Fundamental philosophical flaws... and a different perspective

Visions of the Rewilding Renaissance
#1

I imagine some of you have read ISHMAEL, so I will try not to be to repeatative here. Also, I know if Huby7 jumps in on this he will likely wish to share some of from that book so I will approach this from a little bit of a different angle.

Books have had probably thee most profound effect on my thoughts about civilization, why its f-ed up and why it doesn’t work. I imagine that is the case for most of you as well. One book I got my hands on before I even heard of ISHMAEL was THE FOUR WINDS by Alberto Villoldo.

It is a great book about Amazonian shamanism and how Western thinking differs from other more traditional perspectives on reality.

Here are some of my favorite qoutes from the book, let me know what you think…

The Western world, the ‘civilized’ nations, what is caled the ‘first world’ cultures, rule the Earth by right of their economic and military strength. And the philosophical foundation of the Western culture is based on a religion that teaches of the fall from grace, original sin, and the exodus from the Garden of Eden. This concept is fundamental to the mythology of the West, and it represents Nature as hostile and man as corrupt.
Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad and God said: ' Cursed is the ground on your account. In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return. And so, he drove them out and posted at the East of the Garden of Eden the cherubs and the flaming blade of a sword to guard the way to the tree of life.
It is such a peculiar myth. The emphasis is not man's relationship to his environment, to Nature, to the Garden, but man's relationship to himself as an outcast, fending for himself, becoming self-conscious in a hostile world. The Westerner has accepted this tradition, has promoted this concept through art and literature and philosophy. Indeed, it has become ingrained and second nature, has it not?
But, you end up with an entirely differently focus when the tradition of a culture is not founded on the fall from grace, where man was never banished from the Garden of Eden and lives close to Nature and Nature is a manifestation of the Divine.

This and other parts of the book had a huge impact on me. I realized how much the fundamental Christian mythology influences and infultrates all parts of Western culture. Even to an atheist, the myths still hold sway because of how they work under the surface and how theyare reinforced by everything and everyone (by Mother Culture).

The world to the Western mind is also one that is seperate from us, made of objects which are all disconnected from each other and most of them are lifeless. In the view of many traditional peoples, the world is alive. From a shaman’s point of view, everything is alive, aware and responsive in some way… even the very machines that we surround ourselves with. They too can teach us how we have seperated ourselves from the world and how we are destroying it by living out our lives guide by old and useless myths that insight our self-pity and fear.

How has the shaman’s or animistic perspectives change the way all of you see and interact with your world?

#2

How has it changed me? I can no longer live the way this fucked up civilization does. I just can’t make myself do it without wanting to commit suicide.

#3

Ay-men.

I know your story Urban Scout a bit from reading your great thread (which got erased :P) on Naturetalk.net. Cool to find you here.

I guess the questions I should have asked were: since you have become fed up and started interacting with the world differently, what has changed for you and in you? In example how has interacting with your world and conversing with animals, plants, stones, etc. on your own terms changed the way you feel and experience your world?

Beyond the bs system of government, beliefs and stories that make up our culture… beyond the assumption of a subject/object world, how do you see or imagine things working under the surface? What are your essential views of reality and how do they shape your daily experience?

I think I am getting closer to what I wanted to hear and talk about…

#4

i’m not sure if this is what you’re getting at, spider, but your post reminded me of some thoughts i formulated on how civilization’s presence affects the spirit world.

at first, i thought that the spirits had gone away. i thought that since we had crushed the rocks, riped up and paved over the soil, killed the plants, poisoned the water, smogged the air, starved the animals, and diverted the sacred springs into a concrete culvert that there was no place for the spirits to go. i thought that they had slinked off to distant mountains, sobbing as they went–a spirit-ual trail of tears that civilization had driven before it the same way it had driven the last cultures who still talked to the spirits.

but then i looked around me and had an epiphany: even thought it’s all broken up, everything around me is still from the Earth. this metal fire escape i’m sitting on used to be a living rock of sparkling ore in the ground. these plastic shoes that are called man-made are no more man-made than anything else. we can’t create matter; we can only divert it, separate it out and slap it together in different ways. the oil that made the vinyl that enshrouds my feet was once probably a thousand different dinosaurs who ate a million different plants that all sprang up from the Earth with their chlorophyll reaching up for the Sun.

the spirits that knew those plants and animals then, that lived in their blood and sap and changed with their lively changings didn’t go away. they’re still here, but they’ve been torn apart and ripped up from their place and scattered into a trillion different new homes.

this pc i’m typing on used to be oil and copper and silicone and i don’t know what else. those things lived in the ground. they had a place, and that place had spirit. and i think part of those spirits are still here beneath my fingers, but they’re being constantly bombarded with an energy that is sent coursing through them and past them, dancing in unnatural patrans, waiting at how many tiny little gates that keep opening and closing. all these things combine to make a new system–one that is connecting with other systems like it all the time, drinking energy patterns that it is being forced to recognize and dance with so that i can type some words and hit the “post” button.

the stones that make up the ny stock exchange have a spirit in them. the little runoff creek next to my house that channels the city streets’ water away has a spirit in it. the zipper on my hoodie has a spirit in it. the gum on the sidewalk has a spirit in it. but all these spirits are in a diaspora and are out of sorts in their new “homes”.

but i believe that once the civ starts breaking down and the plants and animals start taking back the land, once the roots break up the concrete, that the spirits will start feeling more at home and start making themselves more known.

#5

I read Ishmael, the Story of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization and from those books, I learned that my lifelong desire to live close to the earth was not a refusal to grow up, not an escapist attitude and irresponsible immaturity - the charges my family threw at me constantly - but was in reality proof that I was the only sane one in my family.

I read Endgame Vol 1 and 2, and Language Older Than Words and learned that being a person who desires to live a primitive life is actually dangerous, because I challenge the righteousness of those higher on the hierarchy. Those people need to put me down, to use me as an example so no one else will even THINK of such a life as I live. I learned that my refusal to play the game all of these years and “make something of myself” is what has saved me. I learned that my determination to raise my children myself, even if it meant living in utmost poverty is what saved them.

I read The 12th Planet and learned the reason WHY humanity has been trashing the planet. It really is an insane response isn’t it? To destroy one’s landbase is such an idiotic thing to do. Unless of course, one happens to have the mindset that Terra isn’t your landbase at all - it’s a mining colony. The principle theme of The 12th Planet is that homo sapien was a genetically modified combination of homo erectus and annunaki - the people that live on the 12th planet which comes around every 3600 years or so - and that they created us in order to be primitive workers for them in the mines on planet earth. So, of course, having created us, we would also acquire their mindset - which must be that since they were on earth only to mine for gold, silver and precious gems, and it was perfectly ok to trash the place, since they could just go back home again - then it stands to reason that the critter they created to mine for them would behave in a similar fashion. Finally - a reason for the insanity.

What are the changes in my life as a result of all of this? I am taking a more proactive approach toward self-sufficiency. Our goal is to turn this mountain into one giant natural farm - permaculture. I just bought 30 pinon pine trees (the only nut that has a chance to grow at this altitude) and 50 native plum trees. I’ll be transplanting raspberry bushes, buying more native plants that produce berries such as currants, buffaloberries, chokecherries and other plants like that. My husband and I are building a new house for ourselves and it will not be wired for electricity at all. We’re starting to buy lamp oil so we hopefully will have enough to last our lifetimes. We bought a hand-operated washing machine. We have a sawdust toilet which we’re using wood chips in because we make a lot of those with chipping up tree branches. We’re building a solar powered water heater. We don’t have any propane coming into our house at all - are so committed not to have this that we have a very small freezer that runs on the solar panels and freeze ice in that to put into an ice box instead of a refrigerator. When we move into our non-electric house, we intend to keep making ice here in this freezer and have an ice box in that house as well.

That’s some of the stuff we’re doing.
Snowflower

#6

Rix,

Beautiful story on the spirits in the materials. . . I have been trying to make sense of that aspect of our “man-made” world and I like your take. I had been thinking mostly along the lines of our speeding up of energy use and redistribution of energy. Like that oil under the earth as being concentrated energy of the sun, filtered through plants/whatever else makes it up, and also filtered through time. Our processes seem not that different in basic mechanics–moving and recombining different types of material (that are really all made of the same stuff, if you look behind the curtain, but identify as different rocks or metals at OUR level of perception) from earth’s most catastrophic/formative processes, just at a greatly increased rate of speed. Did that make any sense?

Snowflower,

I haven’t read the humanure book, but do you know of a post-tree chipper substitute for the sawdust in composting toilets? I guess if wood chips are working, an ax. . . but don’t you need quite a volume?

#7

Essentially, you want high carbon materials that will trap air pockets. So, yeah, sawdust, wood chips, straw, dead leaves…

It’s easier to get ahold of the necessary quantity than you might think.

#8

Thanks for the comment, Yarrow Dreamer.

I actually wrote that before I started “studying” animism with the depth I have started giving it recently. As I read Abrams’ Spell of the Sensuous and listen to the likes of Martin Prechtel, my concept of the spirits comes closer to the spirits themselves. At the time, I thought of the spirits as residing “in” things, where as now, I think of the spirits as existing intrinsically as part of the things.

I don’t know if the differentiation resounds clearly, but it feels like a big difference in perspective to me. Although I still feel like the breaking and diasporic nature of what civilization has done to the spirits dissettles them and likely silences (or gags them)–or maybe their silence merely comes from our inability to listen to them anymore.

#9

Mmm, inablility to listen. As a parent, maintaining awareness of the cultural baggage I pass on disturbs me to no end. From birth, both parent and child are taught to ignore elimination cues and cover up that icky stuff with a nice, clean, sanitary diaper–the first wedge in the oneness. At four, my boy still can hardly stand to stay inside, I hope that city life/civ doesn’t make him forget his wonder too soon. A thousand times a day I have to stop and reframe my answer to his “whys”, realizing the separateness (from each other, the world) I was taught as I grew up soaked in deep and sneaky.

I wonder what explanations he comes up with on his own but can’t articulate, what he started out with. I remember my thoughts as a child, that somehow the “pieces” of the world–each cell, each creature, the clouds, etc.–somehow just “know” each other and how to work together and just do–so simple, no explanation needed.

The Spell of the Sensuous, gotta get back to that one–had to return it before I was done.

#10
I read Ishmael, the Story of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization and from those books, I learned that my lifelong desire to live close to the earth was not a refusal to grow up, not an escapist attitude and irresponsible immaturity - the charges my family threw at me constantly - but was in reality proof that I was the only sane one in my family.

I know EXACTLY what you mean.

my family kept encouraging me to see a phyciatrist because they thought something was surely wrong with my head because for some reason or another i just didn’t like having a job, imagine that.

In high school i had my mom read the short story in My Ishmael about jeremy i think his name was, the boy who was very talented yet wandered around because he didn’t find anything that interested him in this world, depressed and alone he drowned himself in a lake. i wanted her to maybe understand that like jeremy i am smart and talented yet dont’ find anything i want to do in this civilzation. her response? she claimed the only reason i read Daniel quinn’s books is because it reinforces my ideas that i can be lazy and not work. then she recomended a book from the ‘other side’. i aksed what kind of book, she said “you know the one that says grow up and get a job” i dont talk with her much anymore.

WildeRix:

I understand. The spirits are always here, in the forest and in our home. just like “nature” is in the forest and in our home. we are just human, we cannot break natures laws no more than any other organism, and we cannot get rid of the spriits, such things are not in our power. what we can do and have been doing is distancing ourselves from them as much as possible. this is creating a huge spiritual deficiency. and as this deficiency grows people of this culture seem to fill it by becoming more religious. but this doesn’t satisfy them, because the taker religions are false.

#11

Well spoken, NTR. I like your imagery of the deficiency and the attempt to fill it.

#12
The world to the Western mind is also one that is seperate from us, made of objects which are all disconnected from each other and most of them are lifeless.

Richard Heinberg has recently posted an article about a unified theory of physics that describes the universe not as matter, but as motion. I think that you could easily tie it to animism.

#13

Yeah, in the same way that new age thinkers ue quantum physics to justifytheir beleif that if you just think hard enoough, you can change things.

I did come to this realization from another direction. I read Richard Dawkins. I studied psychology. The more I learned how people work the more I realized that we aren’t meant to live this way. We grew up, we evolved to live a certain way and we’re doing it wrong. All the unhappiness, all the stress, it all comes from trying to not be the animal. I’ve never had a great spiritual connection to the world, but I didn’t need to awaken like that to see that this isn’t how we’re meant to live. A simple, impartial analysis of the system will show it’s not a functional one.

#14

In a nutshell. I like it.

#15

I’m still pretty early on in this and I am constantly learning new things, but one of the most striking things I have been wrestling with is how deeply-rooted the notion of “separateness” is to my understanding of absolutely everything.

For example, back when I was doing the peak oil activism thing, most of the people I met were keen on building “consensus,” “relationship,” “community,” etc ad nauseum, as part of their response to peak oil. And in general I think I think a lot of foofy left-wing types are big on that stuff to begin with.

But I have realized that all those things assume separation as the fundamental state of being, not just of our culture, but across the board. For example, they might hold workshops designed to teach “consensus-building” techniques, and pattern their teachings after indigenous “consensus-building” ways that are supposedly an example of how humans can overcome their separation and disagreement successfully. But now I’m seeing that that entire concept is just bizarre… there is no indigenous consensus-building in the way we think of it, because there is no separation for them in the first place. Their consensus isn’t consensus, its something else we probably don’t have words for.

Dwelling on this separation thing has led me to a disagreement with Quinn’s interpretation of Genesis that eating the forbidden fruit represents mankind’s mistaken idea of himself as a god. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, their immediate reaction was to notice they were naked, and to cover their nakedness. That’s not the reaction of someone who happened to stumble into the idea of himself as a god… that’s the reaction of someone who suddenly became aware of an “other.” I think the “fall of man” mythology is oral history of an actual, traumatic cognitive shift that occurred among certain tribes in a certain place and time, from oneness with nature to separation from it. And, once that separation is in place, it’s an almost instantaneous slide into “self=good, other=evil” and then shorthand for that equation: “good and evil.” The tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was literally – in as literal a way as mythology can get – exactly that, without any further extrapolation necessary.

And this, in turn, was the piece that brought the whole Jenga tower of Christianity down for me, which is something I’ve been trying to break free of for 20 or more years. I was raised as a hard-core, bible-thumping, tongue-talking, holy roller… I went to jesus camps and all the rest. That kind of indoctrination doesn’t go away and it has been like a carcass strapped to my back all my adult life. But now I’m free of it. When I’m really old, I will probably consider this change in my thinking a major turning point in my life generally.

So that’s how I would answer the question, long-winded as it is.

-Paula

#16

Out of curiousity, if we go with the idea that “consensus-building” was/is radically different (or entirely absent) for indigenous people due to a lack of separation, do you think that learning “consensus-building” techniques are a step towards losing that sense of separation or do you see it reinforcing concepts of separation?

#17

[quote=“jhereg, post:16, topic:111”][quote author=Paula link=topic=87.msg3348#msg3348 date=1186188951]
they might hold workshops designed to teach “consensus-building” techniques, and pattern their teachings after indigenous “consensus-building” ways that are supposedly an example of how humans can overcome their separation and disagreement successfully. But now I’m seeing that that entire concept is just bizarre… there is no indigenous consensus-building in the way we think of it, because there is no separation for them in the first place. Their consensus isn’t consensus, its something else we probably don’t have words for.
[/quote]

Out of curiousity, if we go with the idea that “consensus-building” was/is radically different (or entirely absent) for indigenous people due to a lack of separation, do you think that learning “consensus-building” techniques are a step towards losing that sense of separation or do you see it reinforcing concepts of separation?[/quote]

Well, that’s just an example and I could be totally wrong of course. I guess I see it more as an exercise in futility than anything. I would think it would take 15 or 20 or more years of living in close proximity before a group of people could build up a level of trust enough to make consensus work. I don’t see how the trust required could possibly be had by a group of people who come together suddenly for some purpose, then go their separate ways at the end of the day.

#18

Hmm, yeah, that’s a good point.