Old Lady of the Tao-Gospel

                           The Goddess of Willendorf  (found in Austria and dating from 30,000 to 25,000 B.C.)


When you make the two, one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male, and the female not be female, then you shall enter the Kingdom. (Logion 22 from the Gospel of Thomas)

​What we are really doing here is reconstructing a vanished part of ourselves. We are attempting to bring back into conscious light that vanished part in order to unite with it and to learn from it the new modes of loving and action that are crucial to our survival. (Andrew Harvey from The Return of the Mother)

​Humanity is being taken to the point where it will have to choose between suicide or adoration. (Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)


In the beginning, as the Scriptures attest (there was a beginning), the Universe is born from the inter-play between What if? Why not? and What next? (from star to the tiniest particle of possibility, the Blessed Trinity dwells in "divine complexity, subtlety, passion, and ecstatic humor" (Andrew Harvey)... The Goddess of Willendorf is a representation of the primordial tao-gospel and the matriarchal stage of human history. The Old Lady was the mystic-portal of all life, for all of life... from the within of primordial human community, the Goddess was experienced as nature, known, cherished, and adored as the Mother, and listened to for Her mystical guidance and astonishing ways... The creation myths of ancient "pre-civilizations" attest to the mystic-insight of a "cosmic copulation", or "divine marriage", originating existence...

​In the destruction of the beginning and matriarchal Way, came the patriarchal stage and "the shattering of the harmony of the old goddess archetypes" (Andrew Harvey). Separation and division became both "theological" and operational principles and practices: creator became separate from creation, the sacred feminine became separate from the divine masculine (and ultimately divorced), the human psyche became separate from its prior experience of unity, and the near-universal oppression of women became the one essential building-block of the newly empowered world civilizations... (we are still in this stage!)...

Admittedly, these are very broad brush-strokes! But, it is important to understand this much in order to contemplate your personal choices! and the cultivation of your own mystical insights (which is, after all, the reason why you are here, alive, right now, on Planet Earth)... Patriarchy, or as Riane Eisler identifies it, "the dominator paradigm" is in the clear process of destroying this precious blue Planet -- so this is, in fact, much more than "just" your personal choice! Now, I have meandered through these thoughts and words to get to this point: while it is, practically speaking, impossible to return to "the beginning" and a renewed matriarchal society, it is nevertheless now of vital importance that the unity of the Sacred Feminine and the Divine Masculine be restored!

​Only you can do that!

Oneness must be intentionally cultivated: understand yourself as being intimate with all of creation: you are not separate from any life or anything (read the mystics and the quantum physicists like St. Hildegard and Amit Goswami, Ph.D.)...

​Get into Rhythm: yes, everything is alive, everything moves (stars, atoms, oceans, trees: everything is part of a Universal Dance)... cultivate your contemplative view, return your awareness to the vibrations that hold every "single" thing together... (read St. Hildegard, Meister Eckhart, Hafiz, Andrew Harvery, Matthew Fox, Starhawk, and Ram Dass)...

​Practice adoration as a Way of Life: miracle is the ordinary way of being and seeing: seed, sex, and surrender are the primordial ingredients of life in "ordinary awareness of the Sacred Feminine": all life comes with an ecstatic surge of energy, a will to orgasm, and a hunger for more: not the "more" of a undisciplined run-amok, but the "more" of the "shifty mystic" who understands that she is shifting from separation into oneness, and from scarcity into a wholly-holy-abundance...  

​Now, here is one final example and teaching: you know (if you are the least bit attentive to the news, and specifically to the murder of George Floyd and the world-wide call to end racism and support for Black Lives Matter) that millions of people are calling for justice for all... Yes! we need justice! There are no if's or but's, about it... There is, though, an important however, or addition, that must come into play: we need justice, but the deepest realms of justice can only be found in mercy... I give you the end of a golden string / Only wind it into a ball / It will lead you in at Heaven's gate / Built in Jerusalem's wall... (William Blake)

In other words, we have "progressed" from innocence to power (some would identify this as a "fall"). How do we, then, "return" to innocence, or come to know "our original face" before we were born? To quote Blake again, And we are put on earth a little space / That we may learn to bear the beams of love... Social change still rooted in division or separation will never get us to where it is that we need to go. Yes, we need justice: but we also need a new justice, one that can no longer be undone! Here! is Heaven's gate: we are most alive in our mystic-dreams, when we, even for the briefest of moments, jump from our "here" into the possibility of a new "there" in our dream, it's then that we carry with us all life, all existence, higher and higher on the divine ladder of evolution: we need justice, but we hunger for mercy: the surety of Mama's loving arms, our lasting "Welcome Home"... In our dream-life, we can facilitate the unleashing of the "Strong Woman", the Mother of Mercy: a little bit of sacred imagination can lesson despair, a little bit more erases the edges of violence, oppression, and separation, still more sacred imagination can reconcile opposites, and still more can uncreate it! (Holy Moly, did you get that?!) (see Harold C. Goddard, William Blake's Fourfold Vision, in Sources by Theodore Roszak)

​The temporary respite provided by justice is the best that the Dominator Paradigm can offer. Power, privilege, greed, violence, eco-destruction, oppression, and exploitation cannot be overcome by reason... (sadly, of course)... But there is hope: hope in our bold mystic-encounter with What if? Why not? and What next? in our Sacred Imaginations: which is precisely what They did! It is in our dreams, our gardens, our art, our music, our laughter, our love-making, our delight, our ecstasy, our mercy, and our surety of a gentle harmony as the Way of the Old Lady of the Tao-Gospel that rEvolution happens: "automatic", if you will... Holy Moly, but I have to bring this thing to its conclusion!

Okay, so here it is, from Dostoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man: "I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth -- it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul forever... It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination... And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the great thing, and that's everything..."

​And just one more step: every 'other' whom you see, is in fact, yourself...  this "no difference" is the essence of the Sacred Feminine... to the Primordial Tao-Gospel...  

​In everything that exists, there is at work an imaginative force, which is determined by ideals. -- Plato