Sophia Returns: World Water Day 2020

“What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home” Alanis Morissette

“The Various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman World, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosophers to be equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Edward Gibbon, Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire

 Worldwide celebrations are being held on this day in recognition of the sacred nature of water and its central importance to our survival. There is a world wide costume party planned--come as your favorite "water" god or goddess. We've also just learned that Sophia will be joining us. She has long been absent from our planet having been ousted long ago. We must prepare for her arrival by looking back and understanding what led to her departure.

We have for far too long taken water for granted and as a result we’d not honored our Earth, the water planet, nor our emotions, our individual source of wisdom. Life as we would generally define it exists nowhere else in our social system and that is specifically due to the absence of this oh so sacred and essential substance of water.

Ancient wisdom recognized a four or five elemental system to explain the world (depending on either a Western or Eastern perspective). This system was based on an understanding of energy which we have long since lost: yin/yang, magnetic/electro, feminine/masculine, right brain/left brain. Using the Western approach, the elements were water, air, earth and fire. These energies were not just physical representations of energy on our earth but related to modalities within each of us as well. Water represented our emotions, air our intellectual or mental nature, earth our physical body, and fire our spiritual nature. Water and air energies were feminine while earth and fire were masculine. These powers represented the means from which we interact in our world. Within these energies the ancients recognized that wisdom originated, not from the intellect as one might assume, but from the emotions or water element and thus from the internal being. 

Taoist philosophy illustrates the superiority of this internal power over the external variety which has so tried to dominate and control our world: “if you wished to change the world, you must first change yourself, and then you will find that is all that is necessary.” We might all realistically see that as difficult as it is to identify and change our own entrenched patterns of behavior, it would be impossible to change others.  Therefore, this understanding that the only viable power capable of transforming our world is found within each of us becomes the fulcrum from whichh we must act.  We are literally like magnets interacting in an electromagnetic energy field. When one magnet shifts, all shift. This is a practical understanding of Einstein’s Unified Field Theory.  As yin which is an expansive energy contracts to midpoint, yang, a contractive energy will expand.   Such requires a conscious act as the nature of those energies have been psychologically distorted though history with men wearing a mantle of superiority and women one of inferiority.

The beginning of history witnessed the rise of religious traditions that reestablished a monotheistic, patriarchal world view which reordered the ancient’s pantheistic classification. The great clash of the sky gods and the Earth goddess at the dawn of history resulted in monotheism replacing the existing pantheism, which was a belief system that recognized the sacred or divinity inherit within all of life rather the exclusionary masculine model which replaced it. That new structure to which we have been so engrossed throughout history focused worth in one God who resided outside or above the Earth, when in actuality the divine was then and always has been accessible to each of us though our universal, right brain.

The ‘new’ religious traditions of the patriarchs elevated the masculine polarities; specifically the spiritual to the supreme place of prominence only to be accessed by an elite cadre of men who then co-opted humanities connection to the numinous for their own personal ends. So began a fire which now has evolved to such a level that it threatens our very continued existence here on our planet home. The new order generally viewed the physical as base. Intellectual development was strictly controlled by denying or controlling access to education, and the emotions were totally repressed. Thus began centuries of disparity. The schism resulted in an elevation of the masculine and a denigration of the feminine. Misogyny was born and deformed history and each of us. Women, being more closely in touch with their emotions, were systematically excluded from participation in affairs of the world. Their place was defined as being only the helpmate of man. Generally, throughout history, women lived out of their right universal brains (martyring themselves for husband and family) and men lived out of their left rational brains (justifying just about anything in the pursuit of ego—a consequence of an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres of the brain). This created a type of balance, but meant that individually each were out of balance. As we are the building blocks of our world, our individual one-sidedness then permeates everything that has evolved for thousands of years. This inequity as it evolved proliferated into the environmental, social, political, economic, educational, etc., challenges which we must now cope with on a global scale.

We have come today to recognize that the disappearance of and pollution of the potable water on our planet is but a physical manifestation of the symbolic loss of wisdom which occurred millennium ago through he suppression of the messages of our emotions which when healthy and heeded, act as canaries in a coal mine warning us of dangerous developments in our environment and beyond.  To mix the metaphor; we have mistakenly disengaged the batteries of our fire alarms in order to stop the annoying alarm from sounding, rather than check to see that the house is burning down and put out the fire.

In an acknowledging the importance of water to moderate the extremes of  fire (as is represented in the first hexagram of the I Ching, we the people of Earth recognize this International Water Day as the day Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom, returned to our Earth. We will never again allow anyone or anything to jeopardize our water; neither internally nor external again.