The conscious mind has become dissociated from the deeper matrix out of which it arose.

One of the foremost reasons for this was the split that developed between spirit and nature in the Western philosophical and religious traditions.

This split arose from the belief that a Creator God inhabited a realm that was totally transcendent to the material world of nature and matter and from the repression and loss of the far older tradition of a Mother Goddess who brought forth all cosmic and earthly life from her womb, therefore unifying creator and creation. In the West, from the sixteenth century onwards, science developed on the foundation of this split. Believing that matter is the only reality, it has taken the “rational mind” as its guide and the brain as the sole origin of consciousness, dismissing any alternative view as superstition. It has ultimately discarded both God and the soul. It apparently ignores the further potential evolutionary development of human consciousness and the states of mind that have long been explored in the metaphysical traditions of both East and West.

At the present time however, something of immense significance is emerging: a new cosmology is being born; a new vision of our profound relationship with a conscious, intelligent universe and a new consensus among a growing number of physicists, astro-physicists and cosmologists that cosmic consciousness and not matter is the primary ground of reality and our own consciousness. Instead of seeing the universe as a gigantic machine with our bodies as miniature machines, they are seeing it as a unified organism with ourselves as part of that multi-levelled organism. This emerging paradigm, together with the growing environmental movement, gives us hope that we may rescue nature from our predatory and exploitive habits in time to counteract the danger of destroying not only millions more species, but our own as well. It invites us to recognise ourselves as having a role on this planet in the service of nature and ultimately the cosmos, to know ourselves in our innermost nature as cosmic beings, incarnated here for a purpose, aware of our fundamental unity. This awakening to a new phase of our evolutionary journey might be described as living the dream of the cosmos.

Suggested Reading: the book The Dream of the Cosmos with online chapters at www.annebaring.com

Anne Baring. MA Oxon (b. 1931) is a Jungian analyst and the author and co-author of seven books including, with Jules Cashford (1992), The Myth of the Goddess; Evolution of an Image; with Andrew Harvey, The Mystic Vision (1995) and The Divine Feminine (1996); and with Dr. Scilla Elworthy, Soul Power: an Agenda for a Conscious Humanity (2009). Her most recent book, published in May 2013, is The Dream of the Cosmos: a Quest for the Soul.

Her work is devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the invisible dimension of the Cosmos that is the source or ground of all that we call ‘life’. Her website is devoted to the affirmation of a new vision of reality and the issues facing us at this crucial time of choice. See http://www.annebaring.com/