So I began searching for books, articles, anything that others had written about encounters with First People. I did not find many, but enough to make very obvious that what others wrote about other aboriginal people all over the world, was amazingly similar to my experiences. Every one of those writers mentions that these primitive people were happy, joyful, sang and danced, did not worry. Every one wrote about their intimate knowledge of their environment--actually not so much "knowledge" as being-part-of, as we know our own body. Every one of those writers admitted that meeting those "little people," even casually, had made a deep impression, a resonance with some inner, shared humanity. And several of these writers mentioned -- sometimes apologetic, reluctant -- what I experienced as well: that those primitive people knew things that they could not possibly know, according to our civilized thinking. Here I'll add just one little story; one of many.
The first author I discovered was Laurens van der Post, South African writer, who has written many books, and in at least three of them he talks about his obsession with finding and getting to know the Bushman of the Kalahari Desert. The many tribes call themselves collectively the San). As most westerners he had to organize an expedition, with trucks loaded with water and fuel, food, machines, Land Rovers, spare tires, guides, bearers, a doctor, a mechanic, and so forth. Somewhere they find a few Bushman. Less than a dozen. They set up their tents close by. Then van der Post writes how three hunters go out. As many aboriginal people they use bow and arrow, the arrows tipped in poison. (In different parts of the world the poison is made from different plant and animal products). They shoot a giraffe, but the poison works slowly in an animal that size, so the giraffe runs away, the hunters run after, Van der Post follows them in a Land Rover. He mentions his astonishment at the ability of the hunters to follow the spoor of one hurt giraffe from among many other tracks in desert sand. Finally, after three days, the giraffe dies. The hunters skin the animal, cut up the meat that they now will have to carry back on their shoulders to where their families are camped. Van der Post writes that it must be at least 50 km (30 miles) from where the giraffe died. He offers the hunters a ride in his car. Three hunters and all the meat and some bones from a giraffe are loaded into and on the roof of the car. As they start out, van der Post says to them, "the women will be surprised when you come back so quickly." Oh no, the hunters assure them, they know. When they get back to camp the women have large fires going, ready to cook the meat. They knew.
All this information, and my own experiences, were stirring in my head, while having to live in a world where humans think differently, see themselves-in-the-world very differently; a different reality. ("Reality" defined as the way we see the world and ourselves in it.)
HOW DID WE GET FROM THEN TO NOW? How did Man change from a species that knew itself an integral part of a whole (an ecology) to a species that thinks itself far above all life forms, now judged either useful (food or domesticated to work for us) or useless. What did we do, or what happened, for us to go from a virtually invisibly small footprint to a footprint so large it tramples everything in its path. Man began modest, became arrogant. Scientists call our "rise" cultural evolution. We assume evolution is always improving, always "up." Man is evolution's final glory, we tell ourselves.
But thinking that is essentially different from knowing ourselves part of All.
Why must evolution go up? From what I see around me with animals that reproduce in much shorter time spans, nature is whimsical. Nature tries anything and everything. Nature makes incredible colors, shapes, ways of being. Evolution is as chaotic as nature. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is that chaos, the unimaginable variety that makes the planetary ecology alive.
Civilized human thinks he knows best, and so we can interfere with nature, "help" nature by creating new beings with pieces of other beings mixed in. We create life forms and then get a patent on it. That means we "own" it and so make a profit selling it.
Nature, left alone, also continually creates new shapes, forms, colors, but without intent. Evolution's only "direction" is maintaining as much variety as possible; not up but sideways at odd angles in every direction. The Hawaiian Islands are the weathered tops of undersea volcanoes, far from the nearest continent. It is a long voyage for any life form to find its way to these lost dots in the wide ocean. A few seeds have blown on a storm, insects perhaps also on the wind. A few plants and animals may have floated on a tree stump for thousands of miles to wash ashore on an isolated island. Scientists found that at least one female bird somehow survived 2500 miles in a strong wind probably. Over time, measured in hundreds, perhaps a few thousand years but not really a long time, from one bird species evolved over 40 different kinds of birds, with different shapes and functions, now different enough to be considered 40 different species. I would say "because an ecology needs as much variety as possible to be stable."
We, who think we must control, want to simplify. We have forgotten-- or deny -- that we are not above, or outside, but right in the middle of all there is. We do indeed have acquired power we think ultimate power. We can force anything and everything to do our will. We think we have not only the ability, but the right, to rearrange nature. We may have the power but we don't know what we are doing. Our rearrangement looks more and more like wholesale destruction. Men have the power to slice the top off a mountain to extract a bit of coal we burn to get the energy to slice the top off the mountain. Consequences? No time for that, we want profit now. A few men make up stories that convince others to make wars, enormous expenditures of energy in order to kill people. Wars must be the most wasteful and destructive inventions of civilized Man.
Our civilization imagines it has seized control over nature, and over Man. And then we think all this glory of conquest and riches proves that we are superior and somehow convince a lot of innocent people to believe that.
I cannot feel proud of our supposed accomplishments. I find it hard to imagine that one system of control is better than another, one belief more true than another. It is pure power that "wins" by destroying a million people who believed something else.
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