The Disease

To quote Niko Bellic. main character of the computer game Grand Theft Auto IV: 

The creature that could do this, doesn't have a soul.

Maybe that's my big problem in life, trying to have a soul while being a member of a species whose success has been built on murder, cruelty, greed and destruction, and the machinery for producing same. Or perhaps as is told in Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic dystopian science fiction novel "We," the soul is a disease which can be caught and which can be cured, albeit by drastic means.

I don't have anything further to add to the video. It speaks eloquently for itself.

Water

photo by Marlon Felippe

After a number of diversions, getting back to talking about animism now. :)

An old friend from out of town came by the other day, and in our varied discussions (which are usually pretty philosophical) he mentioned that it is difficult for him to believe in a God that doesn't show himself. We are both formerly Christians. I said that the beings I encounter, I encounter in actual experience. Gods and goddesses being one level of abstraction removed from actual experience, I don't have too much to do with them. A single monotheistic god is, as it were, two levels removed from actual experience, as such a god has nothing in the world which in any particular way is "his" any more than any other thing. Indeed monotheistic religions have tended to regard the actual world as something completely separate from god, which god may nevertheless "observe". The world is an object and the monotheistic god is a subject.

I told him that there was at least one exception to my agnosticism concerning goddesses: I believe in a Goddess of Water. I said that nevertheless, I do not regard that goddess as something completely apart from my experience of actual water. Mother Water, I call her, wonderful and fearful in equal proportions.

He looked at me rather incredulously and said something like, "two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen." ;)

And here I think that we are getting to something important. To him, water was composed of molecules of one atom of oxygen, two of hydrogen, period. 

To me, water was rainwater and swamp water, the power of flash floods and the gentle dew. Cool pool water, hot bath water, the water that makes up most of my body and yours, the water that makes up most of the mass of plants. Storm surge, hurricanes and tsunamis. Lakes, rivers, streams, a cold drink on a hot day, stinging winter rain, fog, fluffy white clouds. Icicles, snow, sleet. Fresh spring water. And yet here he was saying that the "real" water was one part oxygen and two of hydrogen, and that this in some sense was the "real" water. And in fact most people if asked would agree with him, which strikes me as rather strange. When asked to explain the disconnect between this abstract water and all the things I mentioned, probably most people would say that all these other things are either effects or states of water or my subjective experience of them, or water in connection with other things. Effects of water in certain circumstances.

What we are doing is taking some of our observations of something, scientific observations in this case, and saying that this is the real "something", whatever it is, rather than some of our other observations of something, which we call the subjective observations. All of this is dependent on our being able to completely objectify the "real world," which we aren't actually able to do. Nobody knows ultimately what "the world is made of," and some of the more honest scientists will admit this. We have words for what it is made of, and we therefore imagine that therefore we know what it is made of, but when you start getting down to the nitty gritty you realize we know very little. 

We speak of atoms, and that the atoms are made of fundamental particles like protons and neutrons and electrons, but much below that (and above that, even,) we are talking about "nodes of observabability". Neutrons, protons and electrons are made of quarks, which are the observable bits inside the particles - quarks which are essentially only tiny points in relation to the overall space of the neutron or whatever. What is the space between the quarks?

All sorts of brilliant scientific experiments have gone to show that the "empty space" between the quarks is simply another name for our inability to see what is going on there. We call it empty not because it does not exist, it in fact has a mass even, but because we don't have a clue what it is. We can't observe it. Atoms are in fact mostly composed of this "nothing", and hence you are mostly composed of this "nothing," but the nothing is not a nothing. It's just our inability to see.

For hundreds of years, Western science has been captivated by the idea that it is possible to have a complete understanding of the workings of everything - that you can put down the mechanics of everything on paper and then at some point you can say, "we're finished, we now understand everything." What we are beginning to realize now is that this will never happen. We will never understand everything, the universe is still mysterious. If there is no "bedrock" we can dig down to and say, "Now we can say conclusively what is and isn't," this also undermines privileged frames of reference. We can no longer say that science arrives at the "truth", but only at a truth which is more or less useful in certain frames of reference. If I were building a rocket to the Moon, I would use Newtonian physics because that is more likely to work than using woodworking techniques. It doesn't make Newtonian physics a description of the ultimately true reality, because there isn't such a thing and will never be such. If I were building an end table, I would probably focus more on the woodworking and less on the Newtonian physics. We can engage the world in various ways for various ends, but "truth" is pretty much out the window. Things are true only in narrow relative senses, as particular engagements with particular things for particular ends.

And so you say water is "one of oxygen and two of hydrogen" and I say she is a powerful goddess, two parts a benevolent, life-giving force and one part destructive and terrible. I don't say you are wrong. I certainly don't say I am wrong either.

N O I S E

"Have you ever considered, any real freedoms Willard?

Freedoms from the opinions of others.

Even the opinions of yourself?"

 -Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

Some days it seems that the human world consists primarily of noise. On one level, of course that's not true, the world is full of people cooking dinner or building houses or plowing ground, sensible purposeful activities. But the mental, emotional and spiritual atmosphere if you will that they exist in while they do these things may have little or nothing to do with actual life. 

I am in the position of not intentionally watching television at all, but my mother who has senile dementia has cable news on around the clock. It helps orient her to her position in space, I guess, since she is almost blind, and gives her the reassurance of human voices. So quite against my will, I am periodically confronted with the reality of what is transmitted on such channels. And what I am confronted with is nauseating in its unreality. I go out into the yard and commune with the real world of trees and grasses and dead insects. My cat eating foxtail grass (for a carnivore he sure likes grass a lot). I have a nibble too, suck the green juice from the leaves and spit out the cellulose. 

And then right inside the door I am accosted with the unreal world that comes through that insidious black cable. Full of insane ideas about what life is that are totally disconnected to reality as I understand it. Personalities, controversy, sensationalism, consumerism, voyeurism. All sorts of isms flowing through that black cable. Like shiny demons that are trying to grab you and pull you in so that you will become a part of their black cable world. 

And it is easy to say, well nobody takes any of this seriously. Nobody takes seriously what they see on television, any more than they take seriously what is on the internet. I don't think that's true, I think it worms its way into your mind and is intended to. Even if you don't have television, radio or internet, as long as you are involved with people in some way you will bump up against the noise. The noise is full of judgements that aren't based on anything except whether that judgement will make the one judging feel good about himself and his life. Hardly ever does anyone really say shut up and don't judge. We are all human idiots, where do we get off judging anything?

Of course this noise existed long before cable television, long before radio. It's just on steroids now.

"I've seen horrors.  Horrors that you've seen.

But you have no right to call me a murderer.
You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that.

But you have no right to judge me.

...without feeling, without passion, without judgement... without judgement... because it is judgement that defeats us."

-Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola in the movie Apocalypse Now had these words placed in the mouth of a madman, Col. Kurtz. A man perhaps driven mad by being too honest. They sent him to war, but a war bounded by hypocritical rules designed to build the illusion that they were humane people who were in Vietnam to help people. Col. Kurtz took war seriously, too seriously to believe any of that. If he was sent into battle, he went. But he didn't play games with it. He went all out, total war. For this, his keepers in the Pentagon declared him insane and sent people to kill him. 

And yet his keepers in the Pentagon, and the talking heads on cable news, were motivated by a peculiar sort of moralism. Not a moralism that Jesus would recognize, but behind it all there is a kind of "ought" involved, and if not involved because it is unknown, then there is a search for what the "ought" should be.  Because unquestioned in all of this is the idea that there is an "ought" involved, someone has to come out the winner, someone has to be labeled the loser, whether you "ought" to buy a Subaru or "ought" to support medical marijuana or not or whether Egypt "ought" to do such and such about their supposed "freedom". You can't mold human behavior without an "ought" of some kind. And that is very much what it is about. In our society, the idea that you "ought" to be a good person has to some extent been replaced with the idea that you "ought" not to be a "loser," a state defined by the absence of certain properties or the possession of other properties. Lots of people who don't take moral imperatives very seriously still take self esteem and status pretty seriously.

The stench of human conceit is all over such things as these. All lies, all hypocrisy. None of this has even remotely to do with the real world. There are no actual "oughts" in the real world, and the real world is not language or ideology or ideas, and far exceeds what human beings think about it. Such freedom as exists, consists first in freedom from the ideas and opinions of others. Not that you won't be exposed to such ideas and opinions, but that you understand them in the light of human conceitedness. It consists second in freedom from your own ideas and opinions. To understand that you are most true to yourself when you are in a state of nonverbal nonconceptual feeling-in-the-moment, something that inherently can't be universalized to anything else, or even to yourself at other times. Something that is not expressible. It's not a position, it is not a dogma, it is not an ought. Simply being-with-the-world, now.

I had to stop being-with-the-world in order to make this post, and I can already see that, and already feel disgusted with this post because of it. Was it an error? Am I "oughting" you? Am I also just contributing to the noise now?

"This Dharma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment ...and if I were to teach the Dharma and if others would not understand me, that would be tiresome for me.

Enough now with teaching what only with difficulty I reached.

This Dharma is not easily realized by those overcome with aversion & passion. What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow — those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness, won't see. 

 

As the Blessed One reflected thus, his mind inclined to dwelling at ease, not to teaching the Dharma."

~ Gautama Siddhartha, Ayacana Sutra, deciding not to teach anyone Buddhism.

 

The War Was Never Over

http://www.nbcdfw.com/video/#!/news/local/Arlington-Police-Raid-Farm-Searching-for-Marijuana--Nothing-Found/219514061

NOTE: Some of my recent posts might not seem to have anything directly to do with animism. They are very much still on topic in a holistic sense. I cannot revere the living beings and spirits of this world and not take offense when they are desecrated. When human beings are persecuted for trying to live in a way in balance with nature, I cannot help but take offense at that too.

I was very surprised that there even is an ecovillage in the DFW area. A stronger bastion of conformity and the status quo can hardly be imagined than this place. I guess it goes to show that wild weeds can grow up even through the hardest concrete.

Okay, so on a flimsy pretext of a drug raid (no drugs were ever found), SWAT teams at the cost of tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars raided the Garden of Eden ecovillage in Arlington, Texas, waved machine guns at unarmed people, waved machine guns at mothers with infant children, and compelled the inhabitants under threats to destroy their own property, destroy the FOOD crops they were depending on for food in the coming year, destroy the ecological systems that they had in place and they seized tons of their property in the form of construction materials. The SWAT goons remained encamped on the property for TEN HOURS, long after they could have assured themselves that no pot was growing among the tomato plants. It was only tomato plants. Conveniently, Arlington Police used the raid on GofE's vegetable cartel to do some code enforcement as part of a long-running battle between the City and the inhabitants of the GofE.

Free country? It was never free. Talk to the Native Americans about how free the country was after the Man got here. The Man is still here, his nature hasn't changed, he's just become a bit more subtle. While I don't know if any of the inhabitants of the GofE are actually members of the First Nations, I don't think the comparison is far fetched. You violate people's rights, destroy their food and point guns at them because they aren't part of your civilization and don't want to be. Perhaps more to the point, they aren't domesticated. Towards the end of the Indian Wars, it wasn't the native people's existence that was seen as the issue. The government and citizens were on the whole prepared to let them keep existing. It was their lack of assimilation into white culture that was viewed as the problem. Their lack of domestication. It's not mainly a racial issue, had the original inhabitants of this continent been wearing white skin but practicing Native culture, I am willing to bet the same thing would have happened to them anyway. It's primarily an issue of control.

Settled peoples always had a terrible fear of the wild, that which was outside their control, not fenced in, couldn't be controlled or bribed or commanded. Or enslaved. The wild has always been the enemy of this civilization. It is still the enemy.

Lest someone think that the GofE was some sort of eyesore in the neighborhood, Google Maps shows that it is surrounded on one side by used car lots and auto salvage yards, and on the other side by some sort of rural airstrip. Compared to the auto yards, the GofE does look like Eden. Judge for yourself.

Auto Salvage Yards And Used Car Lots Next to GofE:

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Garden of Eden Ecovillage:

View Larger Map

It wasn't ultimately the code issues or some spurious idea of marijuana cultivation. Even if they had been growing marijuana, what kind of world do we live in where machine-gun toting thugs can run roughshod over your homes because of the kind of plants you grow? I don't smoke marijuana and have no intention to start, but putting people in prison because they are burning vegetables and inhaling the smoke is simply insane. 

It is a measure of how insane our world is that this is taken as a matter of course, that the Law can take away your freedom because of what plants you ingest.

They have always felt, instinctively, that plants are dangerous and suspect, and they are, because plant wisdom is not something they can control. It's wild wisdom. I don't currently smoke pot or munch peyote or eat mushrooms, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that plant wisdom is exceedingly threatening to the status quo. Ingesting the plants is just the tip of the iceberg, that's just an introduction and a how-do-you-do. "How do you do, I'm a plant, and I am about to change your world." It is not merely to avoid poisoning that mothers everywhere warn their children not to put strange plants in their mouths. Because only wild things eat wild things. Because if they do eat them, they might become wild themselves.

Ultimately the real issue behind the raid was disobedience, not being a good slave, dissent from the status quo, people being obstinately free. The City of Arlington must be held accountable for these violations of their human dignity. The war against the wild and the free didn't end when the Native Americans were robbed of their land and forced onto reservations. It continues today, with some new players, but same war. The plants and animals of this land have been feeling the brunt of the war from the day our imperialist culture arrived on these shores until today. The war was never over, it will never be over until that culture finally implodes from the accumulated burden its own evils.

This is the Eight Sign: You will see many youth, who wear their hair long like my people, come and join the tribal nations, to learn their ways and wisdom.

~Hopi Prophecy

Si Wa Wata Wa, an elder of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico, 1903

Let X Make A Statement...

"There's a word for it 
And words don't mean a thing 
There's name for it 
And names make all the difference in the world 

Some things can never be spoken 
Some things cannot be pronounced 
That word does not exist in any language 
It will never be uttered by a human mouth"

~Talking Heads, "Give Me Back My Name" 

One of the more underappreciated gems on the "Little Creatures" album. With so few words, so much is said. Ironically so, because the song is about words in a sense. The cover of the album is strangely animistic, with smiling or frowning mountains and clouds and continents with faces, and people riding panthers of some sort. In the distance, the landscape appears flooded.

The contrast: words and names. Words are proper for things, names are proper for beings. There are things, knowledge, awareness, experience present in beings that will never be present in words. Is this not your own very practical experience? No one will ever in this world know all that is in your heart and mind. In my own experience, I know that I do not know everything worth knowing, but I have friends and they know many things that I as a human being am not equipped to know alone. Do I have roots that reach into the Dreaming, like trees do? If I do, I know that they are not as strong or deep as their roots. They show me. 

Same with people, if you encounter something you don't know, I bet you probably know someone who does know it. But even after they tell you, your knowing that one thing doesn't render their knowing redundant. If you extract one fact from someone who has worked with automotive repair their whole life, you can have that fact. Their knowing of auto repair however, the work and care they have put into it all their lives, you don't have and wouldn't unless you spend as long as they have on it, maybe not even then, and there is only so much time in one life.

Of all the forms of human hubris, and there are many, perhaps the worst is to believe that we can encapsulate everything worth knowing in words. We know nothing. Hell, even scientists say we know practically nothing about the universe really, we only know the easy bits. Most of the universe is made up of this stuff we named dark matter and dark energy, but naming it doesn't mean we really have a clue what it is. We don't have an effing clue what it is. We cannot even be positive that the words "dark matter and energy" even remotely refer to what it is, that there is really any "stuff" there in our common understanding, it is something completely not understood. And yet people go through life all the time thinking that they have everything all lined up neat and tidy, a world encapsulated in words. They don't. They don't have one freaking clue what the world is. None of us do. Just for some sick reason it makes us more secure to think we do, but we're clueless. 

Having friends who know more doesn't ultimately resolve the mystery of the world, it just allows us to know more about some things than we did. And sometimes it allows the mystery to deepen and expand, or rather it disrupts our belief that there isn't much mystery. The mystery is already as deep as deep can be. 

There are things I have experienced, profound things, that I will never be able to tell you. Those words do not exist. Only the Dreaming contains all those dreams, and "the Dreaming" is too, just a name. A name for something I cannot tell you and do not completely know, any more than I can completely tell you about yourself or completely know who you are. You are ultimately a mystery that transcends my words or anyone else's. Even your own. 

You must dive into such mysteries yourself, but go with friends. With names, not words. 

Let X make a statement
Let breath pass through those cracked lips
That man was my hero
And now that word has been taken from us

Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth

Snow

photo by: Paul Jerry, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

I'll be honest with you. Yes, the planet is in the midst of an ecological meltdown, species lost every day, the climate getting warmer in ways that are unprecedented in the last several million years. Ecosystems are going under the bulldozer and chainsaw all the time and the human population is growing far beyond the ability of a consumer society to keep supplying all 7 billion of us with the crap demanded by it without destroying large swaths of the planet. More and more of the planet is starting to look like this:

View Larger Map

Yes all of this is true. But even if by some miracle we could continue doing what we are doing for hundreds of years yet, I would be completely against it happening. I am against the human hegemony of the planet. I am against the Human Empire. I want to put human beings back in their place. I speak for the non-human beings, the plants and animals that want their effing planet back.

You can call me an enemy of humankind, progress and all things right and good and happy if you like, go right ahead. It ain't gonna hurt my feelings none. I don't think it's true though. Obviously, human hegemony over the planet is bad for the planet, you can take one look at the map above and see that. A few hundred years ago, this continent was green and wild from one shore to the other: you can't say that endless strips of Quik-E-Marts, Exxon stations and strip malls instead of forests and prairies did the other biological inhabitants of the continent any good. Obviously it did not. That's 17% of the land mass of the planet that went from completely wild to what we have now in a few hundred years. Most of the damage was done in the last 150 years.

However, I don't think that the human hegemony over the planet is all that great for humans either. Sure, it's great for their total numbers, at least for the time being, but is quantity everything? Look at that map again, imagine all the little people on it. Almost all of those people are living under conditions that the original inhabitants of this continent, and in fact their own ancestors if you go back far enough, would almost certainly call slavery. They wake when someone tells them to, they go where someone tells them to, they do what someone tells them to until finally they can leave, they fight nerve-destroying traffic jams to get home to watch entertainment someone else has programmed, how are they not on the whole slaves? On top of which, they live lives in which any real contact with nature is mostly reserved for "vacations", those moments of freedom that good slaves get every year or so.

They are much more comfortable than their ancestors, absolutely yes. Well tended domestic sheep are probably more comfortable than wild sheep. Are we just domesticated animals, bred to fatten the account books of our masters instead of bred for wool shearing and meat? I consider that an ignoble fate if so. For that matter, what of the animals we raise for food under the inhumane conditions of industrial agriculture? Sure, there are a lot of them, way more than there ever could be in nature in fact. Should they be grateful for that? Would you be?

via the Humane Farming Association

Our human population is supported by a dachau-like machinery of mass agriculture, in which animals live under intolerable conditions prior to their untimely demise. Many people of course, the urban poor for instance, don't have much choice but to support this monument to Man's thoughtlessness. If you live in a city, low-cruelty food is expensive, potentially many times more expensive. One reason why there shouldn't be millions of people living all packed together in cities all over the planet. In a saner world, most of those people would be on their own small plots of land, raising their own food.

Of course, if you think animals shouldn't count and it doesn't matter how horrific their conditions are, I can't convince you otherwise. You sir or madame are simply an asshole and ought not to exist, and I hate you. May you die and be hunted by wild things in the afterlife until such time as you can reincarnate as someone's livestock. A pig maybe. If a superior alien race should do this to you, raise you in inhumane conditions until your untimely death, I am sure you would simply smile and remark, "well they are the superior species after all! Gosh it must be swell to be superior!"

But you're not the superior species. You're just a species. You didn't make the universe appear magically out of your ass, you are just one species among many on this planet. Get off your high horse, human.

I am not against meat. I am against fucking up the animal's life while they are alive. You want to kill them, fine, but let them live a decent life in the meantime. Not sure we humans can ask for much more than that.

And industrial agriculture ruins more than pigs lives. Our monoculture system of agriculture destroys whole environments for crops. All agriculture does this to some extent when it takes over a land, but in a well-ordered organic/permaculture farm, at least the biodiversity goes back up afterwards (though the original species may be still largely gone). Industrial agriculture destroys ecosystems and puts nothing in its place except monocrops kept artificially going by inputs of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. This doesn't simply destroy the land the farm is on, it messes up surrounding ecosystems too.

So we have the unnatural production of crops, the inhumane production of animals, and let us not forget, the domestication of the human being herself, in a process that lays waste to the natural world and alienates people from a productive relationship with their environment, alienates them from actual productive work and the fruits of their labors, makes any real security impossible as the job market continually convulses and in the end alienates people from each other too. So that the rich can get richer, maybe they'll buy a new planet some day. And what do we as average humans get out of this deal? Oh, that's right, a more comfortable life. Lattes in the morning and sleeping pills at night as you shuttle from your pointless work to your equally pointless entertainment, eating tortured animals converted into quasi-food pumped full of chemicals for the benefit of megacorporations. Because they sure aren't in your food to do you any good. That crap is in your food to make you eat more of it, and so benefit someone else's bottom line. Probably the same crap they put in the pig feed to fatten up those poor creatures. Hope nobody starts eyeballing your bacon...

You might be as domesticated as those unfortunate pigs above, but at least you are more comfortable. That's the important thing.

Right, carry on then, sorry I mentioned it. Silly me.

 * * *

Why did I name this post Snow? In a world of increasing global warming, snow might become a rare visitor to many places it used to be regularly found in in winter. Places where it used to snow sometimes, might never see snow in a future world. I had been thinking a lot about what is happening to the planet lately, what's happening to us too, and frankly wishing that a global pandemic would cut human numbers down significantly. If that makes me a bad man in your eyes, go ahead and think that.

When thinking about these versions of apocalypse, either an apocalypse of environmental collapse and humans effing up the planet and themselves yet more, or else a nice global pandemic giving us a reboot, visions of snow would come into my mind all the time and I wondered why. Why snow?

Of course, such a drastic reboot is not at all uncommon in mythology. Hopi mythology states that there were four previous worlds to this one, and in each case the worlds and people in them went terribly wrong and a remnant had to leave for the next world. This one being our last chance, there apparently aren't any more worlds after this. However they do have a prophecy which I have mentioned in other posts, that this world too would go through a purge and hopefully a remnant would be left to start over. Hopefully as in, I don't think there are any guarantees that come with that.

Of course for people in countries with a Judeo-Christian background, the legend of Noah and his ark is a familiar one. Quite similar to the Hopi myth in a sense, except on fewer occasions. People were being very evil, and so Jehovah told Noah to build an ark and put a survival remnant of people and animals and so on in it, because he was about to unload some whupass in the form of a flood. And so for forty days and nights, the remnant of the Earth bobbed around in the waves while JHWH was unloading the aforementioned divine whupass, and then the rain stopped and the rainbow came out, as a sign that it was over.

And I thought, "was that it?" Snow. As in, after a long traumatic period of global warming, perhaps snow will return to places it had once left. Snow will build up the ice caps, build up the North Pole again, build up the pack ice in the seas. As a sort of future rainbow, it makes a certain amount of sense.

It's a happy thought anyway, a thought of a future time AFTER global warming. :) I only wish I could be there to see it. Who knows, maybe in some other life I will.

Drumming

Did a little drumming on my vlog today, thought I would share. :)

Astonishment

Most of my blog posts are sort of mini-essays, this isn't one of those. Just sort of sharing stuff this time I guess.

Tobacco is obviously a powerful plant in my life, one that I will likely never fully extricate myself from. I have switched from cigarettes to a pipe, which is very different. It's impossible to hurry a pipe, you have to take your time. Probably more of the ingestion of psychoactive herb takes place through your mouth than your lungs in a pipe, just because you have to puff a lot to keep it lit. You don't get that "cocainelike" rush with a pipe that you do with cigarettes, but it does get the job done. I think it is a much more meditative experience, pipe smoking. On the whole, while I miss the probably rather unhealthy rush of cigarettes, I am pretty happy with the change. They do stink to high heaven, but then if I go out into the front yard the mixture of the smell of pipe tobacco with the smell of the fig tree is a truly sublime fragrance.

Doing my prayers this morning I fell into a trance, which I usually do, but this was an exceptionally powerful one. Thing is though, it completely defies any attempt of mine to explain what I was experiencing. One of the emotions associated with it was tremendous astonishment, I can't explain. Like I was staring into the mystery of being. It was quite like I had just fallen really deeply into the present, but the present seemed to be exuding "mythologies" that I cannot precisely describe. My breath slowed down to practically stopping. I was still seeing exactly what was there, that was the strange thing, everything was the same and yet totally different. It's like we don't slow down enough typically to actually be present with the things around us, and suddenly I was totally with them and saw that they were powerfully mysterious somehow. That's the best I can do to explain. We don't slow down enough to see anything.

Of course the main or at least first activity in the prayer session is thanking and wishing well, thanking the plants and animals that keep you alive when you eat their bodies, wishing my neighbors the trees well, expressing grief at the damage done to Mother Earth and expressing gratitude for what isn't damaged, and so on.

I also had a wonderful drumming session with my new hand drum, very satisfying. It's just a wonderfully sensuous experience, feeling the drum head under your fingers (no sticks), dragging the fingertips across it to make a sort of scritchy sound, losing yourself in the flying of fingers and the deep resonance of the instrument.

So often I feel like I am not up for a prayer session, don't have the energy or my mind feels clouded or whatever, but when I do it I always feel like it is the best thing that happens all day.

The Lost Language of Plants

"Plants have long been primary teachers for those who travel deep into the heart of the world, for those who seek the soul teaching that only the wild can bring." 
~Stephen Harrod Buhner

Regrettably Youtube for whatever reason won't allow embedding of the video I wanted to show you in blogger, you can see it at: http://youtu.be/xFaZE4bzJXM  In this video, environmentalist Lierre Keith of the radical environmental group Deep Green Resistance talks about her own coming into awareness of the intelligence of plants and about the book "The Lost Language of Plants" by author, teacher, lecturer, and herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner. You may also want to check out this interview with Stephen starting at http://youtu.be/asw0_DaA85Y

I had a dream just before waking this morning in which my brother Adam and my cat Mango were teaching me how to travel to other places through the roots of trees. I don't think this dream was merely the sort of busy monkey business that your brain gets up to when dreaming, but that the dream was talking to me about something. This something was plant communication, which takes place through the roots and the air surrounding plants by way of chemicals, among other possible means. The chemical communication of plants with each other is nothing fanciful, it's scientific fact. Plants warn each other about nearby herbivores that might be munching on them by producing chemical signals, and the other plants respond by producing naturally repellant chemicals and by stiffening up their tissues. So whenever you walk through vegetation and brush up against it, the plants are in fact having all sorts of conversations with each other about what you are doing. Pioneer species like alder trees that reclaim damaged lands send communications to other plants when the land is ready to support them.The idea that plants are unaware is not backed up by the evidence. 

Judging from the number of times the idea appears in folklore and mythology, humans communicating with plants is not an idea that our ancient ancestors were unfamiliar with. My favorite example is the legend of how peyote was discovered, which was that a peyote cactus talked a starving Native man into eating it. Which, if you were really eating it because you are hungry, one bite would convince you to look elsewhere, so personally I find that to be a perfectly credible story. One of the things that Buhner talks about is how virtually all of our medicines come from plants or were inspired by plant chemicals, and how this medicine became estranged from the actual plants themselves and became the province of institutionalized medicine. How did native peoples for instance find out about the medical properties of plants? If you ask me, the plants told them. A deeper communication with the plants themselves would be very helpful in getting in touch with this medicine and potentially finding new medicinal uses for plants, but of course for the overwhelmingly vast majority of people today this is a completely lost language.

Not altogether lost though. As you will probably know from my previous posts, I talk with plants. In most cases, these conversations are pretty simple and are the equivalent of "Hi, how are you?" In some cases, particularly with trees, they can be very deep and strange. I used to think that trees were so ready to talk to me because I was sort of the equivalent of the postman or the internet, trees being immobile. I think my dream was trying to tell me the opposite: I am not a communications network to them, they are a communications network to me. An extremely different sort of communications system from the kinds that humans have, full of whispers from the Dreaming with which they may have a deeper connection. The trees were inviting me in the dream to flow along the network of roots through the world in which they are imbedded. They are a way of contacting a very very very different understanding of reality, and the differentness and non-human nature of this network of leaf and root may be one reason why humans tended to lose contact with it.

Of course, as some of us try to re-establish this relationship with plants, plant ecosystems are disappearing like never before. In the process, we may lose access to deeper understandings and to plant medicines that we cannot replicate ourselves nor ever replace.

Ghost Dance

 

"Derrick Jensen asks a question of every audience he speaks to over in the US. ‘Hands up’, he says, ‘anyone here who believes that this society will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.’ The kind of people who go to Derrick Jensen talks never put their hands up, perhaps because they have gone through the despair themselves and found honesty on the other side."

- "On The Correct Management of Despair" by Paul Kingsnorth

Let's speak frankly here. The world cannot endure 7 billion human beings for very much longer. Not to mention that according to the U.N. median population estimate, it will be 9 billion by 2040. Even if everyone on the planet agreed absolutely to make sustainable living priority one, and actually put actions behind those words, it is too many. Not to mention that no such thing will ever happen. Were it by some miracle to actually happen, sustainable only means sustainable for humans. It doesn't mean the ongoing tragedy in the natural world would slow down. It is almost unimaginable that in any remotely possible scenario it would slow down.

We are in the midst of a mass extinction event. It even has a name: the Holocene Extinction. Approximately 200 species will become extinct today. Approximately 200 species will become extinct tomorrow. And the next. The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate (if humans were not here). 

Interestingly, or insanely, worldwide interest in extinctions and in preventing them is actually on the decrease.

Those who have gained power in a world of reckless consumption will never willingly surrender either their power or their reckless consumption short of human catastrophe, a human extinction or near-extinction event. By the time that happens, a full-on human extinction event may be unavoidable because we won't have much of a biosphere to live in. Two out of every three breaths of oxygen you take in is produced by marine phytoplankton, and the ocean's stocks of marine phytoplankton are decreasing by 1% every year. It is a decrease of 40% since 1950.

I'm sorry. If this is the first time all this has sunk in, I am really sorry. It's a terrible realization to be handed. But I need you and everyone to be awake now and face this. 

Environmentalism-as-usual can't solve this. Even radical environmentalism can't solve this. If a million people in the United States were to all immediately, today, become dedicated fanatical radical environmentalists and start monkeywrenching everything, they'd just steamroller you down and carry on. Not to mention that the numbers of really dedicated environmental activists is nowhere near that number, and even most of those wouldn't involve themselves in direct action. Environmentalism now has become about collaboration, trying to prolong the inevitable, trying to get more wind turbines and biofuels, as if carbon were our only problem.

I sincerely hope that everyone will change their way of life if they can, but even if you do and even if half the planet follows suit and does likewise (a hopelessly unrealistic belief), it will not ultimately change what's going down, it would just slow it some. There is no technological, social or political fix for this.

I am sorry to have to say this, and I'll probably be perceived as a monster for saying it, but there is one and only one state of affairs that will prevent absolute disaster. That one and only one state of affairs is for about 9/10ths of the human population of the planet to die ASAP. Pronto, STAT, right away, the sooner the better. Without the rest of the planet getting similarly effed up, a massive human pandemic, something of that nature. This and this alone would solve the problem, at least temporarily. Of course there is no guarantee that the survivors wouldn't turn around in a few hundred years and do it all over again, but we'll leave that to them to figure out.

The good news is that there is a prophecy that in fact predicts a mass human die-off that saves the planet. The bad news is that it is a prophecy, and prophesying much beyond what you'll have for breakfast rarely pans out. Rarely as in, it never pans out. Christians are still waiting for their Messiah 2000 years on. However, since it is germane to the conversation, please indulge me and let's take a look. My apology if I butcher the source material, it is not my intention. I mentioned the prophecy in a previous post.

Okay, very generally speaking, a Hopi prophecy states that in the very near future, the vast majority of humanity will die. This die-off will happen through mass insanity, mass deformity and probably varying combinations thereof (nice), so that people will essentially become like the living dead except in that without any lick of sense left in their heads they will all die because they won't be able to take care of themselves. If we're lucky, a remnant of humanity, those with pure hearts, will survive the cataclysm and the Earth will be restored and life starts over again. They in fact believe that something like this happened several times in the past, with a pure-hearted few escaping the bad previous world to restart life a new world. In this case however, this is the last world we get, so instead it is regenerated. There are a few problems with this prophecy however, aside from the not inconsiderable prophecies-never-come-true problem.

First off, the Hopi don't precisely have an indigenous word for "future," so this prophecy is at least likely to be post-contact (with Europeans). There was another somewhat similar post-contact prophecy among other Native American tribes, originally from a man named Wovoka. As adopted by the Sioux, it became a prophecy that the White Man would be run off the continent. This gave rise to the Ghost Dance which gave the U.S. Army so much needless consternation and supposedly was a contributing factor (freedom of religion anyone?) to tensions leading up to the Wounded Knee massacre.

Secondly, the belief in an inevitable prophecy tends to lend to a hands-folded, wait-and-see attitude. This is a bit inconvenient if the prophecy isn't actually true, though it is perhaps more restful than freaking out at imminent environmental catastrophe.

However, as I mentioned in a previous post (I forget which one), if you re-imagine the prophecy as a prayer, it makes a great deal more sense. As a prayer, you aren't waiting on your duff for a change to come, you are doing something (the effectiveness of which might not be self-evident I grant.) Yes you would be praying for a human catastrophe, and yes the prospects of that would probably creep most folks the heck out, but bear with me. 

Would not such an action be very similar to the Ghost Dance of the Sioux? It was not exactly an endeavor that bore much fruit (Yankee imperialists did not go home). However, just because you have an immune system, does not mean you don't get sick. It is possible that the Ghost Dance was a sort of immune response by this continent to its invaders, but it was an unsuccessful immune response.  The Sioux were relatively small in number to manage such a large prayer, with relatively few medicine people involved who might really be able to put some weight into it.

Now why wouldn't praying be just as useless as sitting on your duff waiting for apocalypse to come to you like delivery pizza? Perhaps most people would view it that way, but I think it is the only thing that might have some chance of actually working. You can't fight the system any more than the Sioux could fight the U.S. Army, if you tried through active civil disobedience of various sorts and actually managed to effectively threaten the powers that be, you would end up just like the Sioux at Wounded Knee. Dead, imprisoned, or something of the kind. And regardless, you can't kill off billions with civil disobedience which is what it would actually take. Those billions like their lives and would kind of like to keep them, thank you very much. The U.S. Army could stop riots and even stop dancing they didn't like, but they couldn't actually stop prayer very well. It's a pretty quiet affair. 

What if about 6000 of the world's most insightful shamans all agreed to pray every morning for the right germ to strike the human population? What if the world's 6000 most powerful wiccans, voodoo priests and magicians all did the same? All willing to take their chances like everyone else, of course. Would you like to be in the crosshairs of that? I wouldn't, though of course I would be if they did it, same as everyone else would be. I have in fact said that prayer a time or two, though I haven't managed to work it into a morning routine yet. Maybe I really should. 

There is a good version of The End of The World As We Know It, and there is a bad version. The good version is around 6 billion people die and things start over. The bad version is we keep on going like we are going and wind up with an ecocide on our hands, and maybe the whole planet dead. We don't really have a third option at this point. People won't change until a human catastrophe is already here, and the math at that point is pretty relentless. Even if the planet manages to live another day, we likely won't.

Here humbly submitted is a prayer for the good version of the End of The World As We Know It.

THE GREEN PRAYER

Mothers and Fathers, hear our voices

Spirits and gods, hear our prayer

We have become too many and we foul the land and water

We foul the air and destroy the homes of all beings

The time has come for a renewing fire to sweep the Earth

It is time for contagion and death to cleanse the house of Man

Please help us in our quest

It would not be right to exempt ourselves

If this cleansing comes and I die, I will be happy

If this cleansing comes and I am robbed of all I love, I will be happy

If this cleansing comes and I live, I will rebuild the world and remember the dead.

I will be happy when this comes because the Earth will be spared and renewed

and all things can return to their proper places.

Mothers and Fathers, hear our voices.

The Boundary

Todoroki Waterfalls

Many many years ago I took jujitsu lessons (never got past yellow belt.) When I first was introduced to my new sensei, he led me to the dojo which was actually in his back yard. There was a torii over the gate to the area where the dojo was, and a little tiny pond and I seem to recall some bamboo around the periphery. A torii is a gate in Shinto practice that demarcates sacred space. Anyway, he told me that once I passed under the torii, I was no longer in the United States but was actually in Japan, a tiny piece of it anyway. As strange a statement as that seems, I very quickly took it as a matter of fact. The area of the dojo was no longer "normal space" for me, it was some other space, in some strange way perhaps connected to the actual Japan. 

My old sensei once said that the kami of that special space, the local spirit of the tiny dojo itself, took a liking to me which he considered an atypical reaction. I am sorry now that I never got to pour a sake for the kami of that place.

Anyway, what made me think of this was that I was walking to a nearby green space which was apparently named (by a local graffiti artist) Piper's Hollow. Now Yellowstone or Olympic National Park, Piper's Hollow is not. It's a bit of greenery surrounding a drainage ditch alongside an old folks home and some apartment complexes. It drains all the suburban yards of the locality into the Jackson Branch of White Rock Creek, a fingerlike extension of the parkland surrounding White Rock Lake. Trains from the local light rail transit system regularly rattle along a bridge over the ditch. It is hard to imagine a more humble fragment of forest that could still be called a forest.

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And yet, the instant I crossed the street and set foot on the path that led away from the suburban houses and down into the drainage ditch, I immediately felt as if some invisible weight or other had been lifted from my body. As if I were escaping from hostile lands and had crossed the frontier into my own homeland. Even the trees arched over the pathway as if to accent that border, like a sort of torii. If a place could smile, Piper's Hollow was smiling at me.

And yet I have lived in this neighborhood most of my life, why should the suburbs next to the forest be any less "home" to me? Clearly I felt they were.

The suburbs are overtly dedicated to human use, if there is anything wild there (and there is), it exists in the margins of human control. The little plants growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk, the raccoons and opossums that come out at night, are the only inroads of the wild into a carefully manicured and very demarcated space. A space dominated by human property ownership for human uses. It is therefore inherently unfree space. Even your own house, the front yard certainly and also to some extent the back yard is unfree space: it is subject in almost all cases to all kinds human regulation. Let your front yard grow wild, and you will see very quickly that it isn't really yours as the neighbors and the City weigh in. The externals of the house itself is unfree space. It is only in spaces that humans have no use for, or which have been overtly marked as a public land of some kind, that you enter nonhuman wild space, which is the only really free space. It is the only space in which humans enter their right relation to the world, which is as one being of many, not more privileged than any other being.

Few things can repel my soul like human civilized spaces can. You never even realize the stagnant atmosphere you are breathing until you leave. The big box stores are deserts, in which no living thing other than people and their things are. Even if there are plants for sale, they look unhappy to be there. Some people live their entire lives in this civilized space, never once knowing wildness. I can hardly imagine anything sadder. The boundary between the wild and the civilized is the boundary between the free and the enslaved. There must be places in the world where humans are put back in their box, both for their own sake and the sake of the world. For their own sake because they will never know the sacred until they are willing to stop putting humans at the top of the pecking order, with all other things falling in line with human desires and expectations. If you want to speak of ownership, as humans are wont to do, then you do not own the world. The world owns you.

Would that humans were put back in their boxes all over the world.

The Elysium Visions

Honor the sacred.
Honor the Earth, our Mother.
Honor the Elders.
Honor all with whom we share the Earth:-
Four-leggeds, two-leggeds, winged ones,
Swimmers, crawlers, plant and rock people.
Walk in balance and beauty.

~Native American Saying

I don't understand everything that happened here, I am learning what happened over time. So essentially I am just sharing with you what happened, for you to make of what you will. It appears to me that the first vision was a vision of the whole thing without close regard for how people figure into it, and the second seemed more directed towards how people, or to be specific myself, should put lessons from this vision into practice. Of course the idea of having visionary experiences of any sort may be alien to a great many people, and so you might be inclined to think of this as something that has no further application outside my own rather strange mental processes. Personally, I begin to see extensions of this vision extruding into my life on an ongoing basis, so that I can no longer make a sharp and clear distinction between the visions and what I experience. It is a Logos, if you will, that is creeping in through the edges of my life like little plants growing up through a city sidewalk.

The first vision happened shortly after dedicating my home shrine. In a trance, the shrine seemed, not visibly but... okay, I don't know the words for exactly what senses those are. It seemed to open up on another place, which I took to calling Elysium.

"Heaven and Earth would come together
And gentle rain fall.
Men would need no more instruction and all things would take their course."
-Daodejing #32

Elysium seemed to be like Earth, but an Earth in which everything was taking a middle and harmonious path. The air was full of sweet smells of flowering things and fragrant leaves and earth, a moist cool breeze blew. It was also much more than this, but I cannot exactly express what this "more" was. All I knew for certain was that it made me inexpressibly glad and if I could have just jumped right through to the other side, I surely would have. If there was a place I could go after death, I would want it to be Elysium. I don't believe Elysium exists in our "known" visible world anywhere, I think it is a place in the Dreaming.

I've touched on the idea of the Dreaming in previous posts, but just briefly, there is no true past or future but rather levels of concealment in the present. So that the future for instance exists in the present, but in the form of the habits, actions, motion, thoughts, wishes and dreams of all things. The past also exists in the present. Time is not a series of sequential hash marks ticking off on a line graph, but the future overtakes the present, from the present, in the present: forms in the present move into a concealed part of the present - the past. This present is much more expansive than normally understood, a motion not a stasis. In other words, sequential time does not truly exist, but rather there is a continual motion, a continual becoming and passing away, in the same present. The future enters view from the Dreaming, but this is not necessarily all that the Dreaming is. Myths, maybe even completely forgotten myths, lie waiting in it, and more things perhaps than we can know: exactly what lies within it is unknown until it becomes uncovered, unveiled, manifest in some way in the visible (to us) parts of the present, or in this case in visions.

The second vision happened as I was communicating with a live oak tree. I was struggling with tobacco addiction as I still am, and so I brought my problems to the tree. Again, for most people, this is not a relatable experience and I completely understand that. Relatively few people I think "talk" to trees and expect a real response from them. Their loss, I think. They are wonderful beings, trees. Anyway, what I got as a response is a direct experience of a post-addiction state of mind, as if it were already behind me, but also a sort of indication of "this is the direction you need to go." So a moral lesson of sorts but expressed as a real and present state of mind that I was directly exposed to.

It was more than just advice on my addiction however. Saturated through this experience was another experience of Elysium as practically expressed in this world and to human beings. In other words, Elysium not just as a state in the Dreaming or in a vision but a mode of a better human life in this visible world. Or expressed differently, Elysium is a state in the Dreaming that wants to get out, wants to be expressed here, and there is guidance for the state of mind that facilitates that. My original experience of Elysium did not appear to involve human beings unless you include me, it was a vision of a whole environment. So this experience was of an ethos, a moral direction if you like, but expressed as a whole state of mind rather than in particular dictums. The tree did not utter some sort of directives like "cut down a little at a time" or "go cold turkey and chew a lot of gum," but exposed me directly to a state of being.

If I were to try to write down a literal expression of what this state of mind was telling me, it was: "build up all life in love, be real in the moment, and respect all beings and things." However, again, this was not a position statement, it wasn't writing a white paper here. It is a state of being that transcends concise verbal expression. It is the state of mind that results in "building up all life in love and respecting all beings and things." A state of living active reverence in some sense.

Now, where does all this come from? It seems rather peculiar that the beings that I normally relate to would have some sort of concise plan in mind for how humans are supposed to fit into the scheme of things. One potential answer would be that they don't themselves have any such plan, but rather that they embody their own form of Elysium within themselves and it just sort of exuded out onto me. It is not that live oak trees spend a lot of time thinking about the right way for human beings to live, but rather that the Logos of Elysium is already in them and it just osmosed out onto me. Logos, a "living word," (not a dead static word) or in other words a state of mind and being. Elysium seems to be this too, both a "place" of sorts and a Logos, a seed of a living unfolding holy state of mind. It is also quite possible that Elysium as a state or place in the Dreaming is continually trying to be expressed in the visible world, as it is perhaps already expressed in the lives of living things like my friend the live oak.

I am just sort of realizing stuff as I write things, things sort of become clearer in the act of trying to explain them.

So here it is, what I experienced. I do not want you to believe in my experience. Your secondhand belief is useless. I want you to get out there and find your own live oak tree, or some other tree that seems to beckon to you to come over, and see what she says. I can't give you Elysium on a blog page. If it is to be found, you have to find it. Something has to osmose it to you directly. Your state of mind has to recognize Elysium in some sense and in some being, and become aligned with it. Words cannot directly give you a state of mind, as this was given to me.