Topic: The other subtext

Regulation through regular lovemaking gives the body and spirit the strength to fight off any of those 'civilized daemons' floating in our personal noosphere.

I'd like to start a dialogue about the existence of spirits as something that is not a metaphor or a figment of imagination. I'd like to hear why people percieve spirits and myths as metaphors.

I know you're alive because I can recognize parts of myself in you and your behavior.

How would you talk to a Cedar tree? How would you listen? How do you describe the way they speak?

There is no distinction between psyche and reality;

On one level, the world is cold and dead and mechanical.

How would you talk to a Cedar tree? How would you listen? How do you describe the way they speak?

How would you talk to a Cedar tree? How would you listen? How do you describe the way they speak?

What about plants? or rocks? Can you recognize parts of yourself in them?

Are you saying that you believe things are only alive once you project a face onto them? If you could not recognize parts of yourself in them does that mean they do not have a conscioussness all of their own? Without your projections?

I am alive whether or not you can empathize with me.

This is a lie straight from Mother Culture. This is what Derrick Jensens book a Language Older Than Words discusses. The world is not dead at all. You can believe the lie, or you can participate in the universe. If you believe the lie, it does not change the reality of the universe.

But you can't deny that it is, on one level, true--you can't deny that there are chemicals, and physics experimetns, and reactions predicted accurately by mathematical equations.

The lie is that the chemicals are dead. The lie is that the machine of my body is dead with or without me actually being "alive." Chemicals and organs working together are not dead. They are not machines. That is the lie.

That is not "another level of understanding" in a series of "levels."

It is a completely separate worldview that exists for our own psyches to rationalize the destruction of the planet.

3. our language is inadequate for the answer
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The idea of spirits just doesn't resonate with me.
It's not that I'm not open-minded to the idea, because I am. I just haven't experienced anything I would call a "spirit".
In fact, it's interesting -- the time I find myself closing off the most is when I'm experiencing a mystery and someone else insists on explaining it a particular way. If I challenge the explanation on the grounds that it's not necessary (or that there are other possibilities) then I'm accused of not being open-minded. Very frustrating.

I'm not giving Jason shit for saying that the land he spoke with said, "keep the knowledge" (even if my posts about the information of need showed the idea of keeping knowledge is pointless). I'm questioning it's authenticity because I can. I question my own experiences. Were they authentic communications? Or did I garble them like static on a radio dial with my ego?

It's not that I'm not open-minded to the idea, because I am. I just haven't experienced anything I would call a "spirit".

Yet I remained puzzled by my hostess's assertion that these were gifts for the spirits." To be sure there has always been some confusion between our Western notion of "spirit" (which so often is defined in contrast to matter or "flesh"), and the mysterious presences to which tribal and indigenous cultures pay so much respect. Many of the earliest Western students of these other languages and customs were Christian missionaries all too ready to see occult ghosts and immaterial spirits where the tribespeople were simply offering their respect to the local winds. While the notion of "spirit" has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic or human association, my encounter with the ants was the first of many experiences suggesting to me that the "spirits" of an indigenous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form.

As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body-we live our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle, nor can we readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower, or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. Our experience may well be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity; nevertheless we cannot, as humans, experience entirely the living sensations of another form. We do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations-we cannot know, or can never be sure that we know, what they know. That the deer experiences sensations, that it carries knowledge of how to orient in the land, of where to find food and how to protect its young, that it knows well how to survive in the forest witbout the tools upon which we depend, is readily evident to our human senses. That the mango tree has the ability to create or bear fruit, or the yarrow plant the power to reduce a child's fever, is also evident. To humankind, these Others are purveyors of secrets, carriers of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes-who show us, when we are foraging, where we may find the best food or the best route back home. We receive from them countless gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet still they remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and enacting their own rituals, never wholly fathomable. Finally, it is not only those entities acknowledged by Western civilization as "alive," not only the other animals or the plants that speak, as spirits, to the senses of an oral culture, but also the meandering river from which those animals drink, and the torrential monsoon rains, and the stone that fits neatly into the palm of the hand.

I'm only now starting to be able to tell the difference between my own imagination, and these kinds of impressions you mention. They just feel different, y'know?