Gaia

In this new series of posts I'm looking at how dominance and submission might be used in service. In particular I've been talking about how we might serve “the planet”, but I find that description is a bit too abstract and impersonal for my purpose. As I've said already, we need to stop seeing our planet as an inanimate object, and begin to regard it as an intelligent, living being, the source of all life that supports and nourishes us. Doesn't this being have a name?

I'm inclined to steer clear of names that are too strongly associated with religions, such as God, Brahman, Yaweh, and suchlike. They have too much history invested in them, they carry too much baggage, and the fact that we're familiar with them tends to make us believe that we know what they mean.

I'm also cautious about names that appear to refer to the universe as a whole. These days I hear many people talking about getting a message from "The Universe" or "The Field" - I've done it myself at times. The problem I have with concepts on a universal scale is that according to physics as we currently understand it, information cannot travel any faster than the speed of light. Now the speed of light is pretty fast, but equally the universe is extremely big, so big in fact that it's beyond human comprehension.  It would appear that to get a message from one side of it to the other would take many billions of years, and that's not a timescale that's going to lead to very productive conversations.

To keep things simple, I'm going to restrict myself to considering just this one planet, Earth, and look at how someone who considers themselves to be submissive might approach serving this entity. From this point on I'm going to use the name Gaia for the planet. It's not a perfect name, it also carries some baggage, but it's what I plan to use until a better name turns up.

Gaia is the name of the mother goddess from Greek mythology, the personification of the Earth. It is also the name chosen by James Lovelock for his theory of planetary self-regulation. There are problems with both of these origins. I do not see the planet as primarily female, as it gives rise to both male and female forms in balance. So when I use the term Gaia, you need to find a way of imagining a being that is androgynous - both male and female.

The problem with Lovelock's Gaia is that for him it's a scientific theory, a system of dynamic feedback loops, not a living being. You will need to keep that in mind if you read about Gaia in the scientific sense: I'm talking about something much more personal than that.

Not only does Gaia transcend gender (although I'll be calling her “she” for convenience), you will also need to hold her as a being of many parts. We humans are tiny parts of her, so are animals and plants, and it's useful to think of local versions of her in specific places.

Gaia herself is also part of a bigger whole, which I will be calling “The Field”. I could call it God, but as I've already explained that name carries a lot of baggage. If Gaia is the conscious intelligence of Earth, the Field is the intelligence that pervades all of space and regulates everything including our planet, the solar system, our galaxy and the whole universe. So although ultimately your submissiveness is offered to the Field, for the purposes of these notes I'm discussing submitting to Gaia.