From: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)
Subject: Re: Environment and native issues
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1992 19:57:37 GMT

I'd like to pick up on a point in this discussion made over a week ago.
I feel that perhaps we've failed to pay it the attention it deserves.

In <9208150216.AA18529@mamia.UUCP> (15 August 1992) Peshewegunzh
        <mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia!peshe> writes:
> ...
>
> As long as people (any people) are in revolt against the Great Spirit, they
> will be engaged in warfare against the creation too, and therefore, finally,
> against themselves.

I want to examine what is meant here, and how it applies to a broad range
of the issues we've considered in this forum during the past few years of
discussion.  To understand this comment, it seems natural to seek to under-
stand what is meant by "Great Spirit" - not just intellectually - not in the
sense of academics who can only ask questions like "What do people mean when
they talk about 'Great Spirit.'"  I'm interested in knowing whether we might
be able to get any direct sense of this reality that is being implicitly
claimed in the statement?

I keep thinking about what I read in the now late Scottish psychiatrist
and physician R.D. Laing's 60s best-seller _The_Politics_of_Experience_:

    ...nowhere in the Bible is there any argument about the *existence*
    of gods, demons, angels.  People did not first "believe in" God:
    they experienced His presence, as was true of other spiritual
    agencies.  The question was  not whether God existed, but whether
    this particular God was the greatest God of all, or the only God;
    and what was the relation of the various spiritual agencies to
    each other.  Today, there is a public debate, not as to the trust-
    worthiness of God, the particular place in the spiritual hierarchy
    of different spirits, etc., but whether God or such spirits *even
    exist* or ever have existed.

    Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt
    to the external world--the interpersonal world, and the realm
    of human collectivities.

    As this external human world is almost completely and totally
    estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the
    inner world already has grave risks.

    But since society, without knowing it, is *starving* for the
    inner, the demands on people to evoke its presence in a "safe"
    way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tre-
    mendous--while the ambivalence is equally intense.  Small wonder
    that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have
    become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long--Holderlin, John
    Clare, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud...

    ...

    There is no doubt, it seems to me, that there have been profound
    changes in the experience of man in the last thousand years.  In
    some ways this is more evident than changes in the patterns of
 *  his behavior.  There is everything to suggest that man experienced
 *  God.  Faith was never a matter of believing He existed, but of
 *  trusting, in the presence that was experienced and known to exist
 *  as a self-validating datum...

[ _The_Politics_of_Experience_, (c) 1967 by R.D. Laing, M.D., Ballantine
  edition published by arrangement w/ Pantheon Books. SBN: 345-01641-6-095,
  LC: 67-11689, quotes taken from pp. 141-143 of Ballantine Books edition. ]

Unfortunately, when we today read such language, our minds immediately
turn to "religion" and its rituals and belief systems.  We may even have
a difficult time reading these words, since there might be so many un-
pleasant associations.  However, I think Laing was talking about some-
thing very very different from what we ordinarily think of when we think
of "God" and "religion" and related ideas.

I merely want to introduce this idea at this point, rather than to get
wrapped up in defending a position.  I just want to ask whether the
"consensus reality" we have created, and which we promulgate and enforce
through the ideology of political and religious belief systems, is the
best one to use to evaluate such matters as threats to the environment.
I think that before we can work effectively to "solve" a "problem," we
need to achieve some understanding of and agreement on the nature of
that problem, and that process might involve some difficult and even
painful examination of assumptions and "fundamental presuppositions."

( This latter phrase is one that comes from the philosopher R.G. Colling-
  wood, I believe.  I first heard it in connection with a discussion of
  the philosophy of religion.  It has to do with basic notions about the
  things we ordinarily take for granted, such as laws of cause and effect,
  and without which it is hard to even conceive of a world that makes
  sense.  Such "fundamental presuppositions," I submit, might just be
  cultural artifacts as much as anything else, especially given that
  modern physics is starting to call some of these very things into
  question. )

I'd like to return to Peshewegunzh's statement, and to ask if things might not
work the other way around just as well:

> As long as people (any people) are in revolt against the Great Spirit, they
> will be engaged in warfare against the creation too, and therefore, finally,
> against themselves.

Being "in revolt" against "creation" (the natural environment) would seem to
imply being in revolt against the "Great Spirit" just as much as the reverse.
And what if that "Great Spirit" is really one dimension of our own existence
in a stronger way than we might imagine when we hear this "God-talk?"  What
if there is some divinity within ourselves, so that it's not so much a matter
of being against ourselves because of having alienated or angered some
"heavenly father," but rather due to having denied a vital part of ourselves?

Peshewegunzh continues:

> When the spiritual, from which all else proceeds, is ignored and debased,
> those doing so become ignorant and corrupted, and their actions become
> ever more destructive to others and themselves, despite great powers of
> technology. This is because the hierarchy of things has been violated, as
> if a small child succeeded in an alchemy of obtaining the body of a large
> strong man. Power without commensurate spiritual development is a
> violation of the order of things, a cheat of both the material and
> the spiritual. It is immoral and irresponsible.

Again, it is unfortunate that words like "immoral" and "irresponsible" have
become defined almost exclusively in the terms produced by systems of sociali-
zation.  Just like with matters of "religion," it's hard for most of us to
understand these words except through the filters of someone accusing some-
one else of acts or patterns of thought and/or behavior to which these terms
apply.  Can we understand them not so much as concepts designed to produce
feelings of guilt, so as to keep people in line, but as ideas which violate
our own sense of integrity and wholeness (it's so hard to even talk about
these ideas without sounding "preachy," which is surely far from my intent).

I feel these ideas are very important and very powerful.  It seems to me
we would do well to examine the basis upon which we act and upon which we
base our systems of thought, both individually and collectively.  Can we
act "on behalf of" the natural environment in ways that actually thwart our
intent and put us even further away from understanding our own natures, and
our intrinsic connection with nature?  Again, I run the risk of sounding as
if I'm sermonizing when I say these things, but I mean to ask them as sincere
questions and not to dress these things as questions as a mere rhetorical
device.  Is there a certain very important and vital sense in which nature
and Great Spirit and myself are really one thing, and harming any of them is
to do harm against all of them?  If so, it becomes unthinkable to act in ways
which have as their effect harm to the environment, for example, because we
would immediately realize the harm to ourselves, once our sense of ourselves
becomes extended to include the natural world and all its inhabitants, re-
gardless of race or heritage or species.  (Yes, I know this latter statement
just opens another large can of worms, but I'll save trying to explain what
I mean here until later, in the interest of not making this posting any
longer and/or more complex.)

> When materialists think man no more than a beast, then they make man
> dysfunctional, and ironically acting worse than any beast, since he is out
> of his assigned place, rebelling against his own nature.

And isn't this the prevailing ethos of the modern technologically-based
prevailing culture that has come to dominate the world and to capture and
co-opt its imagination?  How difficult and painful it is to try to see the
world and ourselves differently, even if to do so ultimately means to try
to return to a much better and more true understanding of ourselves.

Whether American Indian societies are or were as true to the ideals we have
come to associate with them, of living in harmony with nature, is a matter
I'll leave up to the historians and anthropologists - and to the people
themselves to debate.  What matters more to me is the importance of these
ideals themselves and the existence of people to help us all re-aquaint
ourselves with them.  Even so, it has always struck me as amazing how
universal is/was the interest among traditional aboriginal peoples in the
spiritual aspect of existence, and the inadequacy of the usual anthropo-
logical explanations of such interest as merely "primitive attempts to
understand and explain the world lacking the tools of our (superior)
scientific methodologies."

The rest of Peshewegunzh's article speaks for itself, so I repeat it here
without comment.  My apologies if I have gone too far beyond what he in-
tended, or have gotten too carried away in my editorializing.

Gary


> This is an axiom because beasts cannot be other than true to themselves,
> whereas man is alienated from himself, and is aware of his
> violations, despite protestations that his guilt has no basis. Yet
> being dysfunctional, he cannot correct his behavior, but makes
> up reasons for remaining alienated. This is really a form of slavery,
> because he is prevented from becoming free, trapped by his own false
> view of his own nature, through the denial of his unique spirituality.

> One cannot be alienated from oneself and reconciled to nature at the same
> time. Without an understanding of spiritual things, there can be no
> understanding at all, and finally, no grasp of reality. That is why European
> society and culture in this era now appear so fragmented and bizarre, and
> so helpless to solve problems.

> Even when Indian societies in the past were mistaken in their spiritual
> paths, they tended by their very closeness and dependence upon nature
> to realize their own status as part of that creation, and that because
> of man's unique spiritual consciousness, the restraint needed to be
> practiced in the respectful use of the property of another. In this they
> were closer to truth than the modern technological societies which really
> have alienated themselves from nature so well that they can pretend to be
> sovereign. However, by so doing, they have divorced themselves from
> objective reality, and therefore, we can expect their actions to be
> patternless and entropian, since their desires will be captured by
> their own subjective and changing fantasies and delusions.

> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Peshewegunzh
>
> peshe%mamia.UUCP@mthvax.cs.miami.edu
> mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia.UUCP!peshe
> peshe@mamia.UUCP
> mthvax!mamia!peshe
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


--
    Gary S. Trujillo                            gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts              {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst
Newsgroups: alt.native