Medicine of the World

Consider this an open diary entry, or poetry. People might not get it, in which case, don't worry about it. Perhaps it wasn't written for you. Perhaps in the final analysis it was written for me.



THE MEDICINE OF THE WORLD

There was a rift in the heart of the World. Now when I say world, you don't get worlds without solar systems, and you don't get solar systems without galaxies, and you don't get galaxies without universes, and you don't get universes without a Multiverse, but the World is what we know, so I shall say World.

Now some folks say it is a rift in us, that our hearts are bad, but we would not be riven were the World not riven, and we were riven because the World was riven. We are not a separate thing from the World.

There was a rift in the heart of the World. Now animals can find medicine for themselves in the fields and woods in the form of different plants, but how can a World find medicine for itself? Nevertheless, this is what the World set out to do, to make medicine for the World's heart. With all medicines, not enough can't heal you and too much can harm you, and even more so with this medicine because the World could not say for certain that any dose was a safe dose. It might heal the World's heart, or might wound it worse, and no being in the universe could say for sure.

The World made its medicine in the form of a child, and that child became many children; and as long as they were children, they neither did any great good nor any great harm.

And then the medicine became an adolescent, and the World began to see that a very small number of the adolescents were in fact medicine, but most were poison and made the rift in the World's heart worse every year. At first the World was poisoned very very slowly, but the rate of poisoning increased very slightly every year, and century by century the rate of change increased. And the World could see that things would become very bad, and that it would get very sick with fever for a long while until the poison was finally burned out of its body. It appeared that the intended medicine would fail, because for the most part it was not medicine but poison.

The few who were in fact medicine were at best disregarded by the other adolescents. These were the lucky ones. To be medicine in a world of poison was a dangerous fate. They had only a little power to turn the poison to medicine, or to heal the increasing injuries to the World. The medicine worked slowly, and the poison worked increasingly fast; the medicine was little and the poison was great, and the World's fever rose.

Now I cannot tell you the end of the story because it hasn't ended yet. There are many stories about what will ultimately happen, and I can tell you some of them, and some of them are for others to tell.

The simplest story of the end is, the World has a great fever and all the adolescents die from it. Good and bad, poison and medicine alike. In the end the rift in the World's heart is even greater, and who knows what medicine will ever heal it.

There is another story told by people who live in dry places. Now the dry places of the Earth give birth to both great prophets and great narrow-mindedness, and who can say from what place in the heart this story comes. The story says that the World will call on it's own dark side to destroy the bad medicine from the World, and leave only the good medicine behind, though perhaps the good medicine will be reduced to only two people by that time. The World starts again, it heals back to where it once was, but no one can say whether the rift in the World's heart is finally healed or whether the World is only back where it began.

There is another story told by people who live in forests. This story is that there were eventually very few of the adolescents who were strong in the good medicine, and one of those took the World's divided heart into his own heart, knowing it would kill him. His heart exploded from the burden and he died, but this act ensured that there would be at least one more generation of medicine left in the world, and perhaps one of those would find how to heal the World's heart and bleed out the poison. Whether they ever will, no one can say because it hasn't happened yet.

But know this: we are of the World and if our hearts are sick it is because the World has a sick heart too. It knows this and is trying to heal itself. But the medicines are few and the poison is great, and no one knows how many future generations of medicine there will be in the world. Perhaps one day all the medicine will be gone. All that will be left then, is for the World to purge itself and try again, and we will be gone.

Fair Deal Food?

When people talk about such things as "Fair Trade" coffee, we mean we are giving the coffee farmers a relatively more fair part of the total coffee dollar. The interests of the coffee plants of course don't enter into it. Typical of the usual human preoccupation with self, while some nice folks might be concerned about the conditions of humans in places where coffee or bananas or other commodities are grown, almost none of them think about the lives of the plants without which there would be no commodity at all.

I am going to put forth the scandalous idea that the interests of the plants should be our concern. That fundamental to the relationship we have with the plants that provide our food should be equity. They get a fair deal: we get a fair deal. In other words, I am suggesting treating plants as beings of ethical significance.

Now you may be thinking, "How is that possible, we have to eat plants (and animals) to live?" Firstly I have to say that if you need to eat anything to survive, you can certainly be excused for doing it. If you are in a situation where you need to eat people to survive, you should eat people. Preferably already dead, but if your choice is between starving to death and bonking your neighbor on the head and eating his liver, I am not going to judge. The key idea here is avoiding getting into such a situation to begin with. We can arrange our relationships with food plants so as to treat them properly as partners, not just prey.

And in fact there are a great many plants where we don't have to kill the plants to eat from them. Pluck a leaf off a spinach plant, the plant will probably manage to keep going just fine. The same with loose lettuces and many other vegetables. We don't eat tomato plants for instance, we eat tomatoes, their fruit. We don't eat squash plants, we eat squash. We don't generally eat corn stalks, we eat corn. Potatoes can be harvested long after the plants themselves are dead. In some cases, we might be killing them at the end of their lives when they are dying anyway, such as would be the case with peanut plants, where the sign that they are ready for harvest is that the plants start dying. I certainly don't think that prolonging their death is doing the plant any particular favors.

However, plants live by very different rules than ours, and one of those rules is that they almost always spam tons of seeds into the environment in order to reproduce, and the survival of all those seeds under most circumstances is a physical impossibility. It is as if we had to birth a million babies to get one human adult. It is not important, or possible, for all those seeds to survive but only that the plants reproduce into the next generation somehow, by those few seeds that either by random chance or human care survive to reproduce. Eating seeds then is fair game as long as some are planted to continue their parents' genetics, because the vast majority of seeds would never turn into adult plants.

What are the interests of plants? They want a rich soil, enough sun, assistance when they are under attack from bugs or herbivores or other environmental hazards, and to have a chance to reproduce. In return for our assistance in both nurturing the plants and ensuring a future for their progeny, we eat parts of the plant or the seeds or fruit. This mutual assistance is in fact what we were evolved to do: whether you accept it or not, we were in a sense designed to service plants. Why do we have color vision and opposable thumbs? So that we can see the color change when fruit is ripe and grasp it, and so spread the seeds of the fruit trees in our dung. Why do we have bipedal stance? So we can see over the grass to hunt herbivores which eat grass. Our move from a fruit-eating way of life to a hunting way of life meant a move to the grasslands, and we tamed fire and intentionally used fires to expand the realms of our grassy friends at the expense of trees. This was the beginning of a long and intimate relationship between humans and the grasses which has resulted in the reality that today the vast majority of all human calories consumed comes from grasses or the seeds of grasses. You evolved to work for the plants, and they evolved to help you do it. Plants formed us even more than we formed them. And they are not insensate beings, just very different beings from us.

There are some plants that we probably can't grow if we want to treat them ethically in this sense. Radishes and beets come to mind, since they involve harvesting the whole healthy plant, killing the plant at a time when it would not otherwise be dying. Most vegetables where the leaves are harvested can be harvested ethically if you do not harvest the whole plant but only a few leaves from each plant at a time. I know this is an alien viewpoint in a lot of ways, to take plants seriously as living things, but as far as I am aware there is no reason why one would ever have to kill healthy plants in order to have a full and nutritionally varied diet. My own belief is that the plants will understand your benevolence and respond accordingly.

So this is the essence of what I am saying, and I will grant you that it is an approach informed by my own particular spiritual beliefs. Treat the plants in your garden, and the beneficial insects that patrol them, as partners with you in a fair and mutually beneficial relationship. One in which you are not putting yourself above the plants but serving them just as much as you expect to be served yourself. I am growing my first garden this year so we will see if this approach bears fruit, but I believe it is the right approach ethically and also practically in many ways. 

Now one might think that it is impossible to have this sort of relationship with animals, the raising of any of which entails the deaths of some of them in order for us to benefit. I think that for the most part this is the case. There are however other considerations involving the larger ecosystem of which we are all a part. Some wild animals wreak great destruction in the environment, such as feral pigs and perhaps to a lesser extent deer, so I would say that hunting those animals where they are overpopulated is entirely fair game. Moreover, by hunting wild animals we are not adversely impacting their lives prior to their deaths: while they live they live entirely free. If rabbits start nomming on your garden vegetables, they are totally fair game and in fact if you depend on farming or gardening for some part of your food or income, eliminating them might be the only way to actually stop them from destroying your livelihood. Thus hunting can not only be helpful to the environment, but might actually be the only way you can keep the critters from eating you out of house and home. 

Feral Hogs: Almost As Bad As Humans

According to this rationale though, we should all be hunting humans, since they are the most damaging creature that exists. The personal consequences of that can be pretty harsh however, so I can't recommend it. ;)

Am I living completely in accordance with this Fair Deal Food viewpoint? Nope, because I don't have enough land to provide for my own food needs directly. This is however something I do wish to do as soon as I am able. As far as my limited garden goes however, I am attempting to abide by it. My spinach plants will not be inhibited from going to seed, they will only have leaves harvested from them, not the whole plant.  Same with my herbs. I am also growing corn, beans, squash, melons, cucumbers, sunflowers, various herbs, tomatoes and strawberries, none of which should require me to kill the plant in order to eat. I realize that to many people what I am saying sounds insane, but I would say that a sane man often sounds insane to an insane world. 

I also realize that almost no one will hear what I am saying here, but that ought not to keep me from saying it. I feel almost obligated by the kinship I feel with plants to say it. Plants are my teachers and my friends, as well as the means of continued existence for all animal life on this planet. They could get along fine without us. We would all die without them.

Rainwater as sacrament

Mother Water, Friend of Life

Wash away the unthoughtful

May all the plants and animals I love

always have the benefit of your presence.

May your streams and lakes and rivers and oceans

everywhere run clean and whole

Thank you for your gifts

Our love always to you

Mother Water

**********************
DISCLAIMER
Obviously, drinking rainwater from a bowl you set out in your back yard is a 
potentially hazardous activity, and I am not recommending anyone do it and am
not responsible if you get sick. Equally obviously, this is part of my spiritual life and
might have no beneficial effect on you whatsoever
(and most likely won't.)
**********************

For the first time ever in my life, aside from the odd drop caught on my tongue, I drank rainwater. Why?

It's a potentially risky business, even subversive, this drinking of unlicensed, unregulated, unchlorinated, unfluorinated water. Even the air has bacteria in it, not to mention a few other things, and although I placed my rain-gathering bowl carefully away from all overhanging branches and such, there were still a few mystery particles in the bowl when I came to drink a rainy day's worth of rainwater. Might I get sick? I might. Will it have been worth it if I do get sick? Yes. Why? For 8 ounces of water? 8 ounces that I could have more easily gotten from the nice safe chlorinated fluoridated water that comes from the tap?

This is the sort of thing that is impossible to explain to someone who regards water as merely stuff, who regards the physical world as just a random assemblage of dead matter of little consequence. What conversation can there be, between one person who regards water as merely an atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen, and another who regards it as the very stuff of life? Sacred? A goddess? There is no connection between the two worldviews. They don't coexist whatsoever. 

It all began with me noticing the effect of rainwater on my garden. Now, some folks might just use water from the tap to water their garden, but I take a certain care to get the chlorine out of the water I use for the plants, as best I can anyway. Even so, the difference in growth between the results of a watering day and the results of a rainy day are striking. If the plants could jump after a rain, they would jump. There is a visible growth spurt. Some people observe this same phenomena and rationalize it as the result of dissolved nitrogen and oxygen in the water. I have not done the science myself so who knows, perhaps they are right. To me, it is water from heaven, water from the gods. How could it not be good for the plants?

Anyway, I figured, it does plants wonders, why not see what it does to me? So I set out my bowl in the morning and embarked on my slightly risky and definitely subversive endeavor. It rained all day and was a little cool (in contrast to last week when it was like a sweat bath), and towards evening I went out to see how much rain I had caught in the bowl. There was a small amount of unidentifiable brownish-black well decomposed organic matter in it. The first shock to my senses was that this water had a flavor. It had a considerable flavor: weedy, pollen-y, piney, with perhaps a tiny aroma of diesel fume in the background. I live in the city, after all. It tasted like this place, like the land. I drank carefully, meditatively, avoiding stirring up the organic matter at the bottom.

What did I experience? What I experienced was powerful and moving, though untranslatable in words. Feeling the presence of the gods with me, sustaining me. Gratitude. Timelessness, or a different sort of time. Even now, sitting at my desk drinking a decidedly unspiritual Dr. Pepper, I feel different than I did before.

This bowl contained a sacrament, the sacrament of the way I follow. Not an inebriant, like Christian wine. Not an entheogen like peyote or ayahuasca. Not food, like the other Christian sacrament. Simultaneously the simplest thing and most profound determinant of life. Rain. I drink from the same sky as my plants, we live as part of the same life. Mother Water, carried aloft by the Sky Fathers and sent to Earth as the fertilizing combination of the powers of both of them. Sky and Water, and even a little Earth in the form of the mystery organic stuff. This is my religion, and I see my gods every day. It does not require faith, it requires a different way of living and seeing, and a different morality. To strive for total reverence and respect for all things, to desire to be at peace with all things, and to listen to the gods and spirits.

This is my sacrament. Rain.

Non-Symbolic Divination

Tea leaves. The most basic method of tasseography is non-symbolic in the sense that it does not make use of pre-determined symbols or meanings, though of course the interpretation is symbolic.

Non-symbolic divination using chia seeds.

Just a heads-up, this topic is probably only of interest to me and hardly anyone else, and in fact if you do find this interesting you are probably very weird and people should be mildly scared of you. ;) I am only putting it here because I don't have anywhere else to put it. 

I think it was Julian Jaynes who said that divination only came about as people lost their vital connection to the gods, and so became genuinely confused as to what their wisdom in a particular situation might be. In other words, people who hear from gods directly don't need divination. Gods are awfully busy these days and so you can be excused if you don't hear from them on a regular basis. ;) But divination does (and many other forms of religious practice do) represent a sort of fall from grace, from the state described in the Daodejing as "everything following its natural course." You only need divination if things are pointedly not following their natural course. This "not following nature" is unfortunately the normal state of modern Man. In case you don't know what divination is, it is a means of attempting to gain insight into a question or situation using a wide variety of occult means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divination

Symbolic divination for the purposes of this post means divination using tools whose meanings are relatively set. A classic example would be tarot cards, the meaning of each card being relatively unambiguous even if slightly modifiable in context. The use of the I Ching would be another type of symbolic divination, as would the casting of runes and many other methods. While tea reading in its most essential form is non-symbolic in this sense, there also exists methods of dividing the cup up into sectors with their own significance, and even specialized tea reading cups. Most newcomers to divination are going to be using symbolic methods of divination in this sense, as the interpretations are (to varying degrees) relatively simple to come by. 

Non-symbolic divination for the purposes of this post means divination using tools which do not have set meanings of their own. For instance, assuming you are not using one of the tea reading methods that involve assigning significance to different parts of the cup, tea reading would be one of these. You are just grokking out the patterns of the leaves in their bare arrangements. The ancient Roman method of examining the flights of particular flocks of birds would be another such example. The most bare and sparse form of non-symbolic divination would be scrying, gazing into a crystal or a body of water or a black mirror, not to make sense of patterns in the objects themselves but to enter into an altered state of consciousness which may shed light on the circumstances surrounding the situation. Non-symbolic methods of divination are typically much more difficult, not very accessible to the layman unless they are a very gifted layman. There are some people though that can pick it up right away. 

My great-grandmother was a fortune teller so perhaps I get it from her, though she herself took an extremely cynical approach to the whole thing. It was the Great Depression, she needed dough, she didn't believe any of it for a second. ;) Perhaps it was the Universe having a good chuckle when she gave my hard-headed, ultra-practical, money-loving, fortune-telling-for-profit great grandmother an impractical, mystical great-grandson. ;) I still remember first encountering the cards she used to tell fortunes with and being fascinated by them. 

Anyway, getting back to topic, these matters came up in my head as a result of me picking up rocks. Sort of aimlessly, I would pick up rocks and pebbles that caught my eye and stick them in my pocket. To me, looking at pebbles is way more interesting than looking at television, they're like little worlds. I wondered if perhaps I should write runes on them and use them as a runic method of divination but it occurred to me that this was contrary to the very reason I picked them up to begin with. I picked them up because they were individual and different, whereas runes and in a sense tarot cards and the sticks or coins you use for the I Ching are all the same. So I thought I would use them for non-symbolic divination. Just throw them down on a mat, not the kind of mat you use for tarot cards with their different meanings based on location on the mat but just a plain mat, and see what comes up. Granted it is a lot harder to do it that way, but the problem with symbolic types of divination is that they are too full of the sorts of concepts that exist in human heads. They already form the world in a human way. If divination is a symptom of separation from the gods, or separation from the state of Nature if you will, then pushing divination back towards the 'gods' means pushing it further away from human thought, human preconceived notions and human judgments. The use of human tools like cards, coins, runes and so on, is a kind of separation from nature. 

This is akin to the difference between more ritualized forms of paganism which use tools like the athame and pentagram and robes and precisely formalized rituals and so on, and more of a hedge-witch or shamanic form which uses whatever comes to hand from nature and doesn't emphasize human craft as much. However, what you don't get from non-symbolic forms of divination is the certainty of getting a reasonably intelligible answer. If you do an I Ching reading, you are going to get an answer of some sort. If you do a raw tea leaf reading (not using any set method of interpretation), you might not. In a manner of speaking, you might be asking, "should I have more bonds in my investment portfolio?" and the answer might be like a crow calling. "Caw-caw! Caw-caw!" Which to me would be an awesome answer, but might not be for everyone. ;)

I tried it out just with somewhat mixed results. I did feel like I got an answer of sorts, it is just that I am not sure how it relates to the question. It wasn't a very serious question however, almost a sort of test question, so it might not be a good trial. The question was what would be the outcome if I shared this post to my facebook page, which I normally do but didn't really initially consider doing with this post because of its subject matter. That was the question. I got two different interpretations from the stones, the first being "some gathering some scattering." The stones are all either tight up against another stone or else completely separated, and while the mass of the gathered stones is greater, the number of each kind is the same. 5 separated stones, 5 gathered stones. One of the stones did not leave the bag so it was left out. The second interpretation was "airy bird woman" or "spacey woman." The relevance of these answers seems questionable, though the stones might be calling me a spacey female for wasting time with such a trivial question. ;) Here's the stones as they were thrown, see what you think. 

Despite the mixed results (I might try the chia seeds next time), I do want to experiment with this further because there is a vibe involved very different from using the I Ching or Tarot and I quite like it. With the I Ching, you feel like you are having a conversation with the I Ching itself: like having a conversation with a specific intelligent book. This felt much more raw, more primitive, more out of my comfort zone, which I quite liked.

If the assemblage of weirdness that constitutes this blog post interests you and you try divination yourself, I need to tell you a couple things. First, divination is sort of a "second opinion," a way of gathering more information before making a decision. It does not replace the decision itself, you are still responsible for everything you do and whether you listen to the second opinions offered or not. Even if the I Ching or whatever gives you a result that is clear as a bell and cannot be mistaken, you are the decision maker. You should also not practice divination very often, the general idea is actually to not need it. As I mentioned before, if everything is "following nature," if your life is following a pattern that is sensible and natural, divination is not required or desirable. The second thing is, I would encourage complete skeptics to try divination when they feel they need a second opinion and they don't have access to one. Even if you don't believe in such things whatsoever, it is still a second opinion of a sort and might encourage you to reflect deeper on your decisions. Which almost has to be a good thing, right?

Third thing is though, that if you want to try divination you should definitely start out with the I Ching or Tarot and not non-symbolic divination. It is going to be too difficult for the average person to start with, and the I Ching is a great way to get introduced to divination and is relatively easy to use.

Should you take divination seriously? You should take everything with a grain of salt, everything. However, divination is a great inroad to visionary experiences of various sorts if you incline that direction.

Entreaty to Danu

O Danu, Mother of the Sidhe,

deliver me from this Age.

I do not belong here.

The love of men has turned to decay.

They rip up the bodies of their mothers and fathers,

the soil. They have shaved their locks, the trees.

Your blood, the waters

Their breath, the skies.

The Age has been lost and me with it.

The time has come for me

to enter into your hollow hills.

To enter the mounds that lead underneath the Earth

Elysium is my homeland.

Danu, I am sidhe not man.

I renounce humanhood.

Do not leave me here pining,

for the blue skies, your eyes.

For the blue cool breath of the Western Lands.

For the bluebell forests of Elysium.

Danu, a sheachadadh dom thar do uiscí.

Danu, deliver me across your waters.