Bridging Heaven and Earth: Archetypal Principles for the Interregnum

The oak tree is one of the most sacred trees among many of the pagan people of Pre-Modern Europe. From the Greeks who saw it as a symbol of Zeus their god of lightning to the Norse who saw it as sacred to the God of Thunder, Thor, the Oak has long stood as a symbol for that which bridged the heavens and the earth with stability and strength.

Similarly, mountains have long been seen as sacred places, a bridge between celestial and terrestrial realms. In Taoism for instance, the word for an attained spiritual being known as an Immortal “仙” consists of the characters for Mountain “山” and human “人.” This implies that the immortals dwell high in the mountains where they work to unite themselves with the way of nature called the Tao. “道.”

I’ve been thinking about oak trees and mountains lately concerning the current crisis of the pandemic, and the afflicted modern world. If oak trees and mountains represent stability, strength, and commitment to a place that bridges the heavens and the earth, the modern world embodies the opposite.

The modern world is rootless, ephemeral, and lacks an orientation towards anything higher or deeper. If the oak trees and mountains are symbols for the depth of relationship, the modern world is the triumph of superficiality.

Mountains, in particular, call us towards the transcendent heights through deeply grounded rootedness. They remind us to look up and vertically aspire to undergo the trials of a climb towards the heavens. Modern life, in contrast, keeps us fixated on the horizontal realm of the emphemeral.

Superficiality is maladaptive and lacks resilience. Now more than ever we need to remember what oak trees and mountains have to teach us to resiliently survive and thrive in this new emergent world.

Grasping for Vision in the Interregnum

In 2020 the world as we know it died. Whether we talk about the pandemic or the political earthquakes, something definitively shifted on the planet. Like survivors of any major catastrophe, people are still in various stages of shock, denial, and grief for the loss of what was.

We are in the betwixt and between, the liminal interregnum between the old world order and a new one yet to be born. Like the difficulties faced in the Bardo, the between life dream state discussed at length in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we are wrestling with images in this space of fear of the unknown.

One of the key messages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is not to grasp at any particular image as one navigates the Bardo for to do so is to confine oneself into a particular path of rebirth. One ideally wants to have cultivated a sense of equanimity and emptiness so that in facing the onslaught of images in the afterlife, one releases oneself from the cyclicality of existence and attains liberation.

We are facing such a chaotic onslaught of images in this, our own civilizational bardo, the afterlife of our old world.

Humans need maps and models to navigate reality, and suddenly all the old maps don’t work anymore. The rise of conspiracy theories spawned by the internet expresses the deep need people have for some orientating image in the chaos. It’s in times like this that people become vulnerable to the spin-doctoring of false prophets and fools gold sold by snake oil salesman ever ready to prey on people’s time, money and attention.

But attaining a sense of emptiness and equanimity isn’t enough.

People need tangible positive visions worth attaining and values worth fighting for. It’s an old saying that people perish without a vision. But where do we look, what should be the criteria for these vision and values?

Mountains, World Trees, and Higher Reference Points

All of our orientations to a life worth living can be found in nature. Just as the oak represents stability and strength that bridges the heavens and earth, mountains have long been thought of as inspirations for a deeply meaningful life.

But what can we learn from mountains, what do they have to teach us?

Mountains are the ultimate representation of stability combined with verticality. They teach us to have a solid foundation rooted deeply in the earth while reaching progressively higher toward transcendent heights.

Just as the oak tree provides us with an example of that which bridges the sky and earth, mountains teach us about the progressive climb towards loftier heights while simultaneously remaining deeply grounded.

Is it any wonder that Nietzche's’ Zarathustra descends from the mountains to proclaim his wisdom of the Ubermensch to the community-dwelling in the low lying valleys? Is it any wonder that his philosophy is one born of the transcendent heights striding through the mountains?

Whatever hammer Nietzche choose to philosophize with, it was forged in contemplation among mountains as he strode on his long walks alone in the Swiss Alps.

In the modern world, we’ve lost this sense of verticality. We are oriented constantly towards the horizontal in the forms of screens and commodity consumption. Any notion of a higher reference towards the heights has been cast aside in favor of the superficial horizontal comforts of modern civilization.

Another critical lesson mountains have to teach us is the higher you go, the more narrow the path and the harder it gets. Commodity consumption has turned our spiritual pursuits into just another horizontal supermarket product to be easily purchased.

Whether we are talking about Ahayuasca tourism or the narcissistic culture of pop fashion yoga, so much of what has entered the spiritual and new-age marketplace is just more materialistic and superficial fluff consumed by rootless people driven by the emptiness and hungry ghost quality of our daily lives.

True spiritual growth requires commitment, self-discipline, and the experience of ordeals. Just as climbing a mountain is fraught with risk, so is the ascent up the Holy Mountain.

Trees, Mountains and the Axis Mundi

What oak trees and mountains have in common as spiritual symbols is the concept of an “Axis Mundi” or axis of the world. This is an archetypal idea explored by mythologists and archetypal thinkers like Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell.

The Axis Mundi is the notion that certain natural locations and places represent a bridge between the heavens and earth and central places of sacred alignment with divine principles.

Prolific examples range from the sacred oaks of Druids Groves to Kun Lun Mountain, the home of the Queen Mother of the West in Taoism, to Mount Kailash the home of Shiva in Tantric Hinduism. What all of these natural entities have in common is deep roots, and vast heights that combine the above and the below.

The Norse World Tree Ygradassil upon which the nine realms of Norse Mythology, are held, is the ultimate expression of this idea. Here the higher realms of Asgard in what Shamanic practitioners call the Upper world is integrated with the middle world realm of man in Midgard with the lower realms such as Niflheim.

Ygdrasil as Axis Mundi unites and integrates all of these worlds in their proper place, and shows a relationship of vertical alignment between the above, below, and between.

Mirroring the Macrocausm in the Microausm, the Axis Mundi reflects what lies within the human being. Sacred architecture in the Tantric tradition seen in Stupas and Temples also articulates the concept of the Axis Mundi. Here the various energy centers or Chakras rising along the spine of a person are symbolically mapped onto the built environment.

The age-old Hermetic notion of As Above, So Below reminds us of the mapping of the microcosm to the macrocosm in these examples of the Axis Mundi. Here we see that the heavenly patterns of the galaxies are woven self similarly at every level of our cells.

The Axis Mundi and Higher Reference Points: Three Principles for the Interregnum

With the Axis Mundi, we have a higher reference point for what it means to be human beyond the artificial and superficial modern world we’ve created around us. As the old world continues in its death throes, the answer isn’t more social media, gaming, and ephemeral consumption of people, places, and things.

Rootless a tree falls, and we are being called to think like nature and realign our lives with deeper more rooted ideals as seen in the concept of the Axis Mundi. These principles are old and rooted in the very pattern that connects woven of the creative matrix that emerged 3.5 billion years ago from the primeval soup of life's first biotic surge.

Root Yourself Deeply In Place and Commit to Making It Better

There are three key principles we can follow to make our lives more similar to the Axis Mundi so we ourselves embody the qualities of Oak Trees and Mountains.

The first key principle of the Axis Mundi is one of deep commitment to place.

Pumped up on a poisonous cocktail of petroleum and neoliberal freneticism we’ve been bouncing around the planet with airplanes and moving constantly in pursuit of new economic opportunities. Our greatest values have been our own professional success and material striving rather than committing to a region and trying to make it better.

One of the blessings of the Pandemic has been to slow us down, limit our travel and intensify working remotely for those who are so fortunate. There is no excuse not to leverage these trends for deep bioregional commitment and efforts to improve our own homes and regions.

Align That Which is Above and Below

Hindu Tantric writer Sri Aurobindo believed that the next wave of human evolution would be integral. In this age, we would unite the spiritual and material elements of our lives by “divinizing matter.”

But exactly what does that mean?

It means it’s not enough to just work a day job, make money and have a life based on material abundance. To truly be successful you need to undertake the “Great Work” which is essentially the effort to fully realize your potential in the world through a combination of spiritual practice and daily work in the real world.

Each morning you must make yourself a bridge between heaven and earth through spiritual self-discipline. Spiritual self-discipline (Sadhna) is rising early in the morning and stretching your body, breath, and mind through practices that tone the body, sharpen your mind, hone your voice and integrate your being with the cosmos.

There are many methods out there from Kundalini Yoga to Qi Gong, Ritual Magic, to Mantra. The key is to rise early and make your first efforts about stretching yourself and integrating yourself beyond your finite humanity.

Then after this, you go to work.

Do something in the world that draws on all of your faculties. Write, speak, paint, draw, use whatever skills you were given to express your unique talents in the world. You’ll find that as you do this over time you create a dynamo of co-creative synergy and synchronicity with the cosmos where life itself becomes a flowing miraculous state of grace.

It’s the yoking of this daily spiritual work with the material that creates this integral bridge and helps you align the above with the below and divinize matter accordingly.

Seek Deep Roots and Great Heights

One of the greatest enemies of our day is superficiality. People think because they taste-test multiple psychedelic experiences, lovers, or spiritual practices that they are advancing.

The truth is that breadth and depth are two very different things. You ideally want to expand along both dimensions continually, but picking the 2–3 areas of focus will take you a lot further than superficially skipping across a variety of experiences.

Also going deep within yourself through shadow work, psychedelic journeys, or shamanic work must be paired with efforts to stretch higher in your understanding and connection. You must simultaneously submerge yourself within while climbing higher beyond yourself.

I recommend various forms of devotional work oriented towards union with a higher power combined with inner process work using dream or magical journals, and other methods to gain insight into your interior realms.

Through these three simple practices and principles, you can work towards becoming your own “Axis Mundi” or axis of the world. Doing this you will become a force of evolutionary change that shifts that paradigm of the world from superficiality to much deeper and ancient principles that have and will stand the test of time.

Conclusion

We’ve become lost in a labyrinth of our own making. Mankind’s overly civilized mind has forgotten the old ways and wisdom born of star, and root, wave, and fire, the raw elements of nature’s primeval patterns.

But primordial wisdom and the patterns that connect are always there for those who seek to find them. As the old world continues to die, it will increasingly become imperative that we build our lives on something deeper, richer, and higher. This will increasingly become a necessity not to just thrive but actually survive in the coming Anthropocene trials we will all likely face.

By looking at the natural principles found in oak trees and mountains, and the deeper archetypal lessons they teach about the Axis Mundi, we have the chance to shift our focus from superficiality to depth, from the ephemeral to the perennial.

Rootless a tree falls, but maybe with these principles and a little bit of luck, we can create deep roots and tall branches that help us bridge heaven and earth and co-create a life beyond our wildest imaginings.