Possessed
Possession wears many faces. Meanings can range from falling under a temporary spell: "Whatever possessed you to buy that?!" to outright seizure: "We're taking possession of the property." The essence is a sense of ownership — and often what we "own," owns us. Lately, large numbers of people have been releasing years of accumulated baggage in preparation to relocate, travel, or simply feel freer.
If purging your possessions feels overwhelming, consider this experience from a man who lived through the Indonesian tsunami in 2004: one moment, he and his wife were relaxing after breakfast at their beautiful beach house. The next, they were engulfed, swimming for their lives, and nothing mattered except that they survive. (Both did.) In the vortex and afterwards, he described what millions around the world expressed: the magnificent outpouring of love, the great leveler, that flooded our land like manna.
Granted, no one would choose to lose everything in a cataclysm. But it sure prioritizes life.
Another poignant (and amusing) example of being "possessed" comes from Peace Pilgrim, describing her encounter with an older woman who still worked long hours to afford her 5-room house. Peace asked her, "Couldn't you live contentedly in one room?" She responded, "Yes, but I have furniture for a 5-room house." Peace exclaimed to the audience, "Imagine that poor woman, working her fingers to the bone to make a home for that furniture!"
We can experience the joys of having life's toys — and learn to let them go without regret. Peace Pilgrim was a master at paring down possessions to what she referred to as "need level." Few of us could manage with just the clothes on our back, a toothbrush and a comb for 28 years. And while I know from direct experience that living as a nomad does confer a certain ineffable freedom, it also activates a primal generosity in others, as the tsunami survivors discovered.
We're living a tsunami in consciousness. A breakthrough book, The Tent of Abraham, co-authored by a rabbi, a Benedictine sister and a Sufi scholar, dissects the metaphor of possession in ancient sacred texts and modern life, examining the ways it cripples our attempts at cross-cultural unity and understanding. Each writer describes how in cultivating community, we have lost the pre-literate, nomadic hospitality for the stranger, which was "as good as a peace treaty (and in some cases probably better).
"If we give up our attachment to the rigidity of acquiring, we can sit calmly to drink at the flowing wells of vision … Of course, we cannot do without land altogether. We are physical creatures who at out healthiest must have a land to 'sit' in, a well to drink from, a brother or sister to see us. How can this be done without 'acquiring' the land?
"By sojourning and sitting. How do we 'sit'? By treating the land with loving respect, living not on its back but beside its well of life, encouraging its flow instead of draining its wetlands, or pouring poison into its rivers, or … using scarce water for swimming pools instead of letting it flow …
"For exile, alienation, estrangement, cannot be solved by acquiring, possessing, owning — by rigidity. It can only be eased by acknowledging that possessiveness is itself a form of exile. By letting the water trickle through our fingers.
"And by letting the water trickle through our eyes. Through grief."
Speaking of water: we're also possessed by outmoded ideas, such as eternal economic growth and consumerism. I got a vivid example of the latter the other day, when I was refilling my 3-gallon water jug at Whole Foods. A man entered the aisle and lifted two cases of individual plastic water bottles into his shopping cart. I indicated the water machine and suggested, "Why not simply buy a large jug and refill it?"
He responded, "I have an umbrella outside next to a small refrigerator, and I like to reach in and grab a bottle." Oblivious to his carbon footprint, he was focused only on convenience and personal pleasure.
This individual exemplifies what Visionary Activist Astrologer Caroline Casey calls "the dominator virus": our patriarchal proclivity to "trap it, kill it, eat it." Yet in a sense, what we're "dominating" is a divorced part of ourselves.
In a world that has long embraced the masculine principle of dominion and is now moving toward wholeness, we may try to "possess" our softness, our emotions, our intuition, by keeping them enslaved rather than surrendering to balance.
In this sense, the Abrahamic story recounts the evolutionary journey common to cultures throughout the world. "Something is going to die: the distracting habits of a lifetime that keep us from being … compassionate, creative human beings. Something new is going to be born: a child from the union of the two greatest opposites in the self — our deepest purpose in life (the male self) and our deepest sense of relationship (the female self)."
Our challenge now is to transcend the sacred cow of possession for the sacred, shared reality of planetary stewardship. Choose what you use; learn to discern. Reach out across boundaries and borders and beliefs to co-create the new.
