Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
"What would Robin Hood
have made of Country Life's recent excavation into the fantasies of
British 7-to-14-year-olds concerning the wild life and wild places of their
native land? Two thirds had no
idea where acorns come from, most had never heard of gamekeepers (do they mug
people or protect the Pokemons?), and most believed there were elephants and
lions running round the English countryside. A third did not know why you had
to keep gates shut -- was it to keep the elephants in (or was some joker taking
the piss just then?), or stop cows 'sitting on cars,' upsetting the countryside's
most vital beast -- the traffic?
"In a closed, traditional
society there is something special about animals born in the land where you,
too, were born. The British used
to look lazily at gardens, thickets, and moors, and know -- without bothering
to think about it -- that foxes, hedgehogs, badgers, squirrels, and deer were
out there flecking the undergrowth....
"Dangerous or vulnerable,
shy or cunning, a pest or welcome visitor, our native animals are part of our
romance with the secret wildness of the place we live, even if we never see
much of them. We grew up with them
in imagination. They were inside us, furry heroes of nursery rhymes, pictures
and stories through which we learned the world. Little Grey Rabbit. The Stoats
and Weasels of the Wild Wood. The Fox who Looked Out on a Moonlight Night. The
Frog who would A Wooing Go. They are deep in British folk song, poetry, and
popular art. 'Three Ravens Sat in an Old Oak Tree.' The holly and the ivy, the
running of the deer. Landseer's 'Monarch of the Glen.'
"But that's the way it
used to be. We are not a
mono-traditional society any more -- most kids' traditions center on the TV and
the city street. To most children, a weasel is as unknowable as daffodils to a
young Indian struggling with Wordsworth during the Raj."
In
her article Wild
Neighbors (from where the above quote is taken), Folklorist and author
Terri Windling, writes:
”How did we become so
disconnected to the land we live on, and the wild neighbors we share it with? I think it's partly because we're losing the stories
specific to the local landscape: the stories about this plant that grows
on the hill nearby and that bird that migrates here each spring and
not just the pan-cultural stories we share with everyone on the television and
cinema screens. We no longer know the tales of the animals, and,
increasingly, we no longer know animals themselves.”
My believe is, that this
disconnection happened with the beginning of evolutionism. Evolutionism was created in the 19th century, but the
background is to be found in the Renaissance, not least in the scientific
breakthrough from approximately 1550 onwards. What especially characterices
evolutionism is scientism. It is an ideology which promotes science as the
best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values.
The term scientism is generally used critically, implying a cosmetic
application of science in unwarranted situations considered not amenable to
application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards.
The instrumental view of
nature rests on a sharp division between Man and everything else; that is to
say: between inner and outer nature. Man is by force of his inner nature
radical different from, and is standing over, the outer nature. This is, among
other things, due to, that he, with reason and science, is in the position to
master nature.
By the way, the thought about
Man as a self-producing being, characterizes almost all traditional Western
philosophy, where the art of philosophizing is due to thinking alone, even
though the theories within this tradition in other crucial points are highly
contradictory. You find it in Christianity, in Descartes´ view of Man as a
self-dependant being, in the Enlightenment philosophers, in Romanticism´s view
of Man as a historical being, in Kierkegaard, Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, who respectively
founded existentialism, Marxism and positivism. This thought is called the
self-production thesis.
What
a different attitude is conveyed by these words from a member of the Carrier
Indian nation in British Columbia (quoted by David Abram in Becoming
Animal):
"We know what the animals
do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other
creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this
knowledge from their animal wives. Today
the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has only been a short
time in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived
here thousands of years and were taught long ago by the animals themselves. The
white man writes everything down in a book so it will not be forgotten; but our
ancestors married animals, learned their ways, and passed on this knowledge
from one generation to another."
In Becoming Animal,
David Abram asks:
"How, then to renew our
viceral experience of a world that exceeds us -- of a world that is wider than
ourselves and our own creations?"Does a revitalizing of oral
[storytelling] culture mean that mean that we must renounce reading and
writing? Must we empty our
bookcases? Must we unplug our computers and drag them down to the dump?
"Hardly.
The renewal of oral culture entails no renunciation of books, and no rejection
of technology. It entails only that we leave abundant space in our days for
interchange with one another and with our surroundings that is not mediated by
technology: neither by television nor the cell phone, neither by the handheld
computer or the GPS satellite...nor even the printed page.
"Among writers, for
example, it entails a recognition (even an anticipation) that there are certain
stories we may stumble against that ought not to be written down -- stories
that we might instead begin to tell with our tongue in the particular
topography where those stories live. Among
parents, it requires that we set aside, now and then, the books that we read to
our children in order to recount a vital story with the whole of our gesturing
body -- or better yet, that we draw our kids out of doors in order to improvise
a tale about how the nearby river feels when the fish return to its waters, or
about the wild wind that's even now blustering its way through the city
streets, plucking the hats off people's heads.... Among educators, it requires
that we begin to rejuvenate the arts of telling, and of listening, in relation
to the geographical place where our lessons actually happen."
"Can
we renew in ourselves an implicit sense of the land's meaning, of its own
many-voice eloquence? Not without renewing the sensory craft of listening, and
the sensuous art of storytelling. Can we help our students to carefully
translate the quantified abstractions of science into the qualitative language
of direct experience, so that those necessary insights begin to come alive in
their felt encounters with cumulus clouds and bleaching corals, with owls and deformed
dragonflies and the intricate tangle of mycelial mats? ... Most important, can
we begin to restore the health and integrity of the local earth? Not without restorying the
local earth."
Victorian Fairy Tale Illustration. Artist unknown
What Abram here is talking
about is a communicative view of nature. In opposition to the
above-mentioned instrumental view of nature, and under impression of the
discussion about the damage, which we have caused nature, there has in the
later years been worked out conceptions, which claims, that nature has a value
in itself. It is not only a means, but ought to be respected for its beauty and
richness. It is by the way a point of view, which also is well known from older
times. In lack of better you could call it a communicative view of nature,
since it is implying, that we in some sense have a community with nature.
The communicative view of
nature claims that nature is of value in itself, that there is a beauty and
richness in nature, which is of non-causal and non-mechanical kind, and that
Man as a natural being has a community with this nature. For instance: The Danish
theologist and philosopher of life, K.E. Løgstrup, is not naturalist in the way
the word was used in the above-mentioned. Through the whole of his life he had an
energetic controversy with all positivism and empirical naturalism. His main
objection is, that these reduce reality for important dimensions. What Løgstrup
calls “the sovereign and spontaneous life-expressions” are given with ”life
itself”. You can say, that they belong to our nature, if you thereby understand
it as a metaphysical nature. This you can also call naturalism, but it is in
that case important to emphasize, that it is a metaphysical naturalism.
I have suggested, that a human
being seems to have two aspects: an energy-aspect and a consciousness-aspect.
Seen from the energy-aspect lawfulness rules: your body is subject to the
physical laws of nature (both classical laws and quantum laws); your psychic
system is subject to the lawfulness of the energy fields and of the energy
transformations: compensatory karma. The psychic system is what I refer to when
I talk about thoughts and mind.
Seen from the
consciousness-aspect, then a human being seems to be akin to the Wholeness, to
be transcendent in relation to these lawfulnesses (also the quantum laws). The Wholeness
is one and the same as reality. So, in my view, consciousness, Wholeness and
reality is one and the same.
Please give this a moment for
reflection. Awareness seems to be a quality of the now, and therefore a quality
of life itself: nature, Universe. Many ancient Indian scripts say that the
Universe is in meditation, or rather: the Universe is one great meditation! When you are in the Now, life, nature and
universe expands. Awareness seems to have the qualities of openness and
spaciousness. Unawareness closes these qualities. We can all experience this
quite easily. Take a walk in the forest. Unawareness, or distractedness (focus
on thinking and head), cause that we don´t see the nature we are walking in. Or
take the experience of waking up from a dream and realizing it was just a
dream. The reason why you can realize this is the spaciousness, which is one
and the same as Wholeness. You know that what you in the waking state
experience isn´t something going on inside your head but is all around you.
The concept of spaciousness
(which is unknown in Western philosophy) solves in this way the so-called problem of the external world, a problem
limited to newer Western philosophy, which only are accepting two ways of
attaining knowledge: sensation and reason (thinking), and are describing
consciousness as if it was a camera inside a box (if you think this sounds
primitive, you´re right - Western philosophy is light years behind Eastern
philosophy in that respect).
Within the spacious of
consciousness are the universal images of times, which moves in cycles. These
images are the holistic structure under our thinking and language.
This concept of the universal images
of time must be understood as Platonic Ideas or Platonic forms, essences, or
archetypes. Platonic archetypes must not be confused with Jungian archetypes as
they all the time are due to the reductionism of psychologism. The difference
is crucial. Jungian archetypes are subjective realms inside the human mind
while Platonic archetypes are objective realms; that is: they are external
forces beyond the personal and collective mind. But, due to the spaciousness of
consciousness, they form the structures under the personal and collective mind. Spaciousness is the Wholeness. When you activate the universal images, the Wholeness begins to dream. You can so to speak make a landscape "wake up".
Art,
music, poetry and storytelling are the means where we can activate the
universal images. And since these images are connected with Wholeness,
they are healing. We can in that way use magic chanting to sing open the doors
to the spirit realms, to sing pains or illness away, to sing stronger the bonds
between ourselves and the tree in our backyard, to sing thanks to the dawn or
the car running smoothly, to sing blessings for a newborn child.
The
healing potential in singing is immediate and great, both for the singer and
the one being sung over. Basically, it only requires that you allow yourself to
be moved by your purpose…and open your mouth. The Netsilik Inuit Orpingalik put
it like this: “Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are
moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices”.
In her
article, Songs of Enchantment - The Legacy of the Seiðr
Tradition, the Danish shamanic teacher, Annette Høst, writes:
In the
new seiðr and other shamanic rituals I listen to the singing pouring from
modern people when they are moved and opened by the song. Usually they have no
“song training” but in their voices I hear echoes of the old song traditions, I
hear the most heavenly harmony, the irreverent cackling of old hags, the coarse
calls of ravens blending into a full sweeping wave of Song.
Sources:
Into the Woods, by Ruth
Padel
Wild Neighbors,
by Terri Windling
Songs of Enchantment - The Legacy of the Seiðr Tradition, by Annette Høst
Becoming Animal, by David Abram
Basic
related texts:
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