Imaginal

Freya Mathews has written that every aspect of a culture takes on the colour of its basic attitude to reality.

So what is “our basic attitude to reality”? And is it time we brought our attitudes fully into our awareness so we can consider whether they remain appropriate to the current world situation? Are there alternatives that would assist us in the task of building a more life-enhancing and life-sustaining culture?

Our modern world-view draws a distinct boundary between humans (as subject or master) and world (as object or slave), and treats the world as non-living matter ready to be exploited for the sole benefit of humans. As a result we have created a lonely, meaningless world devoid of spirit and living presences. How we all long for a world of meaning and connection!

Earth wisdom teachers such as indigenous elders, eco-philosophers, eco-psychologists and holistic scientists, can provide us with an array of considered alternatives. They show us how we can tune into our own inner nature, as well as outer nature, and by doing so reveal to us deeper, richer and more varied ways of experiencing our selves and our world. It is a radical re-orientation to reality.

A day I spent with Uncle Max Harrison (Dulumunm), a Yuin Elder and teacher, revealed a radically different attitude to the world, one that is both respectful and very, very, slow. To walk a few hundred metres with Uncle Max can take hours as he teaches the way of nature, seeking out signs and listening for the voice of nature and/or spirits. He said that we need an attitude that allows nature to re-arrange us, in radical contrast to the modern way of re-arranging nature without listening to place, or respecting the voice of non-human others.

The alternative attitude being proposed by all these earth wisdom teachers is a world that is animated (all things are alive), radically ensouled, communicative and purposeful.

What a radically different world we would live in if our attitude to reality changed like this. It would challenge many foundational aspects of our culture, including the scientific interrogation of our world, our exploitative economics, our consumer lifestyle, our religions, our politics, and even the way we relate to others.

So, if you want to be truly radical, try going outside and really be in the world, just as it is. Imagine for a moment that the world is alive, and speaks, and all we need to do is stop, be quiet, listen and wait. and feel what comes. See the clouds, the sky, a tree, not as a spectator, but a participant. Feel the wind on your body. Take off your shoes and feel your feet connected with earth. Quietly sense and feel into your body (not your head). There might be a message in there. It might surprise you.

I recently spent a whole day, from sunrise to sunset, alone in a cave in a very secluded location in the Blue Mountains, NSW to try to re-connect to self and nature, and to the deeper mysteries at the heart of existence.

For most of our human existence, we have had a profound and reciprocal alliance with nature. We are now living with the consequences of breaking the covenant we once had with the living cosmos. So, I was called to spend a whole day alone to start to re-weave a deeper connection with myself and the living Earth.

So how did I go about reweaving myself back into the natural order? How did I compose my mind in such a way that I could be fully receptive to what was going on around me, and as well as  inside me at deeper (psychic) levels, so that resonances, and hopefully understandings, could occur between self and nature?

I am not sure that I was able to fully release myself from the shackles of a cultural norm that is ever and always distracted, is overly rational and objective, views nature as a dispirited and meaningless place, values abstractions over reality, and can’t conceive of nature as communicative other. But I suppose the most important aspect is that I tried!

On arriving at my cave, I simply took time to arrive, sit and be still.  I dropped into my amazing sensory body, and particularly by allowing sight to just be one of many senses.  I let thoughts and distractions fade away.  I grounded myself in the eroded yellow sandstone of my cave floor, relishing the soft, sensuous qualities of this material.  I explored my cave, found footprints, which turned out to be lyrebird. I established my special place in the cave, with objects brought from home and local objects. I meditated. I danced. I cried. I slept. I felt deeply into my instinctual and intuitive body. I called to the world to let me know my purpose, my particular way of healing self and world. I sought to experience and resonate with the intelligence, beauty and subjective nature of my cave and locale.

Words lack the immediacy and depth of the senses, so my subjective experiences are difficult (or impossible) to convey. And to convey the voice of nature is impossible - it is not a human voice, but rather a poetic, mythical and richly textured one.

Freya Mathews shines some light on the voice of nature in her book Reinhabiting Reality.  She says: ” … the world must speak, if it speaks at all, in the poetic language of particulars … when one asks the world a metaphysical question, it often turns the beam of one’s enquiry back onto oneself, to highlight the wounded core out of which the question comes. You want to know about the nature of reality? it seems to say. Well, here, look at this. Before I can give you answers you’ll have to refine your questions. Let’s look at the secrets in the heart of the one who asks.”

The understandings from my day in the cave remain in a deep place of unknowing. For the moment, the secrets in my heart are being explored. Can I rest down into that place?

I have just been listening to a wonderful exchange of views between Bill Plotkin and David Abram. It’s quite long at over 80 minutes, but well worth taking the time to have a listen.

The topic of the discussion is how to generate a profound shift in our culture, in our consciousness. David talks about this great shift as requiring a shift in our perceptions. He says that we don’t see the earthly world around us with any clarity, we don’t hear the voices of the land, and we don’t notice the rest of the world with anything like a realistic apprehension. So, he says, we need to build our perceptual abilities so we can gain the needed clarity to learn what the world is really about, and to learn what our place is in the world, and to live appropriately.

It seems clear that we forget that we have animal bodies, with animal senses, that co-evolved with the world around us, and that we are immersed in a word of others: animal beings, conscious presences, and elemental forces. It is interesting to reflect on the way “animal” is a derisory comment in our modern society, especially when applied to humans: You animal! They were just animals! But our animality is just a fact of life, and we should take the time to celebrate our animal bodies, by, at the very least, getting outside.

Bill says this shift requires a redefinition of what it means to be human. He talks about how our modern western societies have become locked into a patho-adolescent way of being, engendered by our consumerist culture and our schooling, and how we desperately need to grow up. But it is so easy to sell more things to immature people! So we need to develop new models of what it means to be fully and authentically human. We could all benefit from a careful reading of Bill’s nature-based model of human development.

Bill talks about the way in which a conversation between two people can shape each other in interesting ways. Similarly, David asks, could a conversation between a place, animals, plants, water, and winds, shape and inform our bodies, nervous systems, our very styles of experience? Only if we humans consider the world around us as being alive, being able to communicate to us, and if we develop the skills to enter the conversation, can this idea resonate with us. But we have become locked into a human centred way of being, without being affected by non-human “others”. Of course indigenous people around the world have understood that the world does speak, and not just metaphorically, but as experienced reality. Listen to the words of Bill Neidjie, a Aboriginal Elder who has returned to the earth:

I feel it with my body, with my blood. Feeling all these trees, all this country. When the wind blows you can feel it. Same for country … You feel it. You can look, but feeling … that make you.

So can we shake ourselves free from our (perhaps unconscious) assumptions that the world does not speak, does not have a presence? Can we become receptive to the voices and presences of the world around us, and our places? Can we awaken to the awe and mystery at the heart of the world around us? Can we feel this presence deep in our bones, deep in our hearts? Can we celebrate our nature?

So much so-called spiritual writing is about transcendence. But what are the writers trying to get us to transcend? Listen to this piece from well known “new-age” writer, Eckhart Tolle from his book New Earth: “Space consciousness represents not only freedom from ego, but also from dependency on the things of this world, from materialism and materiality.” Well, guess what Mr Tolle, this material world gave birth to us, dreamt us into existence if you like, supports us through our lives, and when we finally die, takes us back into the earth (when we become energy and food for other creatures). Why is there so much distaste for the lovely messiness of this world, and a desire for the abstract purity of “space consciousness”?

Now, I for one, don’t want to escape from this materiality, even if I could! In fact, I want to embrace if fully, and give thanks to it, and honour the material dimension of our lives. As I said in my last post, we need to see the denial of our own embodiment, animality and inclusion in the natural order as a major reason why we distance ourselves from nature.

Don’t confuse materialism and materiality. Materialism, is often the word used, perhaps incorrectly, for consumerism, our insatiable appetite for things. Materiality is the dimension in which we live, now (and this really is the Power of Now). We don’t live in space! We live on, or perhaps more appropriately, in the earth. We are not disembodied beings. And our “sensible” material bodies are brought into relation to the world around us through our eyes, ears, noses, skin, and tongues, as it has done for much of human history.

Listen to another view of earth and materiality, this time from David Abram who is a cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist, the creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics and the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. David says: “If humankind seems to have forgotten its thorough dependence upon the earthly community of beings, it can only be because we’ve forgotten (or dismissed as irrelevant) the sensory dimension of our lives”. And also this: “Sensory experience … is the way our body binds its life to the other lives that surround it, the way the earth couples itself to our thoughts and our dreams.”

So, we need to acknowledge the aliveness of the world around us, and not see it as a trap for our spiritual journey. We are part of the body of the earth, not a spiritual being trapped inside a base material body. We do not need to aspire to a transcendent, abstract god (or spirit), living above us in an ethereal realm. What we really need, especially in this time of change, is to attune to the (multi-voiced and multi-faceted) spirits of the place where we are currently living – the earth, our locale, our place. We need, as David Abram says: “Practices that draw human groups into ever deeper accord with the exuberant nature that surrounds them, enabling community to thrive in reciprocity with a flourishing terrain.”

So stop, and listen: the earth is calling you. Can you hear the whispers on the wind? Can you feel the energy of the sun? Can you (will you) connect with the gaze of another animal, knowing that his or her eyes function just like yours?

Rebecca Solnit has written that the compassion emphasizes emotional generosity and the ability to respond to others. Imagination identifies what it takes to be able to extend yourself that way in the first place, to let another person (I would add another species) in.

Cleary we need a world with more compassion, for ourselves, other humans, and the species with whom we share this world. (It is of course hard to have compassion for the world and others if we don’t have compassion for ourselves.) What would it take for us to extend ourselves in this way? What does it take to imagine the earth in a hundred years from now? How can we extend our imaginations to look through the stuff we buy (and throw away) to see the impacts of each purchase and how it impacts on the world around us in destructive ways? Modern society tries to hide and ignore these impacts, so we need look deeply into these things. This takes a radical imagination.

Unfortunately, our current understanding of what it means to be human is based on a highly individualised, self enclosed and self referential ego, an ego that drives us away from connection and relationship, away from compassion for others. We currently privilege rational, abstract and heroic ways of being; ways of being that are controlling and dominating. We need to develop alternate ways of knowing, based on feelings, emotions and intuition, if we are to extend ourselves in the first place. This way of knowing is metaphoric and symbolic, and creates a new way of thinking and feeling.

So, the big question is: How do we extend our identities to include the world around us, and other species? That is, how do we create an ecological imagination in a distracted world? Can we develop the capacity to re-imagine our selves and the world in radically different ways and treat the world as alive and full of meaning, as deserving of both moral and ethical consideration?

We need to see the denial of our own embodiment, animality and inclusion in the natural order as a major reason why we distance ourselves from nature. As Val Plumwood said, “The resulting delusions of being ecologically invulnerable, beyond animality and ‘outside nature’ leads to the failure to understand our ecological identities and dependencies on nature.”

What is the first step on this journey of re-imagining the world? Here is where our empathetic imaginations are needed. As well as a bit of resistance and defiance! We need, as Val Plumwood has said, the ability to “resist and challenge the assumptions underlying our control and consumption extravaganza we so naively identify with the good, civilised life and move to a sustainable form of human culture.”

This requires homo reflectus rather than homo sapiens. We need to get of our minds and into our bodies, extend our identities, listen to nature with empathy, and reflect on our predicament. I would like to offer you this practice for your imagination. Let me know how it goes.

Environmentalism has become very shallow in these “end-of-the-world” days when the garments of nature and culture are unravelling, and wearing thin. (In earlier times, these garments used to support us on our journey into, through, and out of life.)

These days we are bombarded with behavioural requests: turn off your lights, turn off the standby! These simple minded and crude attempts at being green hardly assist us to work towards healing the chasm that exists between nature and humanity.

Rarely are feelings of intimacy with nature evoked or explored. The imaginative space of wonder in nature seem to have been lost in favour of small behavioural changes, resulting in a loss of the rich history of nature as mysterious, numinous and as a guide to personal revelation. How can we heal nature when we no longer have nature in our hearts? How can we dream our lives and souls into their full existence when the dream of the earth is denied?

We are living through an impoverished story of our place in the world, mainly through the stories of reductionist scientific rationalism, and technocratic dreams of control and mastery. We have become entranced with wires, wheels and widgets. We have removed the heart and aliveness of matter and nature, and reduced it to a backdrop and resource for the everyday world of business and busy-ness. In this reduced story, humanity seems to have no idea of its how to find a grander purpose and meaning beyond the artificially constructed consumerist drive, and its narcissistic tendencies.

What we need more than anything else are stories that situate humanity as part of nature, as caretakers for a planet under siege. We need stories of being in relationship with an alive and purposeful nature. Stories that tap the roots of our deep imagination so we can re-imagine ourselves ecologically, where nature is revered for its role in supporting our very existence.

Where are these stories? Have they been lost forever? Will you share your story with us?

At this time on earth, we seem to be rushing mindlessly into the abyss. We are now experiencing (or, through denial, failing to experience) symptoms of our discordant and indulgent lifestyles (symptoms such as global warming, species extinctions, extreme poverty, war, terror, mass starvation - should I go on?).

While many may view these symptoms as problems to be solved, there is an alternative view of of symptoms as indicating something to be experienced and felt on a much deeper level. I would like to expound an alternative idea of these symptoms, influenced by the thinking of Robert Romanyshyn.

Rather than our typically modern approach of wanting to evaluate and diagnose the symptoms in order to “cure” them (and cure them quickly), our task, I believe, is to treat the symptoms as a call to listen and give voice to what would otherwise remain silenced, to challenge us in remembering what we have forgotten.

Perhaps the symptoms are revealing that our societies need to listen deeply to what is, at core, an ethical and moral problem (dare I say “spiritual”?), and not a technical problem. That is, it is the way we live on, and our attitudes to, this earth, (our one and only home) and our failure to imagine an alternative to mass industrial society and consumer culture that is the root cause of the symptoms.

While there is much talk of sustainabilty these days, there is little talk of what it means to be human, in an authentic way, in these perilous times. While the end of the world may indeed be nigh, that does not mean we can escape the injunction to live an authentic life, even up to the end. And remember, the end is also a new beginning. So, in a sense, the world does not come to an end.

We need to make visible the pathology of the current age by challenging current dominant values, such as: rationalism; disembodiement; privileging of certain ways of knowing;domination of women, nature and other animals; belief in infinite progress; industrialism; individual privacy; hyper-seperation from the earth; scientism; and many others. We need to challenge the concept of the earth as inanimate, as resource for our use, rather than the knowing the earth as alive with intentionality, meaning and purpose.

It is our industrial way of life, and our industrial way of thinking, that needs to be challenged.

This post takes a quick look at how environmental problems are constructed and viewed, and whether the conventional approach to changing society is up to the task.

Typically environmental problems are constructed through a scientific, technology and policy lens. Such a lens minimises the need for societal wide transformation and adopts a minimalist, incremental and shallow approach, mainly through policy and advocacy (legislative change) or populist campaigns (turn off or change the lights campaigns). It fails to argue for a radical transformation in societal governance, institutions and culture. This approach adopts the mainstream values of dominant society, which are a rationalist, detached and scientific view, often failing to recognise the social, cultural and psychological dimensions of issues.

The shadow side of the rationalist approach is that it reinforces the dominant culture instead of challenging it. We have backgrounded alternative ways of being in the world, based on engagement, connectedness, emotion, relationship and nurturance. It is no accident that these backgrounded values, emanating as they are from the feminine, are hidden or denied by patriarchal approaches. We need to address the anthropocentrism (human-centredness) of western ethics and practice, and the dualisms (mind-body, nature-culture) that create fault-lines and hierarchies in our society.

If the detached observer view of the world dominates, it creates a lens, both literal and metaphorical, through which the world is viewed. This view is one devoid of sensory engagement, or in other words a disembodied one. This is a way of thinking that has taken leave of its senses (literally and figuratively) through the denial of a bodily way of knowing the world (through both the senses and a felt sense). It results in a consciousness that creates a body fit only for amusement (since it does not have a role in knowing the world), a body insatiable in its demand for pleasure, distractions and stimulations. Are our overly rationalistic approaches giving rise to lifestyles (and bodies) that are inherently dangerous to the earth? How can people think of themselves as green, when they have little or no sensory engagement with nature, and the world around them?

What we really need is for people to love and be in the world, and not treat the world as a “resource” for our trivial needs and wants. The world is NOT a resource; it is NOT there to be used (how do you feel when you are used?). It is home for other lives that should have moral and ethical standing. Other lives that have been forgotten, minimised, and trivialised.

Can we work towards a transformation of our (ego) consciousness from one that seeks domination and control, to one based on an engaged planetary consciousness, in awe of the mystery and magic of the universe? We desperately need people to see the world and all other beings with loving eyes.