The Marketing Plan of Disconnection
Along with the tsunami of information and translations coming to us over the past 10-20 years, we’ve also learned more and more of our history. We can now see with a wider lens beyond our own culture of origin and realize no one tradition held the whole story. A holistic view offers clear evidence that this view often seen in indigenous cultures which saw humans as divine beings inseparably interconnected in a living divine ecosystem was intentionally demonized by power structures who usurped spiritual institutions and externalized the divine as a completely separate and foreign entity to enforce a feudal system of control.
Love for our earth, sun, sky, and fellow non-human beings—all elements of the divine feminine, the heavenly mother, and any symbology or buildings surrounding her—were systematically demonized and eradicated across Europe for 2000 years.
This handy scheme easily allowed for political and economic subjugation using religion as the weapon of choice while establishing a new class of spiritual brokers, or middle-men who would get you in good graces with the heavenly king (even though Jesus already had spilled the beans on where the kingdom actually is).
We’ve been through 12,000 years of fragmented mental conditioning based on feudal power structures and oppressive masculine systems and told it was God who wanted it this way. These systems hijacked spiritual traditions that were centered in balance and harmony to create a bloody, misogynistic, and dualistic fight between good and evil, black and white, light and darkness. This was leveraged effectively to control and exploit populations for wealth and power for generation upon generation as empires expanded on the backs of the people.
Meanwhile, we slowly internalized the idea that God wanted nothing to do with us.
As a result, even if we were born into positive religious traditions filled with good people, we were still taught by leaders who themselves were under this very old spell—the idea that the benevolent force which sustains us all was somewhere outside of us, out there, down the road, or something to meet in another life (unless you don’t do right by him).
So of course, many of us have come to feel betrayed, rejected and abandoned by what we were taught was the divine.
When in fact, it never left. It was always right here, sustaining us moment by moment as always. We were just hypnotized into looking elsewhere, our heads in a dark cloud of unworthiness and estrangement even as the divine unconditionally filled our lungs, lit our path, warmed our skin, gave us shelter, food, and a place to stand.
In truth, there is no where it is not—except in our own imaginations, and it can be directly experienced and observed at any moment. No middleman needed.*
Power structures can’t control people when they discover they are already inextricably connected to the divine source that sustains them, and of which they are inseparably a part. It is easy to control people with fear when they think you hold the keys to their salvation from all this bullying and oppression. A lot of propaganda, fear, and witch hunts, wars, genocide and brutality… and in just a generation or two, even the most well-meaning mothers are teaching their children spiritual separation and subjugation to human power structures in the name of a “proper upbringing.”
I know, I did that myself. Effective marketing, indeed!
*To be clear, I’m of the belief that rites, sacraments, rituals, ordinances, baptisms, ordinations, initiations, and other religious practices and sacred spaces in any tradition can have tremendous inner transformative power along the inner path, even if they are in a generally oppressive or misguided lineage, place, or time. It is the power of sincere devotion and focus that humans bring (including what ancestors and devotees of the past have brought) into such rituals and places over time that bestows the empowerment. You can have powerful and real growth from experiences in far-from-perfect places and institutions, and even with false teachers and gurus. The channels still can open even in the most unexpected places when you yourself are open.