Uncoiled
On the spiritualized circles of our lives
Spirals began appearing in the Boyne Valley. First, in a dream when I was rounding cobblestoned streets searching for a place I vaguely remembered. Then, indelibly, among the neolithic moons carved into the mother stones at Newgrange in County Meath, where an invisible hand was believed to gesture to the dead on the briefest day of the year.
The fiddle ferns seemed eager to converse at Ballymaloe, their shoulders smiling atop their green, springtime spines; and a cream-colored nautilus curled perfectly in my palm on a windswept beach in Ardmore. An acupuncturist friend explained how Chi travels through the body in spiral patterns. Spirals began opening in the intervals between musical harmonies and along the wooden banister in my father’s home. And then, numinously, in meditation — massive, breathing spirals emanated like forest vines behind my eyes.
“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free,” said the Russian American author and poet Vladimir Nabokov.
Vedic people sensed this spiritualized circle moving through all creation — and reflected in the physical shape of the galaxies — as the interweaving power of creation itself. The universe does not manifest randomly but is expressed through an intricate matrix they gave the nomenclature Ṛta, a Sanskrit word that means “that which is joined together, order, truth, or architecture.”
Ṛta is closely allied to the injunctions and ordinances thought to uphold it, collectively referred to as dharma, and the action of the individual in relation to those ordinances, referred to as karma (two terms that eventually eclipsed Ṛta in framing a sense of moral and religious order). My friend Josh Schrei and I recently spoke about Ṛta with respect to its etymological connection to the words harmony, rite, art, order, rhythm, and ritual.
But some facts do not square tidily with our notions of sacred geometry. Words and actions can unfurl in conscious or unconscious directions. We get caught in tired eddies of protection, maelstroms of othering, devastating tornadoes of forgetting.
The beauty, the horror. We find ourselves asking — what vastness can contain all this?
Scholar William Mahony explains Ṛta, this concept that encapsulates the centripetal and centrifugal movement of time and evolution, of energy and light, as follows: “Vedic thought holds that a true vision of a divine universe must necessarily include the brokenness of the world and that, in fact, it is precisely the imagination that is able to see the way the whole fits together despite the often disjointed nature of the parts.”
So an uncoiling, integrative comprehension of reality must stretch to encompass the world's brokenness, Mahony counsels.
Joanna Macy, an elder in environmental activism and deep ecology, is the visionary teacher of the Work that Reconnects, a roadmap for staying present to painful truths — the brokenness — while opening to the joy that comes with a renewed commitment to acting on behalf of a more just and humane world.
The Spiral of the Work that Reconnects progresses through four stages as follows:
(1) Gratitude. First, we must touch the ground. Gratitude resources our nervous systems. It links us to a flow of empathy and the inspiration to engage in the present moment and the world around us.
(2) Grief. Here, we stop trying to bypass suffering with protection and privilege. “This world, in which we are born and take our being, is alive. It is … our larger body” (Coming Back to Life, Macy & Brown). We feel our interconnectedness. With support, we allow for the movement of sorrow, the broken-heartedness through which we can access vulnerability and courage toward change.
(3) Seeing with New Eyes. “When we reconnect with life, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity” (Coming Back to Life, Macy & Brown). Opening to knowledge that has been suppressed and making room for our natural emotional responses can evoke greater equilibrium and clarity of thought. No longer unconsciously driven by aversion or grasping, sobriety can emerge — and with it, a more accurate understanding.
(4) Going Forth. Awareness and reconnection naturally inspire a desire to be the change. Our personal mandate to contribute can awaken as we re-sensitize ourselves to the web of life. This is a creative process. It’s about paying attention to how we can participate in the emergence of healing.
Ken Wilber famously spent three years inventorying every known system worldwide and arranging them into an integral theory. Wilber thus popularized Spiral Dynamics, based on the emergent cyclical theory of adult human development previously introduced by Professor Clare Graves. As Graves explained:
“Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man's existential problems change. These systems alternate between focus upon the external world, and attempts to change it, and focus upon the inner world, and attempts to come to peace with it, with the means to each end changing in each alternatively prognostic system. Thus, man tends, normally, to change his psychology as the conditions of his existence change. Each successive state, or level of existence, is a state through which people pass on the way to other states of equilibrium. When a person is centralized in one state of existence, he has a total psychology which is particular to that state.”
We don’t always have the vantage point to know where we stand in the great turning. But uncertainty, even ominous apprehension of what could be around the next bend, can nevertheless be a starting point. There are days when the light seems to bend back and shine on everything. There are mornings after storms when perspective can return.
I want to believe in nature's underlying architecture of good and our capacity for deep remembrance. I want to believe that we are held in a gorgeous persistence. When I touch your crown, soft hair whorls upward into my palm. Spirals name your fingertips. Surely, these, too, are glimpses of an ancient vision.