“Life and love are inseparable from each other,” said Meher Baba. Love, humanity, nature, and consciousness have co-evolved together. Long ago, humanity was one with love, one with all of creation, then we separated, and ever since, we have been trying to merge with the Beloved. We developed rituals and ceremonies that brought us back into wholeness, but when these magical ceremonies decreased in power, we developed stories to foster our connection. The era of great myths began in goddess cultures, where the Divine feminine Face of God was most prominent. The Great Goddess was comfortable in all the realms: in the heavens, on Earth, and in the dark mysteries of the underworld. But with the rise of gods and heroes around the middle of the Bronze age, the masculine principle became elevated, and the feminine became suppressed and marginalized. While this has resulted in some important scientific innovation, it has also caused imbalances both to our world soul (Anima Mundi) and to the individual psyches of humanity. “What we are experiencing is tantamount to a shamanic dismemberment. We need to dismember in order to remember; we need to put ourselves back together again in ways that are healthy and whole. We are compelled to reconstruct the whole out of what has been torn apart; we are being called to dig deeper into our psyche. When we go deep, we find Indigenous and feminine wisdom—and original love— buried in the depths of our unconscious.”
Today, we will freely discuss how we can recover and redeem the perennial wisdom of Original love, as well the wisdom of Indigenous peoples and the Divine feminine. We will also welcome whatever else wants to come forward into this sacred dialogue with our esteemed guests Anne Baring and James O’Dea.
Anne Baring, who I was first introduced to by some of my most treasured women friends, has for the past half century been doing her utmost to recover and redeem the Feminine Face of God, initially inspired by a powerful dream she had (which she can share if she wishes today). A Jungian analyst, Anne is the author or co-author of nine books, including The Myth of the Goddess (with Jules Cashford), The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time (with Andrew Harvey) , The Divine Feminine (with Seilla Elworhty, and more recently The Dream of The Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul, and Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.
James O’Dea, who is the first person I gave my newly completed draft of a manuscript for Original Love to, is, similar to Anne, a long-term advocate for the awakening of soul, former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the director of the Washington office of Amnesty International and the president of the Seva Foundation, and also the author of several important books, including Cultivating Peace, The Conscious Activist: Where Activism meets Mysticism, Soul Awakening Practice, and more recently some books with visionary artist Marika Popovits.
Glenn Aparicio Parry's latest book Original Love was published on February 13, 2026 and is available wherever books or ebooks are sold.