Gaia Kali: match-making between Science and
Spirituality
Lucie
Bell
Stop for a moment and consider your surroundings; be aware that you are a delicate construction of perishable organic compounds, glued by gravity to a massive sphere of rock and magma, stuck near naked under a sky open to the pitiless gaze of the sun in one direction and the frigid indifference of the cosmos in all the others. How can this place be so habitable, homelike, nurturing and seemingly made to measure?
Ecology came of age with the first images of the earth from space. Look at that blue and cloud swirled sphere, vivid against the velvet blackness, and take in at once that the earth is not a flat sheet, stretching forever beyond an infinity of horizons. A whole hemisphere can be taken in at a glance and at once it is obvious that the lemon sun squeezing through the winter haze in Europe, gilding the crests of the Andes and blazing down on the Kalahari is all the same burst of radiant energy.
This sense of unity is at the heart of Gaia Theory: the idea that life on earth acts through a complex interrelationship of systems to make one super-system that controls and modifies the physical and chemical conditions of our environment to make it ideal for supporting life. Without these systems, which make up the fabric of Gaia, the earth would be another lifeless planet. If the spark of life was extinguished, conditions on earth would rapidly change to that of a blistering desert, with a temperature two or three times that of boiling water, and a choking, oxygen less atmosphere composed, all but two percent, of carbon dioxide. The delicacy of the balance is awesome as is the fierce determination of life to stay alive.
As the earth cooled from it’s fiery accretion 4.6 billion years ago, the temperature dropped to the level at which water could exist on the surface, and almost immediately life began to blossom. Right from the start individual organisms would have interacted with and modified their surroundings and the guiding principle then as now was enlightened self-interest rather than competition. Any being that competed ruthlessly at the expense of its neighbors would inevitably die out, because there would be nothing left to recycle the waste products, to complete the resource circle.
At that time the average surface temperature was around 15 degrees Centigrade, the ideal for the subtle reactions that create the infinite range of organic chemicals that make up living things. The sun was at least 25%, maybe as much as 40%, cooler than it is now, and the atmosphere was a snug, 90% CO2, thermal blanket. As millions of years rolled by the sun’s nuclear furnace warmed up but miraculously the surface temperature stayed the same perfect 15 degrees. And that is the most obvious miracle of Gaia at work. As the world heated living things began drawing down the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, first incorporating it into their own bodies and then disposing of it permanently in rocks rich in carbonates such as limestone, created as waste deposits that were not recycled. As the CO2 was removed, so another layer of blanket was stripped off allowing the earth to lose heat and maintain the biosphere’s own life supporting temperature.
As the temperature was maintained at an optimum, so were other conditions kept even, such as the acidity and salinity of the seas, so that reactions could continue at near neutral pH and delicate cell membranes didn’t burst due to the osmotic pressure from too much salt in the water. We are so used to machines that do things, regulate themselves by design, that it is easy to lose sight of the majesty and wonder of a natural, spontaneously arising system that manages to deal so serenely, so inexorably with every problem, every potential catastrophe and move on.
Not all the changes were smooth, or perhaps welcome at the time; about 1.8 billion years ago the teeming plankton in the sea began to excrete an unlikely waste product: oxygen. Until then the biosphere had operated on a less efficient reducing chemistry based on the combination of hydrogen and carbon. The appearance of free oxygen would have been as disastrous to the existing life forms as releasing chlorine gas would be to us now. The whole chemistry of the biosphere changed; the once acid sea gave up its dissolved iron and precipitated it out as thousands of metres of jasper and iron formations.
Life must have faltered at this change, but soon it was flourishing again and thriving on the advantages of increased energy available through an oxidizing chemistry. Our agile brains would not have been possible without this potent fuel.
Where are we up to in the present? The solar furnace continues to pour out increasing amounts of heat, to the extent that the CO2 blanket is all but redundant: during an ice age the atmospheric carbon dioxide content falls to 180 parts per million or 0.018%, a level so low that photosynthesis can barely operate and all green plant life will fail if the concentration drops much lower.
Gaia is what is known as a complex system, one that does not lend itself to straightforward mathematical analysis, and it is very unlikely that the workings, the checks and balances, the feedback systems could ever be unraveled and yet at the heart of her lies great simplicity and adherence to the principle of enlightened self interest; do as you please as long as it doesn’t interfere overly with others. Be strong yourself, but not at the expense of the community and the environment. This simplicity is analogous to the simple equations that give birth to the infinitely rich patterns of fractal geometry, patterns that never repeat themselves but are nonetheless regular and bounded.
There is an overwhelming sense of beauty and elegance in these concepts, a sense of rightness and Zen “is-ness”, and a spiritual richness that adds to and transcends the beauty of a mathematical construct or the exquisite geometry of a radiolarian skeleton or a snowflake. This feeling has been suppressed for too long in science, the mythology that has dominated our times. There is nothing inherently wrong with science, it is a practical, useful way of looking at the world and the way it works, but it is only one side of the equation, one way of thinking and we need to revert to feeling and listening, in addition to probing and looking. It’s also important to remember that Gaia, as science, does not leave us in control, it’s neutral
Gaia Theory is pure science, make no mistake about that and it’s main proponent, Prof. James Lovelock, is one of the hardest nosed, least blinkered scientists around, fearless in the pursuit of truth, however it might challenge our preconceptions and cozy vision of our world. But what he has drawn our attention to in the way the biosphere produced us and nurtures us, stirs a totally different side of us and this is natural and vitally important, because listening to this inner voice and being open to the message coming through is the only way we can deal with the scientific facts staring us blindly in the face.
I have no doubt that at certain levels we know and understand everything; we are children of the universe and it knows itself through us, we are inseparable. Somehow Hindu thinkers have opened wormholes between this inner universe and the bright child’s primary coloured world we live in day by day. Fritjof Capra spoke so eloquently when associating the dance of Shiva with the endless motion in the realm of subatomic particles, a reality so utterly different and unfamiliar that it can only be grasped in terms of analogy and poetry.
Mathematics can probably never hope to explain and predict the workings of Gaia, the infinite variables would defeat any analysis, our only guide is our feelings, our sense of this great being that we are part of, and this is a spiritual path
Gaia Theory fills me with awe. Awe is a feeling that dwells in both worlds, emerging in the conscious as the tip of an iceberg with its great mass floating in the sea of the unconscious. Kali provides me with the every day image that personifies, fleshes out the ineffable so that my mundane mind can come to terms with the energy of the universe and the spirit of life.
To Hindus she is Shakti, the female principle that represents spirit energy and the vitalizing force, and this is why she is portrayed as standing with a foot on Shiva, who represents solid rational matter. Immediately the relationship between the ideas of Gaia and Kali come to mind, one the practical way that things work, the other the force that motivates them, the answers to the How? And Why? Questions. Shiva is also perceived as purusa, the passive potential of creation that awaits prakriti, the awakening of nature through combining with Kali. She is the breath of life that is breathed into the inanimate building blocks, the spirit that embodies the laws of organic chemistry to and empowered them to exploit the window of ambient temperature 3.5 billion or so years ago to play the opening notes of the wonderfully orchestrated symphony of life that has blossomed and flourished ever since.
In her role as Creator Kali is depicted as black, which for Hindus represents the void, not empty, as we might see it in the West, but filled with pure energy, from which all is created by coalescence. In this sense Kali is seen as the creator even of Shiva, in the way that matter arises out of energy in the particle physics interpretation of reality. One of the manifestations of this aspect of Kali is a terrifying being with a hideous, ravaged face and a lolling, ever licking tongue. She is ornamented with and seated upon serpents and is associated with the thousand headed Cobra, Ananta, symbolizing her cosmic supremacy. Semantically teasingly, this incarnation is called Guhya-kali. There is evidence that her cult spread far and wide reaching even the western coasts of Ireland, where dearg means ‘red’, her colour, and cailleach, pronounced something like kali-ach, means old woman or hag, the wise owl in Scottish Gaelic being cailleach oidche, the old lady of the night, and Finland, where Kali-ma was an important deity. Perhaps this name entered Ancient Greek and was taken for their first Earth Mother Goddess. It is hard to keep an archetype down and it’s wonderful how they come accurately popping back through from the unconscious in the most serendipitous fashion!
Most famously, Kali is portrayed as creator and destroyer, an alien concept to Western minds, which see opposites as incompatible black and white entities, in contrast to the Eastern view of opposites being combining principles that each contain a seed of the other and together form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. This aspect of Kali personifies the process of growth and decay, “the inherent creative and destructive rhythms of the cosmos” so wonderfully visible in the cosmic laws of the compost heap, where all the scraps and last year’s growth magically break down through her grace and the activities of her holy bacteria and fungi, the scraps of living in the process of dieing and rebirthing, that give us the fruitcake richness of good compost.
So where do we fit into this ruthless realm of a creative-destructive, all-powerful Goddess? Kali’s nakedness is symbolic of her complete freedom from ego and it can only be through losing our conscious attachment to the Great Ourselves that we can fit comfortably into the scheme of life. Perhaps our ancestors, gatherer-hunters, had this kind of close relationship with the world around them, and it seems as though the remaining San bushman people see themselves as perpetually recycled, part of the great wheel of life, endlessly turning and repeating. It is apt that at this epochal watershed when the feminine is being reborn after a 5 000 year retreat, a dark moon period of introspection and renewal, that Kali can be an inspirational helmswoman on the way forward. She is not just a god who created the world and life including man in his image, and stood back, but also a Goddess who is both the spirit of creation and also the spirit of life itself and the guiding principle inherent in making this great glorious blue jewel of a planet habitable.
EPILOGUE: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
One cannot honestly have any doubt that we are reaching plague proportions on earth, and this situation cannot go on. Inevitably something will shift, a threshold will be passed and a new set of conditions will appear as Gaia achieves a new, more comfortable position, (though not necessarily so for the fleas on her back!) How is this likely to occur? Well, global warming and climate change are well under way but the temperature is likely to rise, taking us further from the less desirable ice age conditions. However, it seems that ice ages may come blindingly quickly, setting in less than five years, perhaps as little as two or three. Should the Gulf Stream be blocked the whole of Western Europe would suddenly experience severe winters and short cold summers. The increased albedo of the new snowfields would reflect incoming heat out again and the whole process would accelerate. This is not a scientific fantasy, it happened during the Little Dryas Event, 12 000 years ago and did away with the mammoths. Melt water lubricating the contact between the Greenland ice sheet and the rock underneath could enable the whole mass to slip off, creating huge tidal waves and enough cold water to stop the Gulf Stream. There is a poetic justice behind this that is irresistible, for it would be the developed west who has been responsible for so much of the warming through carbon dioxide production who would be the first victims.
Dreams are foremost the property of the dreamer and their interpretation is paramount, but when we dream we dip into the subconscious and maybe sometimes we are conduits for something, more powerful, more universal, from a wider horizon of the subconscious, that includes even the world’s, emerges and, like a fracture tapping a magma chamber deep in the earth’s crust, something more potent appears.
One of the guiding books for this piece is Dancing in the Flames, The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson. In it they illustrate many of their points with dreams of their analysands. One struck me forcefully:
I am standing by the sea. A great tidal wave is steadily rolling in. I am terrified. Gradually I discern a large chocolate-coloured woman riding majestic on the crest of the wave. She is triumphant, her body poised, her arm uplifted like Delacroix’s Liberty. She rides her inevitable way.
Suddenly, I am a molecule in the wave. My friends and I are all molecules, each molecule dancing with every other molecule in love. We are all dancing with the energy that will bring Sophia to land.
The richness and aptness of this image needs no comment. It fills me with awe.
Lucie Bell is an applied earth scientist whose work
has taken her over six continents and through two oceans. When not
wandering about, she lives with Janet Findlay, a Skibbereen Stoat-hound, in
the middle of a homemade wood in the extreme SW of Ireland. She has studied
under James Lovelock at Schumacher College in England. Her other interests
include growing vegetables, Tank Girl, eating and drinking too much, going
to India, putting things off and effing the ineffable. E-mail luciebell@eircom.net
Copyright: L Bell August 2002
[NOTE:
This article was first published in Vol. 29, The Beltane Papers, a Journal of
Women's Mysteries, February 2003.
http://www.thebeltanepapers.net/]
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Updated 03/03