for a moment, then said, "Bear did not talk directly about spirit. He talked about relationships, and let the Q make the spiritual connections. Do you know about the old gods?"

This seemed like such a non-sequiter that Sedna gave him a quizzical look.

Tengri said, "The New Ravens are invoking the old gods, probably not really knowing that's what they do. Tales of the Raven are shaman stories. The New Ravens draw upon the Haida versions, but the stories are common across the world. They are meant to convey the workings of the spirit realm, and the link between that and the physical."

Sedna looked thoughtful. Tengri continued.

"I believe you seek to tell such a story. And of course you spoke truly when you said that many people are materialists, more so today than in the past. Even in the past the storytellers spoke in material terms, familiar terms, while trying to convey a sense of the spirit. They spoke of gods and demons, not in a literal sense, but as metaphors to convey relationships that go beyond the commonplace, beyond the physical, into the seemingly magical realm we call the Q.

"I know you are already using QAR to evoke the spiritual connection to your narrative, as Bear did. The challenge in that may be to keep it subtle enough. Bear was fortunate to have Xayna's involvement in his project. The world interpreted their portrayal of the farm as a backdrop for their love story. That helped keep the message of farm management from being too overt. People learned to love the farm through their natural sympathy with Bear and Xayna. In a way, Bear and Xayna played the role of the old gods in the story of the farm."

Sedna felt the Q resonate with the connection between what Tengri said about Bear and Xayna and the role her mother Dema and father Cern had played in their lifetimes.

Tengri continued. "But the New Ravens misinterpret the old stories. They take the materialist metaphors to be literal license to emulate the old gods as they were portrayed, not as they were. They seek to emulate spirit with technology. They think to explain spirit with technology. They deny their own connection to what they truly are.

"The Q can tell the waiting world the reality of spiritual existence and the true nature of the old gods. All you have to do is provide the connection. You have made a good start. Can you summarize for me how you might go on?"

Sedna thought for a moment about how her own vision aligned with Tengri's. Then she said, "I think I need to express the situation as I see it. Then I can propose what we should do about it.

"The cosmos is real and is the sum of all imaginings within itself. Atoms are real and imagine themselves as the sum of all atom dreams. Subatomic particles are real and are the sum of all particle dreams. Every animal species is real and is the sum of all self-images of members of that species. The cosmos is a sum of sums. One has to think multi-dimensionally to encompass this reality.

"The old gods were real as manifestations of the imaginations of their people. They were spirits like the Green Man who could manifest themselves to individuals who were prepared to see them."

Sedna paused, gathering her thoughts.

"There is a vast population of people in the world who remain animal in nature to the extent that they accept the evidence of their senses uncritically. They equate the world within to the world without unquestioningly. They willingly and without thought assume the world is as it must be. They understand without thought that their own waking dream must agree with the world dream, the cosmic dream, if they are to survive in their animal form.

"The New Ravens celebrate their material aspect, but in doing so they deny their spiritual side. Their emphasis on the material is no longer natural.

"The very failure of animal nature to distinguish the waking dream of the animal spirit from the physical reality it strives to be in agreement with makes it vulnerable to the influence of the spirit dream of others. The New Ravens, unknown even to themselves, invade each other's spirit dreams to reinforce their insistence that the spirit does not exist.

"The power of the shaman lies in awareness of the divide between the world dream and the spirit dream, between ultimate physical reality and the reality assumed in the dreams of individuals."

Sedna paused again. Tengri said nothing.

"The cosmic dream is the dream of a cosmic Now. It collapses on itself due to the paradox of time, the nature of the photon dream of distance and separation.

"A spirit can surrender itself to the cosmic dream, be the dream, be the All, the Q, the essence from which the physical derives. It can do this, and learn the origin of its individuality. It can do this and lose the sense of its individuality. Or it can retain its individuality, and lose its sense of the All. It can also hover between, focusing its sense of individuality now here, now there, not focusing on one form, one physical entity.

"But the physical entity is seductive, providing feedback that reinforces the sense of individuality, the sense of separation from otherness. This sense of self can be extreme, creating a sense of spiritual isolation. Or it can retain a social element, a sense of belonging to a group. The group sense can be layered, evoking an intuition of the existence of the All without the sense of being the All.

"In this way being is joined by belonging. Then by extension the belongingness becomes differentiated from otherness, creating a sense of isolation between groups. Again the sense of isolation can be extreme, or it can be mitigated by the sense of social layers.

"This is how the allness of the physical mimics the allness of the spiritual, and by the same reinforcing feedback creates a sense of isolation from the spiritual, and even a denial of the very existence of the spiritual from which the physical ultimately derives."