Water as the mother of consciousness
Photo: Barbie Robinson
The maternal waters are propelled towards the sacrificers.
-ancient hymn to the Goddess of Waters
The earliest invocations of water in Indian archetypal wisdom call her Amba or mother. As the maternal dimensions of consciousness, water invites us to attend to the particular nature of the maternal as an archetype and not as we have narrated this in our technocratic reality.
For many of us the maternal is a domain of nurture, unconditional love, and trust. For those of us who have difficult experiences of the maternal, whether in relationships with our own mothers, or as mothers ourselves, the maternal is a more difficult domain. My relationship with my mother was fraught with narcissistic dynamics which means that I do not have a lived experience of the maternal as nourishing. I have been a mother myself and worked deliberately to attend to how I can overcome the absence of lived experience of maternal consciousness. I can never be sure whether I was “successful” or not, because this means assessing it against templates emerging from disordered systems we call reality!
The absence of intuitive intelligence about the maternal made me inquire into this through archetypal dance and wisdom. What emerges is not the sentimental versions of motherhood we are offered, rather it is an approach to the Self that is compassionate, unconditional, and nurturing. To explain this, I must share an archetypal story.
The original story is multi-layered, here I focus on the elements that are relevant to this context. A God does something that results in His consort, the Goddess, leaving Him. Devastated, He wanders the cosmos in search of Her. After a while, He realizes that it is necessary to return to His own Consciousness and Self, in other words to find Himself before He can find Her. He retreats into an anthill which is the archetypal invocation of the womb. While He sits in austere contemplation, the Goddess sends a cow to shed its milk over the anthill thereby sustaining the God.
One day the local ruler spies the cow’s strange action and decides to kill it. However, the God rises from the anthill to save the cow and receives the blow on His head. Injured, He leaves the anthill in search of His mother. His mother has been waiting for Him for many lifetimes. He reunites with Her in a forest. She takes care of Him, nurses Him through the wound until He can return to His archery in the forest.
As an archer, He finds the Goddess again, now reincarnated, just as He is reincarnated in a transformed Consciousness. They reunite in a marriage that is facilitated by His mother.
The archetypal intelligence of this story is deep. It is inevitable that, as we live in a mind-dominated reality, the feminine (Goddess) domain of intuition, mystery, authenticity, and nurturing, will exit. We will firstly wander anxiously and grief-stricken. The arc of the archetypal inquiry will lead us to a contemplative return to Self, a gathering of external focused energies to re-direct them towards the quest for our own authenticity. This is nourished by the Goddess, even when it is unbeknownst to us.
It is inevitable that we will spring up from this contemplation again and again, as we are driven to exert our purpose and value in the world, which our mind interprets as “service” to others. It is significant that it is the God’s head that is wounded—the realm of the outwardly asserting mind. The archetypal inquiry then leads us towards the maternal within us. Our inquiry is into the qualities, sensations, and intelligence of compassion towards our Self and its unfolding.
How do we attend to the inevitable wounds inflicted by transactional actions? How do we lay our heads on the Mother Goddess’s lap, allow Her to calm us, nurture us and strengthen us from within? How does the maternal unfold in the absence of the brutality of goals and productivity?
In His wanderings, the God divests Himself of all His trappings, even of His Godhood. He is unrecognizable as His former Divine self so much so that even the reincarnated Goddess does not realise He is a God. The maternal domain is where status, and all other signals of the ordinary world, are irrelevant. We approach our inquiry with childlike (not childish!) innocence, adventure, and enjoyment. This requires trust, faith, and simplicity—all those qualities which flourish in a healthy childhood for those of us lucky enough to be gifted with one.
While a nurturing maternal bond supports finding the archetypal maternal, it is not always a pre-requisite. Because there are significant differences between the narrated maternal paradigms we are offered and the archetypal maternal. The archetypal maternal is a spacious, flowing, nonjudgmental movement. Water is the element of this domain.
Even in the banal act of enjoying a bath, we experience the sensation of relief, expansion, and nurturing. We can, for that time, relinquish the incessant treadmill of the mind and allow the waters to calm us. This is the archetypal maternal divinity of water.
Water as Amba or mother is the womb of authenticity which is Consciousness. This intelligence of water flows towards us when we have, like the God in the story, relinquished our “egoic” world by which I mean the story of self we have inherited from the external world. This is true even for the Gods. When we sacrifice the known, including what we think we know about ourselves, then the maternal waters find us, because, like the mother in the story, they wait for us.
Archetypal water eternally offers and sacrifices, like the God’s mother. This sacrifice cannot be one-sided—the mother is unavailable so long as we do not hold a sacrificial or offering Consciousness. We are enfolded in the embrace of the maternal waters when we meet Her offering flow with our own.