The Ant Whisperer (Page 3 of 3)

The fowls of the heavens, and of the beasts whatever is beneath the earth, or upon the earth, and the fishes of the sea, these are they that draw you unto the Divine.

As to the first question, there is a long answer and a short answer. The short answer is, the Mesotes is the Manitou of indigenous shamanic traditions in the Americas. This is a powerful supernatural figure who traditionally appears to people on vision quests in the wilderness. In fact, the vision quest is not complete, and cannot be considered a success, unless the devotee encounters the Manitou or a power animal sent by it. In a sense, Manitou itself assumes the guise of a particular animal. Manitou is the spirit of the wilderness and the matrix of animal powers.

Generally, they are any kind of supernatural intelligence, plant- or animal-identified, that interacts with human beings to foster the connection between humanity and the natural world. The manitos are intermediaries.

In both cases, the Presence of the Sacred wells up from nature and imbues its human witnesses with the right and proportionate sense of humanity. The vision quest of the Americas is a direct encounter with the Spirit if the Wild, the Manitou, that not only confers visionary wisdom on the witness, but imbues him or her with a deepened and compassionately delimited sense of humanity.

Let's recall that the made-up word Mesotes literally means ‘half-joined,’ but it is better rendered as ‘intermediary.’ An intermediary joins two things. The Mesotes joins humanity as a species to all other species. This is the ‘pure unity’ that can be realized by encountering Manitou, the Spirit of the Wild.

The potential of our species is encoded in the human genome, ‘a living code.’ Each of us carries a share of the genius of the species in a genomic endowment, distinct from the genetic inheritance deriving from the familial bloodline. The genomic endowment, ‘the inward ineffability,’ is a phylogenetic transfer from the experience of humanity as large. As such, it transcends and overrides whatever traits we inherit from familial blood-ties. It is connected with the sense of a mission, a vocational calling.

The Mesotes-Manitou has a double function: to mediate between the human species and all other species, and through ‘the connection that heals,’ to engender in us the right sense of humanity, including our personal share in the indwelling genius of our species. The complementarity of these two functions cannot be overstated.

For Gnostics, Christos was not a redeemer and never assumed human form in flesh and blood. In the Sophia myth of the Mysteries, Christos is often paired with Sophia. They are the two Aeons who encode the singularity of the Anthropos, the human genome, with a range of species-specific potentials. At a critical moment when Sophia has morphed into the earth, and she is overcome by the density and diversity of the life-forms that arise in the biosphere, the Aeons of the Pleroma send Christos to intervene in her behalf.

In humanity, by contrast to other animals, symbiosis has to be realized by overcoming an inveterate tendency for self-obsession. ‘We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with all that is not human,’ David Abram says. By entering into kinship with all species, we overcome our anthropocentric tendencies, which can be vicious, harming ourselves as much as others. The Christos intercession effected a softening of human boundaries, especially ego boundaries, to allow enhanced empathy with all that lives. In this empathy we find our personal path more easily, because no creature lives by itself. The ultimate function of the Mesotes is a subtle, non intrusive guiding effect.

The luminous phantom is the subliminal inner guide, not a ‘life coach’ who fosters self-empowerment or collusion with God. It does not support the gratification of our personal lives, but selfless consecration to all that lives.

In the range of human instincts there is a drive for self-preservation (including preservation of the ego as well as the body) so strong it can counteract the drive to coevolve, to embrace all life-forms and to love Gaia, the earth itself. We are immersed in Gaian symbiosis, and we always have the choice to override self-preservation in the cause of life at large. The inner guide is a sublime gift endowed in our species from the Pleroma, an insuperable aid to self-correction.

Without the subtle guidance of the luminous phantom, we would be even more driven by insane egotism than we already are.