Nearly two years ago I wrote a post gleaned from Thomas Berry's seminal book, "The Dream of the Earth," notably published by the Sierra Club in 1988.
That book was a comprehensive exploration, through sixteen separate essays, of where the West went wrong and how we might right ourselves through a re-acquaintance with the Earth. Berry has become one of my touchstones in my attempt to understand the world at large and how -- and why -- we went awry.
Berry provides no clear, concise answer. He does, however, pose what at first appears to be a nonsensical formula: we are to look to our own "genetic coding" and to the Earth itself.
What does this mean? The assumption still seems to be that technology going to save us. Although there is a silent groundswell of people who are continuing to live close to the Earth and focus on regional solutions, the huge mechanism of our modern economy is still running roughshod over the world. It appears to be beyond the reach of any of us to turn the tide against a raging technocracy. How do we, then, look to our genetic coding. What does that mean? What would it look like?
For Berry, it was trusting in Nature as expressed by the 14 billion year epic of cosmological transformations that have led to life on this earth. Somehow, "we" have resulted from all of this: "we" as in contemporary humanity. It's fashionable among a certain set of intelligentsia to say that "we" are the Universe made conscious; that is, the Universe evolved a self-reflective consciousness that can pose the questions of life and attempt to find the answers. Presumably, we have the eyes with which to appreciate, query, and grasp all that we see.
We, as in homo sapiens, have apparently out-competed all other homo species and after a mere 300,000 years, stand alone on the earth as the sole homo species survivor. Until relatively recently we lived under conditions over which we had little to no control. Climactic challenges and changes, enormous predators that could eat us for lunch, food sources that were seasonal or mobile.
As fate or luck would have it, we are in a 12,000 year interstadial that has led to -- well, all of recorded history as we know it. The farther we have strayed from our natural state, as nomadic, tribal hunter-gatherers, the more bizarre our social organization has become. We are about to overlap the limit on bizarre, aided and abetted by our penchant for technological wizardry. In the process we seem to have abstracted ourselves right out of our own natural state.
Berry's premise is that we return to our natural state, but in a new way, by heeding our genetic coding, which, he posits, has guided us thus far.
Okay, how?
By listening to the Earth, our original teacher.
Again, how? We're clueless, having so separated ourselves from our natural state of being that we have to learn once again what we have long forgotten: the lessons of the indigenous. Berry states in Chapter 14 of his book, "...the interior sources of renewal that are available to the Indian....are our hope for the future."
As a culture, we tend always to look for the easy way out, the short-cuts. New Age shamans, drumming circles, sweats -- our superficial appropriation of practices that native peoples have evolved over tens of thousands of years. We can't copy what they've learned. We have to go to the source from which they learned, listen, and see if we can't learn for ourselves, anew.
We can bend the knee to our indigenous forebears and approach the question with some humility. After 500 years of colonial conquest, oppressive attempts at assimilation, broken treaties and such, why would they trust us?
But for us, it's a question of attitude. We have to acknowledge our wrongs, as Winona LaDuke has said, attempt to make amends. And listen to their wisdom, in humility. Our own arrogance is our Achilles heel. We obviously don't have the answers. Not among the Religious Right, not in our technological wunderkinds. Our politics are a debacle, our religion a sham. No one in the West has the answer. No one.
As Berry says, "We have so developed our rational processes...that we have lost much of the earlier communion we had with the archetypal world of our own unconscious."
So there's the clue: what we seek is not in our conscious minds. Our conscious minds have created this madness. Where is the way into the archetypal realm of the unconscious mind? How can we listen again to the winds of the spirit, which blow whither they will? How attune ourselves, how makes ourselves vulnerable?
What Berry is saying is that we must seek visionary experience. This is partly why he is pointing us toward the indigenous orientation and their history of wisely using symbolism, vision and dreams, their unique and integral bond with the spirit of place. These are forms of knowing we've long ignored and with which we somehow must become familiar once more.
Berry states, "The Indian now offers the Euroamerican a mystical sense of the place of the human and other living beings. This is a difficult teaching for us since we long ago lost our capacity for being present to the earth and its living forms in a mutually enhancing manner. This art of communion with the Earth we can relearn from the Indian."
He says this while acknowledging the tension and opposition that exists between ourselves and Native peoples, hoping that tension can be used creatively to bring something better out of our nature, something besides the need to dominate the perceived "other," which has been our modus operandi for 500 years.
Berry's realism -- "The wilderness is largely gone and will never again be what it once was. Yet the psychic structure of the Indian, however shattered in recent centuries, retains an amazing integrity with itself....the destinies of the Indian are inseparable from the destinies of the American Earth.....the fate of the continent, the fate of the Indian, and our own fate are finally identical."
What he's banking on, I believe, is the underlying, deep love that anyone on this continent has for the land upon which they stand. How is it possible to not love this land? We have only to let this love lead us wisely and not self-righteously. Let the energy move up the front of the torso and out the heart rather than up the back of a spine rigid with messianic fury, exploding out the crown of our overworked heads like millennial fireworks on the 4th of July.
Time to let that love of the land lead. The spirit is gentle, quiet, tenuous, and one must quiet oneself and sit still -- preferably in a natural setting -- in order to be vulnerable to its voice.
There are unanswered questions here, I realize that. Berry was naive, I think, to state that the shamanic personality was re-emerging in our culture and to place his faith in something so nebulous. We are a culture that always looks for the quick fix, even in terms of visionary experience, hence the renewed interest in psychedelic drugs. As if the answer was in a pill. How Western is that? That we could be saved by a substance; materialistic to the core. The answer's there, but it's blowin' in the wind, so to speak, and who can hear?
Remember Einstein's famous quote, that you can't solve a problem with the same thinking that got you into trouble in the first place? Such is our dilemma.
Berry, bless his heart, hoped his vision would shift the culture. I believe he was mistaken. For a man who lived his life essentially as a scholar, he grew a large thought and then looked beyond himself and his religion for the answer. He did have a crucial piece of the puzzle; the indigenous does have part of the answer to our current technological entrancement and the havoc it wreaks upon the Earth.
For an entire culture to shift, though, something more is required. It takes an entirely new vision, one larger than Berry's, to shift something so monumental as an entire civilization. I'm under no illusions that this will happen voluntarily or quickly. If it happens at all, it will still take several hundred years for a civilizational or cultural shift of the necessary magnitude and effect to take place.
A small portion of people may be able to make the shift now and, in time, others may follow. When I look down the barrel at the remaining three-quarters of this century, I don't see voluntary and informed change happening. Atavistic attitudes abound. I see an entire system collapsing under it's own weight and the accumulated national, religious, ethnic and sectarian hatreds simply serving to distract us from the larger picture. Much of humanity, I'm afraid, will simply go the way of the megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene. Unable to adapt, refusing to learn the lessons at hand, railing into their graves.
We'll talk in the future about visionary experience and the size and range of what would be needed to shift this world on its axis before it hits "tilt."
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