Course

Long Journey to a New Story with Anne Baring

Course Description:

In this 4-week course, Anne Baring takes us on a momentous journey through many eras, from the Great Flood in 10,800 BC, and the Myth of the Fall, the astonishing findings of the huge temple complex at Gobleki Tepi in Turkey, and the Civilization of Old Europe as discovered by archaeologist Marija Gimbutus. She explores the Lunar Era of the Great Mother and the Shamanic vision of kinship with all Creation; the Solar era of patriarchy, and our separation from nature; and finally, the rise of science, and the awakening to a new story.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the course you will understand:

Why the Great Flood was the forgotten catastrophe that underlies Western civilization.
The importance of early Egyptian civilization and its connection with the stars.
The importance of the discovery by Marija Gimbutas of a 3,000-year-old forgotten civilization in Europe.
The importance of Shamanic cultures and their concept of kinship with all creation.
The Lunar Era of the Great Mother and the Great Goddesses of Egypt, Sumer and Anatolia and why all aspects of life were connected.
The Solar Era of the Great Father and why this led to the separation from Nature, the loss of soul and the silencing of women. Why the drive for power, conquest and domination replaced the concept of relationship.
The two polarising mythologies that have dominated Europe and the Middle East for four thousand years and influence us still today.
Why religions have failed to civilize humanity because they left out one vital element.
Why science in the seventeenth century broke away from religion control and why the materialist paradigm it gave rise to led to the dominance of nature by man. The simultaneous waning of Christianity. Why the vacuum left by the absence of religion gave rise to the violent, polarising ‘religions’ of Fascism and Communism.
Why the empowerment of women is so vital for the world. Why Jung and the concept of Individuation is important for the further evolution of consciousness.
Why Quantum Physics is giving us a new paradigm of connection and relationship.
Why Consciousness is being recognized as the ground of reality and a New Story is emerging

Requirements for enrolled Degree students to earn 1 Credit:

Watch all videos in the lessons below and read the accompanying PDF handouts
End of course essay on describing the impact on life of studying this material

- 1. For BA students – 6-9 pages in length
  2. For MA students – 10-15 pages in length
  3. For PhD students – 20-25 pages in length

The rules guiding our assignment collection and grading process can be found here: Ubiquity University Grading Policy

Long Journey to a New Story:
The Evolution of Civilizations, Cultures and Consciousness

The Great Flood and the New Discoveries

In this webinar, Anne talks about the catastrophe of the Great Flood ca. 10,800 BC (this date is not yet agreed) and the near complete destruction of a highly advanced civilization that existed in different parts of the world before this, including Egypt, South America and South-East Asia.

The Great Flood was recorded by people in different parts of the world but more specifically by the Sumerians and the later Babylonians, and from them passed to the Book of Genesis. The Myth of the Fall (ca. 700 BC) may be related to the distant memory of this catastrophe when people were abruptly “expelled” from the Garden of Eden of the pre-Flood world. Recent discoveries suggest that the Flood was either caused by the fragments of a disintegrating comet forcefully hitting the great ice fields surrounding the north pole (in the western hemisphere, Canada, North America and Greenland; in the eastern hemisphere Siberia) (1) or by an overnight appearance of gigantic solar flares which had the same effect of melting the glaciers equally abruptly, over a period of three or so days. This sudden melting of vast areas of ice had the immediate effect of causing gigantic tsunamis and, in a matter of days, raising the level of the oceans worldwide, drowning the coastal cities and inhabitants.(2)

The large island known as Atlantis, which is thought to have existed in the Atlantic Ocean and was mentioned by Plato, disappeared overnight. A huge landmass joining Indonesia to China also vanished. The Egyptian civilization is now known to be much older than archaeologists have believed. (3) The Sphinx has been dated by the geologist Robert Schoch to the pre-Flood era, around 10,000 BC. The temple of Osiris at Abydos was also built long before Dynastic times. Its enormous blocks of stone were put in place by a lost technology as were the gigantic stones of the temples of Bolivia and Peru. 1000 years of freezing cold known as The Younger Dryas followed this catastrophe as the ice-age returned and many more people and animals perished. In Turkey, some survivors carved out huge caverns for shelter and survived in that way. In Egypt, Isis and Osiris may have originally been survivors of the Flood who brought with them knowledge of how to rebuild civilization. People had to begin again from scratch, so to speak.

Anne also speaks about the astonishing discoveries made at Goblekli Tepe in eastern Turkey (near the Syrian Border) by Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist (now deceased) of a huge temple complex thought to date back to 10,000 BC with many T-shaped monolithic pillars, some of which are engraved with signs of the zodiac. It seems to have been a temple or complex of temples built for the surveillance of the stars. The Patriarch Abraham was apparently born at Gobekli Tepe. These discoveries have shaken the timeline usually presented by archaeologists and historians since they indicate that “civilization”, including astronomy and mathematics, began much earlier than has been thought. In Peru and Colombia, the shamanic traditions being explored by Westerners today may have originated in the pre-Flood era, as did the shamanic traditions of the great seers of India.

Turning to Europe, Anne talks about the Civilization of Old Europe as discovered by the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and dated by her to between 7,000 and 3500 BC – and the ridicule and furious opposition she faced, (3) but later vindication in recent discoveries about the difference in the DNA of the people of Old Europe and the invading tribes from the North beginning in 3,500 BC and continuing for 2,000 years. These tribal invasions penetrated Persia and India as well as Europe. In India they drove the indigenous Dravidian people to the south and imposed the rigid caste system. The highly developed artistic culture of Old Europe (beautifully decorated pottery) was centered on the Danube river valley but extended southwards into Macedonia, Greece and Crete and westwards and southwards into Italy and the islands of Sicily and Malta. The Maltese temples are the remnants of this civilization which apparently, from the many temples and sculptures found there, worshipped the Goddess. This remarkable and barely recognized civilization laid the foundation for the later Etruscan, Cretan and early Greek (pre-Dorian invasions) civilizations, and could be recognized as the unacknowledged foundation of Western civilization.

Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods. His most recent book America Before will be published April 2, 2019.
Robert Schoch, (tenured geologist at Boston University) Forgotten Civilization: The role of Solar Flares in Our Past and Future; Origins of the Sphinx, Celestial Guardian of Pre-Pharaonic Civilization
Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, 1 & 2. Manfred Lurker, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt(a short guide) Alison Roberts, Hathor Rising; My Heart, My Mother: Death and Rebirth in Ancient Egypt; Egypt’s Anointing Mysteries
Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess;The Language of the Goddess

The Lunar Era of the Great Mother: Participation in Cosmic Soul and The Shamanic Vision of Kinship with all Creation

In this session, Anne speaks about the Great Mother whose image probably originated in the Palaeolithic era around or before 25,000 BCE and extended geographically as far East as Siberia. Timewise, it is found far into the Neolithic Era (Civilization of Old Europe) and the Bronze Age Great Goddesses of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Greece and Crete (with particular attention to Inanna, Isis and Kybele) and the later Iron Age Goddesses of Greece. China (Kwan Yin) and India have kept different images of the goddess to this day. She will discuss the belief that all forms of life emanated from the womb of the Great Mother – that there was no Creator beyond Creation; and that Sky, Earth and Underworld were the three ‘domains’ of the Great Mother. The patterns on pottery discovered by Gimbutas show the many different animals associated with the Great Mother. Cretan civilization gives us a wonderful glimpse of what a culture focussed on the Goddess might have looked like before Patriarchy took over.

For countless thousands of years, in the great civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Central and South America and China, astronomers and mathematicians studied the stars, the patterns of the constellations and the movements of the sun, moon and planets. They kept exact records in stone spanning thousands of years. They built extraordinary temples aligned to constellations like the Great Bear and Orion or the bright star we call Sirius. Daoism and the I- Ching. The Dream was highly valued in all these early societies. It was understood to be the means by which human society could align itself with the unfolding pattern in the heavens at any specific time.

Anne also addresses the following: The shamanic culture of the Druids and the great Neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge, Avebury and Newgrange (ca. 2,500 BC;) the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and the practice of Incubation in Anatolia and throughout the Greek Empire, and contact with the invisible world they called “The Immortal Realm”; Parmenides and his encounter with the Goddess Persephone; the Iron Age where the Greek goddesses become the “daughters” of Zeus, and Sky, Earth and Underworld are now ruled by the gods; and lastly, the Iliadand the Odyssey and the difference between them.

The continuity throughout this time of the Shamanic Vision – Kinship with all Creation – brings us up to the present day to the Kogi Indians of Colombia, the Australian Aborigines, the ‘San people of S. Africa, and the Indians of North and South America, and how these people are trying to wake us up out of our dream of control over the Earth’s resources to the realization that all of life is sacred. For centuries they have been in touch with the inner dimensions of the universe.

Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image
Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul (Both these books have extensive bibliographies which can be consulted)
Anne Baring, The Great Mother
Anne Baring, Images of the Soul
Andrew Harvey and Anne Baring, The Divine Feminine
Marija Gimbutas, as above
Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (for Parmenides and rites of incubation); A Story Waiting to Pierce You (for Pythagoras and Mongolian Shamanism)The Solar Patriarchal Era; The Separation from Nature and the Battle between Good and Evil

In this session, Anne addresses an era that is entirely dominated by the male psyche, beginning around 2,000 BC in the Middle East, when the Great Father God replaces the Great Mother. We see the beginning of the process of separation from nature and the 4,000 year-long oppression of women which continues today, mainly in Muslim countries. Its impacts were manifold, including: the movement of people to large cities and the rise of the great Empires beginning with Sargon of Akkad; and the rise of Bronze Age technology and the adulation of the Warrior (The Iliad). War becomes endemic. The destruction of the older agricultural civilization around the Fertile Crescent is replaced by a totally different worldview based on war, conquest and the acquisition of power. We also see the loss of divine immanence; the impact of literacy (Sumer;) and the rise of powerful priesthoods and kings.

Next, she describes the influence of two powerful mythologies: The Battle between Good and Evil and The Myth of the Fall. Misogyny: the origin and effects of the oppression of women culminating in the witch trials of the 15^th-18^thcenturies, and the silencing of woman’s voice. To include: Christianity’s repression of Animism or shamanic practices which had kept people in touch with nature. The deliberate repression of Pagan and Gnostic religion by the Emperor Theodosius. The destruction of the great Pagan temples such as Eleusis and Philae (Egypt) and the Great Library of Alexandria by Christian mobs (AD 381). The Emperor Justinian’s closing of the Platonic Academy in Athens in the 6^thcentury after 1000 years, which led to its teachers to join the great universities of Persia, bringing with them manuscripts of the Greek philosophers that many centuries later were to reach Europe via the Arabs in Spain. Then the rise of Islam in the 7^thcentury AD and its conquest of vast territories including Persia, Spain and North Africa.

Anne touches on the phenomenal artistic achievements during this era, inspired by religious faith and funded by the immense wealth of kings, princes and Popes – including Chartres and other great Cathedrals of France, Germany and England – as well as the universities in Europe, and the School of Chartres. It was the Crusades and contact with the Middle East that led to the geometric art of Islam in the great mosques of Persia and the influence of Islamic craftsmen on the doors and windows of Chartres. The age of the great explorers in the fifteenth century. The brutal conquest of South America by Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century. Further conquests by European countries were followed by the rise of modern empires. This whole story of war and conquest followed humanity’s separation from nature created by the belief in the transcendent God of the three patriarchal religions, and the loss of divine immanence.

She describes the two hemispheres of the brain and the gradual “takeover” by the left hemisphere – beginning with the influence of Plato – and the emphasis on the rational mind which thereafter dominated Western philosophy. The increasing control exercised by linear thinking that led to the loss of the relational, imaginative way of thinking of the right hemisphere (McGilchrist). The importance of the Renaissance and the brief return of right hemispheric consciousness that was subsequently lost in the Wars of Religion that devastated Europe in the 17^thcentury. The reconnection to Platonic thought through Marsilio Ficino. The Oration of Pico della Mirandola and the resurgence of interest in the body in art. The influence of the image of the Virgin Mary in art.

The Myth of the Goddess and The Dream of the Cosmos (chapter on the Solar Era)
Minou Reeves, Europe’s Debt to Persia (an enormous book but fascinating)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Videos on YouTube as well
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

The Rise of Science and Technology. The Dominance of the Old Story and Awakening to a New Story

In this final session, Anne discusses topics that include: the Enlightenment and the separation of Science from Religion beginning with Copernicus and Galileo; Newton’s great discoveries. Darwin and the Origin of Species; the rise of Science and the fading power of religion; and the ideologies of Communism and National Socialism (Nazism) which filled the gap left by the waning of religion. The separation between spirit and nature that was deeply embedded in the patriarchal religions was transmitted to Science from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries.

In Europe, Science came to reject God and the soul as illusory creations of the religious or superstitious mind, and as a consequence the creed or ‘philosophy’ of scientific materialism (Scientism) virtually controls modern secular culture. Four main theories of scientific materialism were widely taught in schools and universities: “Life has no script, no playwright, no producer — and no meaning.” (Yuval Harari, Homo Deus.)

We see how in 1945, the splitting of matter and the creation of the atomic bomb enabled us to create demonic weapons with which to destroy our enemies. The huge danger of nuclear weapons is the product of the linear thinking of the left hemisphere. The more power technology has given us, the greater the need for us to develop the morality to handle it. Technology and the digital revolution now control our species, and this has involved the loss of soul. World culture lacks a moral foundation. Through the influence of both patriarchal religion and science we see ourselves as separate from the planetary life of which we are a part, and this’malfunctioning’ brain has led to the four great dangers which face us: Climate Change, Nuclear War, Population Growth, Technological Insanity. Yet, during the last 100 years, in response to the danger of all the above, we are seeing a spiritual awakening of the Soul of Humanity through the rise of feminine consciousness and women’s struggle for the vote, access to education and parity with men.

In the field of Science, Quantum Physics has brought us the Internet, the computer, the cell phone and the media giants. It is also challenging the old materialist paradigm which has dominated western culture for 200 years, separating the observer from the observed. It is connecting us with each other, world-wide. Its discoveries prove that the whole universe is a unified field. Every atom of life is connected to every other atom, no matter how great the distance between them. It gives us a New Story and updates the old religious story to give us a totally different image of ourselves and the inseparable relationship between spirit (the Quantum Field) and matter: we don’t have consciousness; we are consciousness. We are co-creators with the expanding life of the universe.

The universe is becoming conscious of itself through our evolving consciousness and the discoveries science has made and is making. The implications of all this have not yet sunk in but the number of people aware of this revolution or revelation is growing exponentially. We have never been alone in the universe but are surrounded by orders of reality beyond reckoning. There is no death for consciousness. In our essence, we are immortal or infinite beings. We need to wake up to this New Story and change our relationship with the planet, transforming the beliefs and patterns of behaviour imprinted on us for thousands of years.

Ancient shamanic wisdom is returning to us now as we face the effects of the harm we have done to the planet. We cannot continue to dominate and control Nature for the advantage of our species. From the dreams and prophecies of the Hopi Indians, and others, including renowned cosmologists and scientists, comes the urgent message that we have to change our ways if we want to survive on this planet.

Faculty:

Anne Baring, PhD (Hons) is the author and co-author of seven books including The Myth of the Goddess, Evolution of an Image, The Mystic Vision, The Divine Feminine, and Soul Power: An Agenda for a Conscious Humanity. Her children’s book, The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time, has been honored with a Nautilus Gold Award for 2011. Anne’s new book, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul was published in 2013, and is the primary text for this course. Anne is a Jungian analyst, living near Winchester, England. Passionately interested in the fate of the Earth and the survival of our species in this critical time of evolutionary change, her work is devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the invisible dimension of the universe that is the source of all that we call life.

Gyorgyi Szabo, PhD serves as Ubiquity University’s Dean of Graduate Studies. She was a Co-Founder and Academic Dean of the Ervin László Center for Advanced Study (ELCAS). She served as Director of Research and Development of the Center’s Exploratoria Program. She was co-creator of the WorldShift International Foundation, and the WorldShift 2012 organizations, and currently serves as Member of the Advisory Board of the Memnosyne Foundation. In 2012, she founded and now serves as a President of UniverSoul, a Hub for Conscious Evolution in Paris, in association with Barbara Marx Hubbard. Gyorgyi lectures worldwide and has published papers in The Scientific and Medical Network’s Review, The Shift Network, and World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research. She translated from Italian to English The Basic Code of the Universe: The Science of the Invisible of Physics, Medicine and Spirituality by Dr Massimo Citro.

Pricing

BA Level: $100
MA Level: $200
PhD Level: $300
Audit-No Credit: $80 (no credit, access to course materials only)

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