ratitor's corner
june 21, 1998
june solstice, 7:03am, pdt
--------------
Planting Seeds of Transformation
Our Elders the Redwoods
Gifts of Life: Dad & Piano
Witness to a Last Will of Man
Today is the June solstice, and, being so, the sun, appearing to travel
along the ecliptic, reaches the point where it is farthest north of the
celestial equator. In the northern hemisphere days are now the longest and
nights the shortest while the opposite occurs in the southern hemisphere.
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This ratitorial recounts significant experiences over the past
half-revolution around SOL, how they have greatly expanded and deepened my
appreciation of the bountiful gifts life bestows upon us, and an exposition
of what the dynamics of inner transformation provide each of us with to
manifest change within which in turn changes the world around us we are in
contact with at each moment.
Many seeds have been planted inside over the past
half-a-revolution around SOL and, with all the ratitor's corners
"penned" over the past 2-and-one-half such revolutions, it seemed
fitting to finally write one on the occasion of the longest day in
the northern hemisphere given that today, where i live, is the day
of most sunlight. After all, SOL is the source of the fecundity
life bestows upon all plant seeds growing first in the darkness of
the earth to marshal their energies for growth, and then bursting
out into the light of its nourishment to manifest their further
increase.
As with plants, so it is that the seasons and cycles of life exert
their ineluctable influence and pattern of birth, death,
nourishment, and renewal upon all of creation existing here. For
me, i continue to feel the greatest fascination centering on what
the processes of growth and change actually contain and symbolize.
They attract me simultaneously as the most compelling and the most
mysterious creative patterns swirling within and without.
Compelling, in that i feel the imperative to continue to grow and
explore what change is and means in an ever-expanding contemporary
idiom; the gravity of these two "heavenly bodys" is enormous,
cosmically astronomical in magnitude and influence. And mysterious
in that both growth and change, processes so effortless and
effusive during childhood, seem to atrophy and slow down or
practically stop altogether as one assumes a supposedly
inescapable burden of the increasing weight of mechanical patterns
of thought and behavior as the years spent alive in this place
turn into decades.
i live an extraordinarily privileged life at this time on Earth,
where an inner sense of meaning continues to flower and urge
further discovery and exploration of the limitlessness life
imparts. For most of us it is a battle to simply survive
physically as well as psychically; where concerns about giving
something back to the life and world that spawned one, although
such might sound like a "nice idea", do not enter into the picture
given the daily challenge of simply existing, as best as one can,
with the ravages of the outer and inner landscapes strewn about.
The prospect of transforming our world into a place where all may
enjoy the same quality of meaning in their lives seems to more and
more be possible only by manifesting transformation inwardly, on a
host of levels, which then flow outwardly to touch all one comes
into contact with.
Starting in the latter half of January, i was able to enjoy a
3-month vay-kay away from the working-for-money grinder, stepping
out of the time-lock most everyone i know feels the ever-mounting
pressure of with each passing day.
Our Elders the Redwoods
---------------------------
In late January i made a short road-trip up [Redwood Tree]
the [California] coast and was transported
into a state of grace not touched for some time with a few days of
communing with the redwoods in Humboldt Redwoods State Park (south
of Eureka) and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park (south of
Crescent City). These extraordinary beings also exist in Muir
Woods of course, but there, as they are that close to the massive
metropolitan area surrounding the San Francisco bay, one does not
feel the same degree of "remove" and distance from such frantic
centers of human activity and all the "distancing" and feelings of
fragmentation such energy interposes between oneself and the
natural world we belong to and are part of by rite of birth.
i frequently felt choked-up both from the beauty of their
magnificent living energy combined with the sadness of the threat
we have manifested and continue to pose to their being and future.
Consider these items:
* Here are the largest beings on earth, some living more than
2,000 years.
* The Coast Redwood is one of three types of this species --
the others are the Giant Sequoia and the Dawn Redwood.
Combined, they once covered significant portions of the
northern hemisphere. Now there are just 3 spots left: the
Coast Redwood and Giant Sequoia in California and the Dawn
Redwood in China.
* Coast Redwoods grow to heights exceeding 350 feet.
* Coast Redwoods thrive on moisture: they also influence the
climate of the river canyons by transpiring moisture which
keeps the humidity high. A single tree can release up to 500
gallons of moisture into the air per day.
* Ancestors of the redwoods lived all the way back during the
time of the dinosaurs -- they have "been around" that long.
* At the Visitors Center in Humboldt State Park was the round
of a tree with this description:
In 1148 A.D. this tree begin growing near Jordan
Creek at the north end of the "Avenue of the
Giants". It was 839-years old when it fell in 1987.
The height of the tree was 300-feet, the average
diameter at the base was 9-feet and its weight
probably was 325-tons.
* There were plaques on the side pointing to different rings
with the following "time markers":
1215 Magna Carta Signed
1341 Significant Fire Scarred the Tree
1492 Columbus Discovers America
1579 Drake Lands in California (more than 1/2-way out)
1620 Pilgrims Land at Plymouth Rock
1776 Declaration of Independence Signed
1849 Humboldt Bay Discovered by Land
1919 Save the Redwoods League Founded (close to bark's
beginning)
On one level, what made me feel so choked-up was the fact that
here are beings who live for hundreds and hundreds of years --
and, instead of frantically scurrying about hither and yon as we
more and more do in the conduct of our lives, these living beings
occupy the same spot for all their centuries, and even millenia,
of life! Think of what they have "seen"! Think of all the stories
they can tell! They stand and express and experience time in such
a fundamentally different manner than we. And our own frantic
nervousness is more and more consuming the entirety of the
exquisite living system we share with them and all life exploring
itself here in, on, and around our Mother Earth.
i slept in the town of Scotia where the Pacific Lumber Company has
its large mill. In a public green there was a steam engine and
another bit of historical machinery as well as another redwood
round section on display with the following plaque:
COAST REDWOOD
(SEQUOIA SEMPERVIRENS)
AGE 1,382 YEARS
GREATEST DIAM. 13'9" INSIDE BARK
THE TREE FROM WHICH THIS SECTION WAS CUT
YIELDED 184 LINEAR FEET OF LOGS AND
CONTAINED 81.320 BOARD FEET OF LUMBER.
THE TREE WAS FELLED IN 1979 ON THE
PACIFIC LUMBER COMPANY LAND.
The poignant tragedy of the above speaks worlds about the human
capacity to separate and distance oneself from the world one
belongs to by rite of birth. The round in the Visitors Center was
taken from a tree that fell of its own accord; the round in Scotia
was taken from a tree almost fourteen hundreds years old that was
cut down, killed, by people. People caught in the in-between
moment after their ancestors had lived out their lives working in
timber industries cutting and milling trees for building
materials, when the Earth's bounty seemed infinite and when
"civilized" man had already reached the point where his conception
of the world, and his place in it, were divided and separated each
from the other. Ten thousand years or more ago, by what we can
observe from the aboriginal peoples still on Earth attempting to
continue living as we all once lived, human beings did not feel
divided nor separated from the natural world but rather,
inseparably connected with and interdependent upon it for all
life's blessings.
Today, more and more of our human family live lives engaged in the
pursuit of accumulation, one of the most compelling substitutes
people become trapped within -- i.e., the attempt to obtain
physical security by amassing greater and greater quantities of
material wealth (of which one can never have or acquire enough) as
a bulwark against the reality of there being no inner, psychic,
non-material security. Facing the fact -- that existing as
conscious "apparently autonomous" beings brings with it the
actuality that the only security in life is understanding that
there is no security (either inner or outer) -- is so terrifying a
prospect to explore that a significant portion of people living
through recorded history have spent the bulk of their lives
attempting to deny and escape from the consequences of this law of
life.
i certainly am not free of this fear, and the conditioning of the
culture i was raised in, to surround myself with material things
as a means to stave off coming to grips with this fact of there
being no security. But i do want to find out more about all this,
and how my own experience of life is diminished and made less by
it.
Spending some brief moments among the giants living to the north,
has rekindled a sense of the existence of the unquenchable flame
of life within, and the utter gratefulness that its warmth
instills imparting a sense of deep connection with all beings. We
would do well to listen to the stories our friends the trees are
telling us still, if only we could but "take the time" to listen
and hear them.
Gifts of Life: Dad & Piano
---------------------------
When i came back from the land of our Redwood Elders i was
endeavoring to heal soreness in my right arm from way too much
typing with lousy posture, which i'd engaged in at work before i
stepped off on January 20th. This had been a lapse back into
useless old patterns which i already knew about from an RSI thing
i had going back in 1996, and for which i had benefited from
working for 6 months with Michael Siegel, a physical therapist of
remarkable gifts and talents in Santa Cruz. Although the symptoms
were not the same -- this time it was primarily a sense of mild
strain and a feeling of muscles in the forearm being mildly
engorged without releasing their extra fluid -- i already knew one
ignores the intimations of such discomfort at one's own peril.
This time, through good friend Charles "Lucky" Stein, i found my
way to Jill Cohen and her extraordinary gifts with the practice of
myofascial release, "a therapeutic treatment utilizing a gentle
form of stretching, producing a profound healing effect upon the
body tissues, eliminating pain and restoring motion." On February
23rd, the first day i saw Jill, i intuitively realized i had found
someone and something that offered me tremendous potentials in the
areas of growth and change. i saw Jill 9 times over the next 3
weeks, in which period not only did i experience a sense of
wonderful release in my arm, but an opening throughout the whole
of my human overcoat. At this point i find my experience of
looseness, from the spine and sternum outwards, to be more agile
and flexible than i can recall from before i backed-up into
computers in 1983.
But the most illuminating aspect of all is how, since late
February, i have experienced the sense of old, mechanical patterns
of behavior as well as of thought, dissipating and dissolving.
Flowing from this, the greatest gifts manifesting from my time off
were an active re-engagement of connection with my father and with
the piano. As i've described elsewhere, i've been aware to varying
degrees for a long time of the significance of the estrangement
that grew up inside between myself and my father as well as the
fact that actively establishing a more intimate level of
communication between us was an avenue i could pursue at any time,
if i would but choose to do so. The week before i started seeing
Jill was when i elected to reach out to him as i never have before
in my adult life.
Once free of the daily influence of the "accomplishment drug" i
had already been burnt out on from the place i've worked at since
February, 1986, i was able to commence wading into a second level
of re-evaluating and re-visiting my own life and experience of
being begun last fall in earnest when friend John Terhorst died at
the age of 37 years after struggling with cancer for the previous
12 months. A lot of self-examination had already been opened up
from that experience. John lived so utterly expansively to the end
of his days here. His love and the light manifesting in him were
available in great profusion to all his friends. His sharing of
his own journey was unconditional right up to the end of his
physical expression of life.
At the turn of the year i already knew something very significant
was approaching. The feeling of "It was twenty years ago today"
was alive-and-well inside as i was recalling February 1978 when i
landed the job at Rhymes Records in New Haven, Connecticut and how
that experience carried me to places i never had previously
imagined during the 15 months i worked there and beyond. Here i
was 20 years later, approaching the same new moon of February,
remembering one of the first evenings i was on my way to the bus
to go work at Rhymes. Looking up around the time of sunset, with
snow everywhere on the ground and blue everywhere in the sky, i
saw the sliveriest of cheshire cat smiling new moons beaming down
from the western sky. Everything felt in sync in that moment. Now,
2 decades later, a different sense of "pregnant moment" was in the
air.
But although i had been relishing the prospects of the two areas
of interest i most wanted to spend the 3 months engaged upon --
practicing piano and working on ratical.org -- once i was free of
work, i had to face the fact that i'd stretched my arm beyond its
physical limits and needed to truly relax and let go of the
on-going craving to accomplish. After some weeks of having to
relax and truly slow down, i realized one day that there was no
better time than the present to make time to visit my father, an
hour's drive to the south. So i started to drive over for the day
once a week. He used to play piano for some years soon after i was
born. 20 years ago he started playing the violin. Among other
things, we picked up where we had left off some years earlier with
Handel's Violin Sonata No. III in F major, Opus 1, No.12. The fact
of music's healing power and energy has never been more evident to
me than during this break from work-life. There is a glorious form
of benediction expressed in the symbolic union of the creative
spark spanning as well as being passed between the generations
when one is given the gift of making music with one's father.
The estrangement i felt towards my father that started at the end
of childhood and gathered momentum into my teens is, sadly,
something all too many boys-becoming-men are familiar with. It can
come to intrude in virtually every aspect of one's life. What i
saw in February, more clearly and consciously than ever before,
was that in believing i could not trust my father, i was
unconsciously caught in the trap of believing i could not trust
life itself. Such an inability to trust outwardly inextricably
came home to roost inwardly in the form of self-rejection, the
ultimate betrayal of one's own being. i have lived a significant
portion of my life in a such a state of self-rejection. There is
much about the world today that fosters such rejection of one's
own self and by extension a commensurate rejection of life.
But anything is possible! And for me, i found that during the end
of February and in March and April, something was beginning to
thaw out after a long, frozen interlude. Along with this, at the
very same time i began to work with Jill, i found it was
effortless psychically to sit and play the piano in a way i had
not felt for years and years. Extra to the fact that i was feeling
much looser and less and less inhibited by any sense of physical
stricture or block, was the infinitely more remarkable-to-me fact
that i wasn't feeling anything of the previously familiar "i
should play", or "i really need to practice" voice within. i
simply wanted to sit down and play and play. And play i did as i
haven't since studying with Mary Lou Williams in 1979-80; for the
last 8 weeks, every day centered around playing on average of 4 to
6 hours.
i was interested in reviving as much of the bulk of my repetoire
as i could and by this point i was actively pursuing the prospect
of seeing if i might be able to start playing piano for kids in
the schools. Last October i had been in Washington playing piano
in my niece's 2nd/3rd grade class and was delighted with the
enthusiastic response of the children. That experience stayed with
me. At present i am listening with my Mom to recordings of the
1973 Norton Lectures by Leonard Bernstein at the Harvard Square
Theatre in which he opens with the question Charles Ives posed
near the beginning of this century, "Wither music?" Bernstein will
forever be worlds beyond me as composer, performer, conductor, and
teacher, but his example of inspired-to-the-extreme expounding on
the syntax and semantics of a worldwide musical grammar and
giftedness in the area of presenting an unrivaled, compelling
"music appreciation act" makes me want to find out what i can do
in the same vein with children today, playing as well as telling
stories about the songs, their composers, and sharing my own love
of and excitement with music to our future grandmothers and
grandfathers. i also want to study all the Danny Kaye movies i can
find as he was in a league by himself when it came to reaching
kids and "bringing them along with him" into a magical world of
music and song, humor and unbridled imagination.
While with Mary Lou Williams, she fostered a deep sense within of
the importance of keeping the healing energy of jazz alive by
playing it for people, whether through recordings via radio
stations or live performance. i brought back about 85% of what i
used to be able to play and found a situation at the beginning of
April where i can play piano downtown every Tuesday night at a
coffee house to practice playing in front of people again.
Currently i can play for about 2-and-a-half hours from memory but
the current song list doesn't begin to include the range of
composers and styles that i'd like, starting with J.S. Bach and
coming up to the 1950s and early sixties. Given that most children
will never hear practically any of this sort of music played live,
i decided when i went back to work that i'd change my job status
from 40 to 32 hours a week so i can have up to 3 days a week to
work up more and more material in prepartion for attempting some
form of a evolving music appreciation gig in the schools. i
volunteered and was able to play in a number of elementary schools
in April and May and already have the enthusiastic interest of two
school's music directors to work up on-going programs come the
fall. In time, the challenge will be how to respond in the
affirmative to requests to play elsewhere once it becomes more
well known through word-of-mouth of what i'm offering.
Witness to a Last Will of Man
---------------------------------
[Hunters] As those who've read the 1997 fall equinox
ratitorial know, i've been greatly expanded
by drinking in the stories of Laurens van der Post. His lifetime
of service to a furtherance of the art of story-telling and of
what stories mean and give to the human spirit sings worlds to
this one. This spring i read through the out-of-print 1984 book,
Testament to the Bushmen. This book is a companion to the film of
the same name by Paul Bellinger, film-maker and friend of Laurens
for many years. Jane Taylor wrote the bulk of the text. However,
starting on page 121, i found the most remarkable essay written by
Laurens entitled, Witness to a Last Will of Man .
Of all his books and stories i've read and listened to, this
48-page testament is unique and singular both in its concise as
well as extraordinarily wide-ranging articulation of the real
source of lethal illness daily consuming the human spirit, and
moving, seemingly inexorably, towards its tragic completion of the
profoundest night of non-being since before our aboriginal
forebears manifested here on Earth. It also provides great healing
and illumination. For the remainder of this ratitorial, i will
attempt to convey something of the essence of what i feel makes
this testament so noteworthy and of some of the profound insights
it contains which it is hoped others will likewise explore and
ponder.
As stated on the book jacket : "For Sir Laurens, the Bushmen
represent the primitive in man which we strive so successfully and
so tragically to hide behind the mask we call civilization. In a
more significant sense the destruction of the Bushmen is the
destruction of the best in all mankind." But this is not simply
one more articulation of the ever more disturbingly familiar
litany of crises facing humanity in its bid to either transform or
perish. It is a unique exposition of the challenge we can face
only if we are "prepared through profound self-knowledge to
re-learn the grammar of a forgotten language of self-betrayal, and
in so doing the meaning of tragedy and disaster".
The real trouble began for me, as it has done for
countless others, when I sought to understand
imaginatively the primitive in ourselves, and in this
search the Bushman has always been for me a kind of
frontier guide. Imagination shifts and passes, as it
were, through a strange customs post on the fateful
frontier between being and unrealized self, between what
is and what is to come. The questions that have to be
answered before the imagination is allowed through are
not new but have to be redefined because of their long
neglect and the need for answers to be provided in the
idiom of our own day. For instance, in what does man now
find his greatest meaning? Indeed, what is meaning
itself for him and where its source? What are the
incentives and motivations of his life when they clearly
have nothing to do with his struggle for physical
survival? What is it in him that compels him, against
all reason and all the prescriptions of law, order and
morality, still to do repeatedly what he does not
consciously want to do? What is this dark need in the
life of the individual and society for tragedy and
disaster? Since the two World Wars that have occurred in
my own lifetime, disorder and violence have become
increasingly common on the world scene. Surely these
things are rooted in some undiscovered breach of cosmic
law or they would be eminently resistible and would not
be allowed to occur? Where indeed does one propose to
find an explanation for the long history of human
failure? How can one hope to understand this aspect of
man and his societies, and comprehend a scene littered
with ruins and piled high with dunes of time which mark
the places where countless cultures have vanished
because men would not look honestly, wholly and steadily
into the face of their inadequacies? The answers to none
of these questions are available unless one is prepared
through profound self-knowledge to re-learn the grammar
of a forgotten language of self-betrayal, and in so
doing the meaning of tragedy and disaster. It is the
ineluctable preliminary to our emancipation, especially
for those priests and artists who have been subverting
themselves and the societies which they are dedicated to
preserve. Unless one is honestly prepared to do so, one
is warned at this crepuscular immigration post that one
had better not cross the frontier. [pp.124-5]
van der Post goes on to discuss how Shakespeare's Hamlet is,
"[f]or the English-speaking world the most significant example of
such an imagination shift", and how for him, "the Bushman has been
a scout and frontier guide to me from infancy in the same dark
labyrinthine underworld of human nature which Shakespeare entered
precipitately with Hamlet." The questions posed above,
complemented by the ensuing exploration into the implications of
such enquiry, provide all who read this -- and listen attentively
to what comes up from within that still small voice of the heart
-- with an exceedingly rare (and hence all the more precious)
glimpse into the subtle and expansive meaning contained within
such a grammar of this forgotten language of self-betrayal.
Since Testament to the Bushmen is out-of-print, most people will
never have the opportunity to benefit by exposure to such
life-nourishing insights as those provided in Witness to a Last
Will of Man :
Late, partial and hurried as it was in the doing, it
will make those who ponder its fragmentary bequests
nonetheless rich because they are all he had left to
bequeath of the wealth and natural spirit out of which
in his own day he gave so abundantly with all the grace,
willingness and fulness of which he in his time on earth
was capable. [p.160]
This sort of illumination needs to be given the widest possible
distribution. i put this essay up on ratical on May 31, 1998,
guided by the certainty that anyone who finds their way to this
and is touched by it, may well begin to experience something akin
to the potent "dose" of the medicine that has been progressively
restoring my spirit and psyche since the beginning of 1996 when i
read my first tale of his, A Story like the Wind. Traveling richly
through the landscape in this epic -- like any work of art, a
story that is both timeless as well deeply relevant to the present
period -- launched a process within that had been gestating for a
long time. Where self-betrayal is concerned, my own interest in
regaining a living grasp of this obscured vernacular and how to
understand and recognize the meaning and influence of its
articulation in my daily life is something i've yearned for since
the closing years of childhood.
i alluded to this above in mentioning the trap i became caught in,
feeling i could not trust life itself as a result of the fear,
confusion, and doubt that beset me with the psychic death of my
family when my parents divorced. For a child, such a deep-seated
and heretofore alien experience as feeling one could not trust
life laid-in the initial pattern of a rejection of self that was
then accompanied by a host of resulting consequences. At the time
i compensated as best i could and on into the years thereafter,
but the "accommodation" to such a tempest of conflict buried deep
within a locked treasure chest bursting with sadness, loss, grief,
and rage. The process of cutting off access to such rich sources
of growth and wisdom as these darker feelings embody and present
us with is tragically all too common in our age as people are
taught beginning early on to avoid and seek escape at any cost
from such disturbing challenges. Such avoidance -- and the
requisite Faustian debt incurred -- is an expression of rejection
that lays one open to commit a betrayal of self rivaled only by
rape or murder.
Decades were spent endeavoring to understand my self through a
process of enquiry based on asking `Why' as a means of gaining
insight and understanding into the true nature of who and what i
am. Such a question is the operative tool of the act of analyzing,
one of the cornerstones of western thought and perception. The
first definition of the verb analyze is, "to separate or break up
(any whole) into its parts so as to find out their nature,
proportion, function, relationship, etc." Starting in 1993, i
became deeply affected by tapes and books of Krishnamurti and
David Bohm. This began a process that continues to unfold and
expand. i came to the point where grasping the deeper significance
of things by asking `Why' could carry me no farther. As Laurens
describes from his own vantage point, `Why' is "a severely limited
question as the child discovers from the moment it begins to
talk."
`Why' in any case is a severely limited question as the
child discovers from the moment it begins to talk. It
produces limited answers, limited as a rule to the
mechanics and laws of the world, universe and life of
man. But the human heart and mind come dishearteningly
quickly to their frontiers and need something greater to
carry on beyond the last `why'. This beyond is the
all-encompassing universe of what the Chinese called Tao
and a Zen Buddhist friend, in despair over the
rationalist premises native to Western man, tried to
make me understand as a newly-graduated man by calling
`the great togetherness' and adding, `in the great
togetherness there are no "whys", only "thuses" and you
just have to accept as the only authentic raw material
of your spirit, your own "thus" which is always so.' In
and out of these great togethernesses it came to appear
to me that the story brings us a sense of this unique
`so' that is to be the seed of becoming in ourselves
during the time which is our lot.
This is what gives the artist in the story-teller
his meaning and justification to go on telling his
story, and sustains him, despite a lack of material
reward or recognition, in poverty and hunger. Even
though his work falls on stony ground and deaf ears or
is trodden under the indifferent feet of the
proliferating generations too busy to live in their
frantic search for the joys and hopes of gaining the
honours of the plausible world about them, this radar of
the story never fails him. He does not even try to know
but through an inborn acceptance of the demands of the
gift which entered him at birth, spins his story in the
loom of his imagination. The life in him knows that once
a story is truly told, the art which this mysterious
gift places at his disposal shall, when the time is
ready -- and the readiness is all -- find listeners to
take it in; their lives will be enlarged and the life
even of the deaf and dumb around them will never be the
same again. [p.137]
i have become one of those listeners whose life has been enlarged
by the rich vein of stories mined from the mother lode of humanity
Laurens van der Post was exposed to from the time of his infancy
on through the 9 decades of life lived here. But he is not
well-known in the U.S. -- and he needs to be. Now more than ever
people are silently crying out inside -- most without even
consciously recognizing the fact -- for an experience of the
living meaning of being made specific and immediate in their
contemporary lives. The latin root of "religion," is religare :
re-, back + ligare, to bind, bind together -- thus to reconnect or
relink to the cosmos which spawned us. This understanding of the
need for contemporary woman and man to regain a living sense of
religious experience in daily life is a deep thread running
throughout Laurens' writings: "I returned to the world, knowing
that unless we recover our capacity for religious awareness, we
will not be able to become fully human and find the self that the
first man instinctively sought to serve and possess." [p.161]
i have been as conditioned as anyone by the fixed meaning words
seem to inevitably assume in the mind. Everywhere is the evidence
that systems of authority -- be they economic, political,
religious, or social -- inevitably create and concentrate the most
mechanical patterns of thought and behavior in people. For a long
time, the word "religion" has conjured up an image within of
people blindly imitating and repeating antiquated rituals while
adopting literal interpretations of scriptures and sacred texts
without any urge to find, much less live out, a contemporary and
specific expression of the symbology contained within the given
system of belief.
My previous urge to gain understanding within through the process
of analyzing and viewing "me" as a collection of parts has given
way to an interest in seeing things wholistically, as a complete
unit. Looking at life as a whole is something western civilization
has very little practice in or familiarity with. In concert with
this, our culture thinks of and sees the world in extremely
literal terms with practically no understanding of the
significance of living and seeing symbolically.
My Grandpa was a Congregational minister in our church when i was
growing up. Born in Warren, Vermont in 1886, he too was a great
lover of stories and an ardent storyteller himself. He married
Mary Stambaugh who was born in Cheney, Washington in 1883, and
grew up near Wilbur where she remembered Nez Pierce Indians
including Chief Joseph coming into her father's grocery store.
They went to China in 1916 (where my mother grew up) where Grandpa
was a missionary and Grandma was a teacher and stayed until World
War II, returning afterwards from 1947 to 1950. The times i sat
through church services (instead of being in Sunday school which i
did not care for) were meaningful not so much because of the
sermons but because it was my Grandpa who was standing up there,
speaking to all those people. It was this personal connection with
the minister that mattered the most to me.
Raised on one level to think of things in a very literal manner
myself, i did not find much in the organized religion i was
exposed to as a child that enhanced my own perception of the
bounty and miracle of life, so palpably present in the world of a
child. i do recall feeling very close to and connected with the
world i was living in. My parents, siblings, and larger family,
friends, our cats, dog and rats, the earth i'd play in, the trees,
plants, water, clouds and sunshine, wind and birds, ocean and
fish, mountains and sky, as well as the utterly mysterious stars
and infinity of space; all the world i experienced felt close to
and immediate within me. And it is precisely this same sense of
belonging to and being intimately related with the world and all
life expressing and exploring itself here that is re-invoked and
re-joined more constantly in Laurens' stories than most others i
can remember.
The Hunter and the Whale provides a good example of this. Although
labeled "Fiction", it is written in the first person with
underlying elements confirmed as autobiographical in Chapter 3,
"The Singing Whale" of Yet Being Someone Other. The young
protagonist, named Peter, becomes a member of the crew of the
Norwegian whaling vessel, Kurt Hansen, based out of Port Natal in
Durban, South Africa for four seasons during the early 1920s.
Casting off from the the quay in the middle of the night and
travelling out into the vast expanse of the southwest Indian Ocean
on his first journey aboard, he stays above deck until dawn
certain that "interesting things were happening all the time and I
was convinced that if I went below I would miss something of the
greatest importance."
Remaining on deck until first light, he watches the morning star
rise and is filled with the sense of oneness engendered by such
direct, unabridged connection with creation and participation
within it:
There is something most significant about the
encounter of a human being in solitude with great
abiding manifestations of nature. It is so intensely
personal and specific that it demands some special
recognition from one's imagination. That moment, indeed,
grew great with natural divinity and the vast uprush of
light soaring after it with widespread wings became a
miracle. I felt then as if I were witnessing the first
day of Genesis and so near to some numinous presence
stirring over the face of the waters that I had the
impulse to pray in the ancient Amangtakwena way. They
greet the day by breathing into the palm of the right
hand until it becomes damp and warm, holding it up to
the dawn till the morning air has fanned it cool and
dry, taking that as a sign that the breath of their
lesser life has been made one with the breath of a
greater. I had often when alone with them on the veld or
in the bush found it perfectly natural to join in with
them. But on this occasion something I was not aware of
stopped me. I know now that it was a fear that Thor
Larsen, up there at the wheel, would see me do it.
[p.75]
Thor Larsen is the Captain, an intense, complex man of
extraordinaryly keen perceptivity where the skills of a hunter are
concerned, as well in his revealingly gentle appreciation of the
experience of "inexplicable rejection and scorn to a far worse
degree" than what Peter grapples with himself for the first time
in his life during this story. In the present day, the art of
hunting has been thoroughly eclipsed by the runaway excesses of
the meat industry and the grotesque, assembly-lined
mass-production of killing on such a grandiose, commoditized
scale. But although we have lost our connection to such an
experience as that with which our aboriginal ancestors were
intimately familiar, there is an art to tracking and following the
spoor, to the hunt for physical nourishment. This has its parallel
in the symbolic dimension with the hunt for meaning in life. The
pursuit of this quarry is of heretofore unparalleled significance
to the psychic well-being of our present-day selves. We are also
all the poorer for the fact that virtually all of us know not what
it means anymore to participate in finding and killing the animals
and birds that comprise our own portion of the cooked flesh that
appears on our plates.
In the above, Peter feels the presence and influence of the
rational mind, symbolized in the character of Thor Larsen,
intruding upon his own communion with the world of spirit "free of
the mistrust of instinct and intuition wherein contemporary Europe
tends to imprison human imagination". [A Story like the Wind,
p.124] This intrusion of the intellect, into a realm it cannot
apprehend nor grasp, followed by its attempts to either reject,
ignore, or disparage such non-rational forms of intelligence and
meaning, is one of the primary sources of the desolation i know i,
as member of the "modern" world, feel within. Such nourishing
encounters with the numinous nature of life are now mostly
extinguished by the system of mass culture, with the extent of
resulting desolation in the human spirit being anomalous to
anything that has come before during the span of recorded history.
Peter, nicknamed "Eyes" by the Captain for his ability to see the
blast of the whale's spout far off in the distance (and the luck
he is perceived by the crew of the Kurt Hansen to bring with him
from his numerous sitings), also enjoys a special relationship
with 'Mlangeni, the Zulu engine room stoker and the only black
member of the crew. Peter can converse in 'Mlangeni's native
tongue, something no one else understands. This situation provides
many opportunities to highlight the differences between the mind
of European man and that of people not beholden to such patterns
of thought :
I had not said more to Ruud because I had a hunch
that the less I told the rest of the crew about my
exchanges with 'Mlangeni the easier it would be for him
to confide in me. Also how explain to a man like Nils
Ruud what had just passed between the two of us? How
make a regular church-goer like Nils understand that
'Mlangeni, ostensibly one of the benighted heathen, was
more aware of the world of the spirit and its claims
than most of us? To 'Mlangeni everything from a grain of
sand to the fire underneath his boiler, from the
movement of an ant to the lowing of cattle at night,
even the sneeze of a boy, were all significant
manifestations of meaning. What would Nils Ruud have
said had I told him that 'Mlangeni was such a dedicated,
accepting servant of the spirit that we, by comparison,
became brutal materialists rejecting it? [p.87]
Of late, i feel increasingly in the presence of something being
expressed all around me, so beautifully stated above, that
"everything from a grain of sand . . . the movement of an ant to
the lowing of cattle at night, even the sneeze of a boy, . . . all
[contain] significant manifestations of meaning." There is a
growing sense of something being rekindled within, of a perception
of the utter mystery of life, manifesting every moment. It is
here! And we, in our frenzied goings on, expressing through our
daily patterns of behavior a nervous angst almost stretched beyond
its limits to the breaking point, are prevented from sensing such
nerve alarm bells since the warning of their incessant ringing
assumes the quality of "white noise," taken in below the level of
conscious recognition. Refusal to consciously acknowledge the
significance and true implications of such "alarm bells of the
spirit" is the machine-like unconscious and conscious pattern of
rejection we must in the end, one way or another, face and
resolve. This "business" of brutal materialists rejecting such
dedicated, accepting servants of the spirit -- and thus rejecting
the very same nature of spirit within our own selves -- is a core
thread running through Laurens' story-telling, and one we cannot
be reminded of and confronted with often enough, given the fact
that such lethal rejection of this quality of the human spirit
continues each day to grow in its ferocious intensity and
influential reach.
Our ancestors lived in a world rich in the imagery and symbolic
representations of the spirit which everyone felt themselves
directly connected with and related to. Also included on May 31st
was a copy of the 1957 booklet, Race Prejudice as Self Rejection,
An Inquiry into the Psychological and Spiritual Aspects of Group
Conflicts. This is a consolidation of lectures presented by
Laurens at the Workshop for Cultural Democracy, in New York City,
in December, 1956. Along with more stories, particular those of
the Bushmen and their god Mantis, van der Post observes how,
through stories provided in the form of legends, is illustrated
"in its deepest sense the problem of rejection -- a rejection in
ourselves, in society, and in civilization." He goes on to explain
that, "Perhaps the mythological aspects of this machinery of
rejection will help further to illuminate the situation."
I find it so tragic and ironical that the age in
which we live should regard the word "myth" and
"illusion" as synonymous, in view of the fact that the
myth is the real history, is the real event of the
spirit. It is this immense world of meaning with which
the image links us. The myth is the tremendous activity
that goes on in humanity all the time, without which no
society has hope or direction, and no personal life has
a meaning. We all live a myth whether we know it or not.
We live it by fair means or we live it by foul. Or we
live it by a process or a combination of both. We have a
myth that we live badly. The Christian myth is a myth in
the real sense of the word. [p.18]
Where growth of the spirit is concerned -- of an expanding
understanding of the world within -- the attempt to interpret
everything as possessing only a literal meaning (as is the case in
modern society) exacts a supremely oppressive toll on our sense of
participation in and relationship to the world we are part of.
Laurens describes some of the major elements of the Christian myth
which were both contemporary to the time 2,000 years ago as well
as symbolic of an inner development of the human spirit beyond
that moment in time. Included in such perceptions is the essential
nature of the image of a journey, of the sense of direction :
At the beginning of all this mythological activity,
at the beginning of everything always, there is the
image of a journey. In fact, I think the whole of the
religious approach to life is the awakening of the sense
of the journey in the human being. And right at the
beginning, immediately when man sees himself on the
earth and separated from God, he finds himself on the
first step of the journey, the Journey of the Garden,
the garden to which be can never go back because over
the gate stands an angel with a flaming sword in his
hands. We cannot go back, once life presupposes a going
on. [p.18]
Of course this is not only meant to signify a journey in the
physical world, but also a journey into the spirit. "It is a
journey of the spirit, of the human personality, moving towards a
greater and more complete expression of man, to a greater and more
contemporary expression of what is the first spirit in him." And
van der Post -- every bit the equal of Joseph Campbell in his
understanding and apprehension of the vast importance universal
myths of the human family provide, expressed individually through
so many cultures specific experiences -- relates the way in which
one's own experience of the journey is always concerned with
making contemporary, "in the circumstances of one's life, . . .
what is first and oldest in the human spirit." This act of making
the most ancient qualities in the human spirit contemporary within
oneself is what provides the source of renewal we are today
seeking and in need of more than ever before. The point is made
above that "We cannot go back, once life presupposes a going on",
but today we see all about us how we have once again forgotten
"that knowledge, culture, and civilization are not standing-still
structures, that they are only camping sites on the way of this
journey."
The sense of a journey must always be expressed in
the most contemporary way in the material, in the
circumstances of one's life, in what is first and oldest
in the human spirit. This is beautifully told in the
opening phrase of our own Judeo-Christian myth. In the
Bible, the opening journey is concerned with the first
great discovery, the discovery of laws: with the
lawfulness of life. Then you get a period where the
people try to stand still in that lawfulness. They
forget that knowledge, culture, and civilization are not
standing-still structures, that they are only camping
sites on the way of this journey. One has to move on,
and one sees here that one has the trials and the
tribulations, the disasters, that overtook this flesh
and blood because it would not continue the venture.
[p.20]
We can only continue the journey we are all here together embarked
upon when we are able to re-infuse the structures of knowledge,
culture, and civilization with the flexibility and dynamism life
requires in order that they serve the totality of the human spirit
instead of the other way around as is the case today. In the first
quotation of this section the question is posed,
Since the two World Wars that have occurred in my own
lifetime, disorder and violence have become increasingly
common on the world scene. Surely these things are
rooted in some undiscovered breach of cosmic law or they
would be eminently resistible and would not be allowed
to occur?
Something of what constitutes this cosmic law is mythologically
identified in such lawfulness of life which requires we not stop
the journey and attempt to create such standing-still structures,
but recognize the essential nature of what it means to continue
moving, changing, and growing in order to further learn about the
infinity of what existence contains and provides. After "the
trials, tribulations, and disasters that overtook this flesh and
blood because it would not continue the venture", there comes the
second phase in the myth when God comes down to the world to
become human, and "that this coming down is immediately concerned
with rejection" . . .
It is concerned with rejection from the start. Consider
what Christ was from the little history that we have of
the event. The myth starts straight away with rejection.
He was born outside the law. It is an image that he was
born in sin, the people of his period considered it to
be a sin; and this is how the new aspect, the God,
reveals himself to humanity.
Again, profoundly important, is the fact that this
myth moves on -- there is the return to Egypt. That is
the flight to Egypt. That is the land of bondage. It is
a return to the very beginning of the myth, as it were,
in order to make it reality. It goes right back to
Egypt. There is the mysterious disappearance into Egypt
before it re-emerges and there we have to deal with the
God who has become law, the rejected aspect of that
society. And what is this rejection? It brings something
which the law, important as it was, has ignored: the
discovery of love. It is the discovery of forgiveness,
the mechanism inside the myth, inside the human being.
Life could not move on because it could not forgive
itself. It stood still in this law. It was pinned down,
and the human mind, the human spirit, could not move on
until there was this discovery of the reality of
forgiveness.
This forgiveness is not a cerebral, soft
or sentimental thing. It is not a kiss against
the sunset. The new, immensely heroic reality
which is God's Son brings a sword. But it has
this extraordinary basis: the capacity of
forgiveness. And this, in a world drunk and
obsessed with law. It is the Roman might and
power which this rejected being, this rejected
God, discovers as He makes a wonderful remark
already prophesied in the Psalm which He
refers to when He says, "The stone which the
builders have rejected shall be the
cornerstone of the building to come." Thus
there is a resumption of the journey, and the
resumption starts with the acceptance of the
rejected aspect of society.
From that time, 2,000 years ago, until now we have
refused to go on with the journey. We have not, in a
sense, many of us, even come as far as this mechanism of
forgiveness. Spiritually and intellectually, we have
tried to limit that myth to a particular event. In the
meantime, another kind of rejection was piling up
because this great discovery of the new, Christian
reality has also brought about the rejection of the
natural, primitive, instinctive man. The imperative of
our time is that the journey must go on again. We have
to strike our tents and be on the march and come to a
new aspect of ourselves. We have to deal with this new
kind of rejection.
I feel there has also been a third great discovery
in the mechanism of man. It links closely with what is
implied in the process of man becoming God. This
discovery owes an enormous amount to Carl Gustav Jung.
He has found that by delving into dreams and into the
rejected aspects of the psyche there is found the
godlike mythological activity in the human being, a sort
of master image which, if you can get hold of it, can
deal with the mechanism of rejection.
In each of us there is a transcendent image that can
reconcile these opposites; bring them together and make
it possible for us to move on again. This is the phase
at which we stand today. This is the opening, and I
think it is a turning point in the history of the human
mind. This is the facing up to the mechanism of
rejection in ourselves, the realization that the thing
we reject in order to become what we are, unless we meet
it as a friend, comes one day knife in hand, demanding
to sacrifice that which sacrificed it. That is an
absolute law. That is how it works, whether we like it
or not. That is how it works in us, how it works in
groups, how it works in the world. We have had
disastrous illustrations of it from time to time,
particularly in this generation in which we live. Twice
already have we seen the sacrificed aspects coming knife
in band, being dealt with by foul means because we would
not deal with by fair means.
Until we transcend this darkness in ourselves,
we shall never be able to deal with it in our societies.
It is an axiomatic law that no human can take an
institution or a situation or another individual farther
then he has travelled himself, inside himself. And here
we have a fact of tremendous religious importance. But
it is not being dealt with in our religious life if we
allow dogma and doctrine to destroy the sense of journey
in human beings, this sense of becoming, this sense of
travelling from the state in which we have been born,
into the new country of our soul. [pp.20-23]
Within myself, i sense that the process of self-rejection is a
paramount fact and dynamic of what is happening at this time on
Earth. By rejecting so absolutely some of the deepest elements of
our nature -- containing but not limited to non-rational awareness
of intuitive and instinct intelligence and illumination -- we are
engaged in a pattern of self-betrayal, the cost of which is the
very tangible desecration of the natural world and its complement
in the world of spirit within each of us. i feel the fact of this
because of my own earlier experience in life of a betrayal of self
that grew up as a result of my feeling i could not trust life,
could not trust my father, to take care of me, to consistently
affirm i was lovable, and good, and welcome here. These feelings
of not being good enough, of not feeling welcome did not beset me
from the start. They were something that began to manifest in the
latter years of childhood and really took off during adolescence,
a time in which Laurens points out, "no human being is so
completely helpless and lonely as at the moment of his
adolescence." [The Hunter and the Whale, p.133-4]
As it happened for me, my parents ended their union when i was 10
years old. Many people never even knew both their parents, or lost
one or both of them to the scourge of war, poverty, political
repression, disease, or accident. Or grew up and came of age with
parents who still were married but for whatever reason physically
and/or psychically abused them to whatever horrific degree, or had
parents who were so lost in their own private hells, there was no
energy left to express anything towards their offspring, negative
or positive. Each of us only has our own lived experiences and the
ensuing memories to proceed with along our unique journey. From
this vantage point, i have recently come to see more fully than
ever before how i am both the product of my parents in the
genetic, psychic inheritance, and teachings gleaned from their
actions carefully observed when i was young, as well as then
taking those experiences and adopting my own "Dad" and Mom"
personas within. I lived through my own unique initiation of the
human experience of dethroning one's parents from the towering
godhood they literally as well as symbolically occupied at the
beginning, to the imperfect, fallible, and eminently human status
we all in fact embody and manifest here.
Laurens points out above that "At the beginning of all this
mythological activity, at the beginning of everything always,
there is the image of a journey." For the journey to continue to
develop things must keep moving, continue unfolding. If the
process of the journey stops and stands still there can be no
further growth and maturation. Alternatively, van der Post asserts
if it has stopped and then resumed, that when "there is a
resumption of the journey . . . the resumption starts with the
acceptance of the rejected aspect of society." From his own
life-long contact with and relationship to the Bushmen, beginning
with his half-Bushman nurse Klara who was already present in his
earliest memories, Laurens' grew up and came of age seeing very
clearly, as he describes it, that a manifestation of "the deepest
divide in the human spirit" was a fundamental split in the mind of
European man with that of the Bushman of ancient Africa over the
sense of property and ownership of physical matter. In Witness to
a Last Will of Man he illustrates this rejection of a side of our
human consciousness with the story of Esau, the first born, the
hunter, who was betrayed by his brother Jacob.
The essence of this being, I believe, was his sense
of belonging: belonging to nature, the universe, life
and his own humanity. He had committed himself utterly
to nature as a fish to the sea. He had no sense
whatsoever of property, owned no animals and cultivated
no land. Life and nature owned all and he accepted
without question that, provided he was obedient to the
urge of the world within him, the world without, which
was not separate in his spirit, would provide. How right
he was is proved by the fact that nature was kinder to
him by far than civilization ever was. This feeling of
belonging set him apart from us on the far side of the
deepest divide in the human spirit. There was a brief
moment in our own great Greek, Roman, Hebraic story when
his sort of being and our own were briefly reconciled
and Esau, the first born, the hunter, kissed and forgave
his brother Jacob, the strangely chosen of God, his
betrayal. But after that Esau, like Ishmael before him,
vanishes from our story and a strange longing hidden in
some basement of the European spirit still waits with
increasing tension for his return. Meanwhile, the divide
in our consciousness between the Esau and the Jacob in
man deepened and the Stone-age hunter and his values
could not have been more remote and antagonistic to ours
when we clashed increasingly in southern Africa. We were
rich and powerful where he was poor and vulnerable; he
was rich where we were poor and his spirit led to
strange water for which we secretly longed. But, above
all, he came into our estranged and divided vision,
confident in his belonging and clothed as brightly as
Joseph's coat of dream colours in his own unique
experience of life. Where we became more and more
abstracted and abstract, he drew closer to feeling and
the immediacy of instinct and intuition. Indeed for him,
his feeling values were the most important and the
liveliest. Even the language he spoke was a feeling
language, expressing reality not in ideas, calculation
and abstraction so much as through the feelings provoked
in him. He would speak of how the sun, feeling itself to
be sitting prettily in the sky and feeling itself to be
warm, believed it could make people on the cold earth
feel warm as well. His language, therefore, was poetic
rather than realistic and though, of course, he was not
indifferent to a robust range of the sort of verbs we
favour, all usages of his grammar, still warm from the
presses of his aboriginal imagination, were contained in
an assessment of reality and meaning through feeling.
[pp.150-1]
This "divide in our consciousness between the Esau and the Jacob"
is the rejected aspect of society van der Post refers to, which
must be reconciled if we are to move on again in our journey of
the human spirit. There has been a fundamental abrogation in our
culture and civilization to face squarely the fact of this
rejection of an essential part of our nature that includes the
feeling, the intuitive, and the instinctual non-rational states of
human consciousness. Laurens' life spanned not only the divide
between cultures of "west" and "east", "white" and "black", but
between the cold, growing evermore impersonal, 20th century human
being and his stone age forebears manifested in the Bushman who
had lived in Africa going back at least 30,000 years. The remnants
of the Bushman he found in the Kalahari in 1957, who were still
then living as they had millenia ago, were, by the time he
returned in 1984, fast becoming completely subsumed by the
encroaching cattle ranchers and others spreading over their last
refuge. But even with the destruction and annihilation of the
final vestiges of the people themselves, the spirit they embodied
and the meaning they lived is still something we must take back in
ourselves in a contemporary way for the journey to continue.
For years I would watch the Bushman as I shall
always remember him by countless such fires at
nightfall, so confident and at home in his immense
wasteland, full of an unappeasable melancholy. He was
the Esau being we daily betrayed in our partial and
slanted modern awareness and instead of blaming
ourselves for the betrayal, we projected it on to him to
such an extent that we had to kill him as Cain killed
Abel. Yet, though he himself is vanishing fast from the
vision of our physical senses as Esau vanished from the
great story which contained as it fashioned the
foundations of our culture, he lives on in each one of
us through an indefinable guilt that grows great and
angry in some basement of our own being. The artist and
the seer, even though the priests who should have known
it best have forgotten it for the moment, know there is
an Esau, a first man, a rejected pattern of being within
us which is personified by something similar to a
Bushman hunter, without whom they cannot create and
sustain a vision of time fulfilled on which a life of
meaning depends.
As they create and dream their dreams by making his
sort of being contemporary, by linking that which was
first with what is new and latest and all that is still
to come, they do work of cosmic importance and in the
process are invaded with a compassion for this betrayed
Esau element that leads unerringly to a love that is
overall and which knew him long before we were made.
Like that which created creation, named or not named,
known or unknown, he is always there.
That this vital link with the first man in us is no
subjective assumption of mine but objective truth is
proved, I believe, by the striking parallels that exist
between the basic images of his spirit and those of
Shakespeare, Goethe, Blake and Valéry on which I have
already drawn. I know of many more. But I believe these
are enough to show how, in considerations such as these,
we can proceed to dispel the lethal imperviousness in
the cultures which compelled men to fear and extinguish
him. Our diminishing civilizations can only renew
themselves by a reconciliation between two everlasting
opposites, symbolized by Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau
and, in our own day, by the Bushman and his murderer. We
have no excuse left for not seeing how fatally divided
against themselves the processes of civilization have
been, and how horrific the consequences in the human
spirit. Now there is only a re-dedication of man to
knowing himself: the command of both Christ and Apollo
which can lead him to rediscover the wholeness lost in
the beginning in a contemporary and greater form.
Something of this sort is the armour the spirit needs
for a future imperilled by corruption from the power we
have acquired over the forces of nature. Since this
future has come to include man's journey to the stars,
the proportions that our humanity needs to protect it
from brutalization by hubris of power and extremes of
greed demand that we should look back to the moment the
first man summoned his son, his future self, and gave
him a stick of light with his fire, his awareness, and
pointed it to a great feminine star, a mother figure
through which an overall father begets. In that slight
exercise of what the anthropologists label Stone-age
superstition, the journey to space was born and made
inevitable, and we have an inkling of why the first man
thought of the glittering men of heaven as hunters.
[pp.154-5]
The challenge we face then can be no less than to find a way to
fashion an armour for the spirit to dispel the corruption
engendered by the power we have acquired over the forces of
nature. And this armour can only be created with rediscovering the
wholeness lost in the beginning in a contemporary and greater
form. Speaking about all this recently with a close friend who
understands a great deal more about it than i, she pointed out the
nature of human life on Earth has always been and continues to be
irrevocably engaged in the process of expanding and maturing.
Though i do not yet clearly understand all she said, i apprehended
glimpses of the meaning of what she expressed. We are learning
what it means to separate from our innocent roots -- manifested in
aboriginal times and peoples such as the Bushmen -- in order to
find out what life means when we are alone and apart from that
time of innocence. As one may find, as one matures and ages, a new
basis of meaning and way of belonging to one's own biological
family that was so fundamentally different when one was a child,
so are we now as the family of humanity involved in finding a new
basis of meaning and way of belonging in the changed context of
maturing as a species with heretofore unimagined power over the
material world.
As best i can articulate, if i had to try to sum up at this point
on the journey what i have learned from being here, i'd say it is
that each of us is here to find out what the nature of being human
means -- what is its meaning?, its significance? -- as it applies
to our individual contemporary experience of life itself, and of
being human life specifically. Whatever-it-is that sings or speaks
to each of us, the clarity or the recognition of meaning will not
necessarily resonate and strike another in any similar degree. The
bedrock fact is that what for each of us is meaningful and of
value, another may not see at all in the same light. All we can do
is share what we have found with one another. If it strikes a
sonorous chord there is possibly more of mutual interest to
explore; if it doesn't, the stream of joint meaning dries up at
that point.
David Bohm, the physicist who explored the nature of being human
together with Krishnamurti for the last 25 years of Krishnamurti's
life up to 1986, conducted weekend seminars after this On Dialogue
And The Nature Of Thought until his own death in 1992. Given the
extent to which the word meaning has been employed here, i'd like
to include a segment from a seminar held in December, 1989, which
contains a segment exploring the meaning of the word `meaning' :
Bohm: Culture is the shared meaning. And meaning
includes not only significance, but also value and
purpose. According to the dictionary, these are the
three meanings of the word `meaning'. I am saying that
common significance, value and purpose will hold the
society together. If society does not share those, it is
incoherent and it goes apart. And now we have a lot of
subgroups in our society which don't share meanings, and
so it actually starts to fall apart. . . . If we want to
say what the meaning itself is -- the concrete reality
of the meaning -- we can't get hold of it. But we can
experience it in various forms -- like the significance,
the value, and the purpose. If we share meanings, then
we will have a common purpose and a common value, which
certainly will help hold us together. We have to go more
deeply into what that means.
Q: Is the difference between significance, value,
purpose important for this discussion? And if so, could
you expand on that?
Bohm: There is not a fundamental difference. They are
really different aspects of the same thing.
`Significance' has the word `sign' in it, indicating
that it sort of points to something: `What is the
significance of what we are talking about? What is the
significance of what we are doing?' That is one idea of
meaning.
Value is something which is part of it. If something is
very significant, you may sense it as having a high
value. The word `value' has a root which is interesting
-- the same root as `valor' and `valiant'. It means
`strong'. You might suppose that in early times, when
people sensed something of high value they didn't have a
word for it, although it moved them strongly. Later they
found a word for it and said it has high value. And then
later the word itself may convey that.
If something is significant it may have a high value.
And if it has a high value, you may have or you may
develop a strong purpose or intention to get it, or
sustain it, or something. Things that do not have high
value will not generate any very strong purpose. You
would say, "It's not interesting. It doesn't mean much
to me."
"It means a lot to me" means it has high value. And "I
mean to do it" is the same as to say, "It's my purpose."
You can see that the word 'meaning' has those three
meanings. And I don't think it is an accident; I think
they are very deeply related. [Proprioception of
Thought, David Bohm, 1990, pp.51-53]
This articulation of the three meanings of the word `meaning' is
important for what it points out about the interrelation between
them. It has been helpful for me to grasp on a deeper level how
the three words work together where meaning is concerned. van der
Post emphasizes in different ways that the meaning of life is
embodied in the story each of us is here to find, explore, and
live out. In the 1996 film Hasten Slowly, Laurens recounts a time
in the Kalahari desert in 1957 when he found and lived for a short
period with a group of Bushman who were at that time still living
in the manner their ancestors had for tens of thousands of years.
He longed to hear them tell some of their stories but had been met
by blank expressions of resistance and denials that such stories
even existed.
I told Jung this story, and Jung said that's
wonderful. How wonderful that the wise old lady should
protect a story like that. Because, he said, you know so
many civilizations have used their power to deprive
primitive, vulnerable people of their story. And when
their story is taken away from them they lose their
meaning and they get corrupt and they cease to live.
They lose the will to be an integrated society. And I
said to him this is what I had felt too; I'd felt very
strongly.
And he said to me, yes, psychologically it's an
enormous truth that every human being, through his
dreams, is in communication with a story with which he's
charged to live. And if they don't live that story, for
one reason or another, they become neurotic, they become
alienated and they lose the will to be complete members
of the life their time.
Along with the individual experience of life we each explore is
the shared meaning defined above by Bohm as culture. van der
Post's sense of the individual and the collective and how they
interrelate is relevant and timely to the disintegration of
meaning being acted out on wider and wider scales of size in the
material world. i'm referring here specifically to the mob-minded
sort of collective behavior that manifested so concretely in
Germany in the thirties, and is, to my limited view, gaining more
and more ground globally throughout post-industrial culture. This
is the collectivity of an unconsciousness that chooses to stay
thus asleep and so live out a partial form of existence and being.
But there is also a collective whole that each of us is joined to
and in communion with in our individual material experience,
living inside these "human overcoats" (as Evelyn Eaton's I Send A
Voice so beautifully evokes).
Among its many perceptive observations, Witness to a Last Will of
Man points out how the nature of being human -- with regard to the
individual and the collective -- has become lost in the
reductionist thinking of our day that only concerns itself with
"things that are useful." In so doing we are not only cut off from
that "partnership with an overwhelming act of creation" our
aboriginal forebears lived intimately with throughout their lives,
we also falter because we no longer know what "a living experience
of religion" feels like, expressed in "a contemporary idiom" that
directly reflects the tenor and meaning of life in our own day.
As I thought of the first man's instinctive sense
for the meaning of life, I seemed to be more aware than
ever of the loneliness creeping into the heart of modern
man because he no longer sought the answers of life with
the totality of his being. He was in danger of going
back precisely to those discredited collective concepts
and surrendering this precious gift of being an
individual who is specific for the sake of the whole, an
individual who believes that a union of conformity is
weakness but that a union of diversities, of individuals
who are different and specific, is truly strength. A
grey, abstract, impersonal organization of a
materialistic civilization seemed to be pressing in on
us everywhere and eliminating these life-giving
individual differences and sources of enrichment in us.
Everywhere men were seeking to govern according to
purely materialistic principles that make us interesting
only in so far as we have uses. It was true even in
Zululand, let alone Paris and London.
I was speaking once to an old Zulu prophet who, when
I asked him about their First Spirit, Unkulunkulu, said
to me: `But why are you interested in Unkulunkulu?
People no longer talk about him. His praise names are
forgotten. They only talk about things that are useful
to them.'
This ancient reverence for the individual, so clear
and unprovisional in the Bushman, has been lost, this
individual dedicated to a self that is greater than the
individual, who serves something inside himself that is
a microcosm of the great wheeling universe. This
individual who, by being his self, is in a state of
partnership with an overwhelming act of creation and is
thereby adding something to life that was not there
before, is being taken away from us. We no longer feel
the longing, the wonder and the belonging out of which
new life is raised. In the depths of ourselves we feel
abandoned and alone and therein is the sickness of our
time. . . .
It is only now that we have lost what I re-found in
the Kalahari in the nineteen fifties when, for months on
end, I moved through country no `sophisticated' man had
ever set eyes on, that I realize in full what it meant
and did for my own senses, brutalized by years of war.
It was as if I had been in a great temple or cathedral
and had a profound religious experience. I returned to
the world, knowing that unless we recover our capacity
for religious awareness, we will not be able to become
fully human and find the self that the first man
instinctively sought to serve and possess. Fewer and
fewer of us can find it any more in churches, temples
and the religious establishments of our time, much as we
long for the churches to renew themselves and once more
become, in a contemporary idiom, an instrument of
pentecostal spirit. Many of us would have to testify
with agonizing regret that despite the examples of
dedicated men devoted to their theological vocation,
they have failed to give modern man a living experience
of religion such as I and others have found in the
desert and bush. That is why what is left of the natural
world matters more to life now than it has ever done
before. It is the last temple on earth which is capable
of restoring man to an objective self wherein his ego is
transfigured and given life and meaning without end.
[pp.160-2]
To me, there is something so deeply true about this perception of
"being an individual who is specific for the sake of the whole"
and how this relates to the direction post-industrial society
continues to head towards. This mass culture is fast absorbing and
making homogeneous more and more of the remaining distinct and
diverse cultures still not assimilated into a collective world
asleep, where the one speaks to the many through mass media, and a
partial, limited version of consciousness continues to attempt to
usurp and take the place of the whole in life. This fact of the
manifestation of partial being and awareness is painfully apparent
to anyone who still is blessed with whatever degree of sensitivity
that was not "unlearned" or seared out of one from early trauma or
unbearable pain. As van der Post describes in A Far Off Place :
Obedience to one's greater awareness, and living it
out accordingly to the rhythm of the law of time
implicit in it, was the only way. Unlived awareness was
another characteristic evil of our time, so full of
thinkers who did not do and doers who did not think.
Lack of awareness and disobedience to such awareness as
there was meant that modern man was increasingly a
partial, provisional version instead of a whole,
committed version of himself. That was where tyranny,
oppression, prejudice and intolerance began. Tyranny was
partial being; a part of the whole of man masquerading
as his full self and suppressing the rest. All started
within before it manifested itself without and tyranny
began within partial concepts of ourselves and our role
in life. [p.111]
Maintaining one's own depth of sensitivity -- physically and
especially psychically -- at this time on Earth is perhaps one of
the most challenging and elusive feats imaginable. Everywhere is
the call not only for instant gratification, but more pervasively,
the pursuit of activities and goals promising escape from coming
face-to-face with the fundamental incoherent nature of our lives
and our culture. To cohere means "to hold together firmly as parts
of the same mass". Incoherence is lacking coherence, a way in
which things fall apart and move away from each other. In another
seminar facilitated by David Bohm (November 3-5, 1989), he
describes one of the ways our society attempts to stabilize itself
by destroying sensitivity to incoherence in young people :
I think our whole society tries to stabilize itself
by starting out to destroy sensitivity to incoherence
starting with very young children. If people could see
the vast incoherence that is going on in society they
would be disturbed and they would feel the need to do
something. If you're not sensitive to it you don't feel
disturbed and you don't feel you need to do anything.
I remember an instance, a daughter was telling her
mother, "this school is terrible, the teacher is
terrible, very inconsistent, doing all sorts of crazy
things," and so on. Finally the mother was saying,
"you'd better stop this -- in this house the teacher is
always right." Now she understood that the teacher was
wrong obviously, but the message was, it was no use.
Even the message may have been right in some sense, but
still it illustrates that the predicament is that in
order to avoid this sort of trouble, starting with very
young children, we are trained to become insensitive to
incoherence. If there is incoherence in our own
behavior, we thereby also become insensitive to it.
Those of us who have not lost this sensitivity to incoherence are,
to my mind, blessed because we are still aware to whatever degree
of the whole in life and are able to see wholistically to whatever
depth and scale we each perceive. Above, the Zulu prophet
remonstrates about how people nowadays "only talk about things
that are useful to them", which is of course what will comprise a
partial expression of consciousness if the material, the physical,
is all that is vaunted and held up as being valuable and worthy of
human searching and purpose. The sense of the search and purpose
of the original hunter for the greatest quarry of all is almost
completely extinguished for most people today, who are left
`palely loitering" through life'. i'm referring, of course, to the
hunt for meaning.
We know so much intellectually, indeed, that we are
in danger of becoming the prisoners of our knowledge. We
suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished
superstition of the heart only to install a superstition
of the intellect in its place. We behave as if there
were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for
purposes for which it was never designed. As a result we
are no longer sufficiently aware of the importance of
what we cannot know intellectually, what we must know in
other ways, of the living experience before and beyond
our transitory knowledge. The passion of the spirit,
which would inspire man to live his finest hour
dangerously on the exposed frontier of his knowledge,
seemed to me to have declined into a vague and arid
restlessness hiding behind an arrogant intellectualism,
as a child of arrested development hides behind the
skirts of its mother.
Intellectually, modern man knows almost all there is
to know about the pattern of creation in himself, the
forms it takes, the surface designs it describes. He has
measured the pitch of its rhythms and carefully recorded
all the mechanics. From the outside he sees the
desirable first object of life more clearly perhaps than
man has ever seen it before. But less and less is he
capable of committing himself body and soul to the
creative experiment that is continually seeking to fire
him and to charge his little life with great objective
meaning. Cut off by accumulated knowledge from the heart
of his own living experience, he moves among a
comfortable rubble of material possession, alone and
unbelonging, sick, poor, starved of meaning. How
different the naked little Bushman, who could carry all
he possessed in one hand! Whatever his life lacked, I
never felt it was meaning. Meaning for him died only
when we bent him to our bright twentieth-century will.
Otherwise, he was rich where we were poor; he walked
clear-cut through my mind, clothed in his own vivid
experience of the dream of life within him. By
comparison most of the people I saw on my way to the sea
were blurred, and like the knight at arms in Keats'
frightening allegory, "palely loitering" through life.
[The Heart of the Hunter, pp.137-8.]
The insensitivity to incoherent human activity manifesting around
the globe continues to be lived out by those poignantly and
painfully caught up in it by their own choice, as well as by those
thrall to the scourge of "the four horseman," primary instances of
such previously and amply discredited partial patterns of human
thought and behavior. i am always grateful when i catch further
glimpses of my own insensitivity as well as instances of
self-deception still raging and manifesting with an energy and
power as disturbing as it is illuminating. But in all that is
happening, i also find my self buoyed up by the manifestation of
greater meaning in the life expressing itself through me with such
activities as playing piano for kids in school and exploring
further and living out within my self what van der Post so richly
evokes as "an example of [what it means to be] a `spy of God'".
The following two paragraphs follow immediately from the first
quotation in this section regarding how for van der Post, the
Bushman was always "a kind of frontier guide" along a boundary
where "[i]magination shifts and passes, as it were, through a
strange customs post on the fateful frontier between being and
unrealized self, between what is and what is to come."
For the English-speaking world the most significant
example of such an imagination shift is to be found, of
course, in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It was preceded by
works in which Shakespeare celebrates the beauty, the
potentials for happiness, the plausible attractions and
surface patterns of the outer world. But suddenly it is
as if the wind of time from some absolute frontier of
the universe brings him a scent of the existence of a
denied meaning that is far more than surface beauty, and
so much greater than either the happiness or unhappiness
encountered on the worldly scene. And at once it is as
if, with Hamlet, man crosses not only for himself but
for all men, this long shunned frontier of the spirit,
and from there begins years of journeying of a new kind.
The journey this time inevitably goes down into an
underworld of mind and time, where man is confronted not
only with all the inadequacies and consequences of his
worldly consciousness but also faces alone and
unsupported by a familiar pattern of living the stark
necessity of making his own choice between good and
evil, truth and untruth, before he is free to move on
towards the wholeness that their opposition so
paradoxically serves. Shakespeare, I believe, becomes,
in his great phrase, one of `God's spies' and takes on
himself `the mystery of things' so `utterly' (as the
Bushmen would have it), that he could come to rest in
the conclusion: `Men are such stuff as dreams are made
on'. But even as dream material Shakespeare in The
Tempest is still faced with an ending that would be
despair, `unless I be relieved by prayer'. Why prayer?
Because it is the symbol both of man's recognition of
the existence of, and his dependence on, a power of
creation beyond his conscious understanding, and greater
than life and time, that time which Einstein described
not as a condition in which life exists so much as a
state of mind. In prayer, there is an image of certain
promise that through this recognition and this
remembrance and surrender of the part to a sense of the
whole, Shakespeare could summon help from the heart of
the universe to live the final portion of the overall
dream with which his art was invested and to which his
flesh and blood was entrusted.
All this may seem as remote from the Bushmen and
Stone-age culture as to be irrelevant. Yet in reality it
has an a priori significance not only for understanding
the nature of primitive being but for preventing the
contraction of individual consciousness which is such an
alarming symptom of our collectivist day and promoting
the enlargement of individual consciousness into an
expanding awareness on which the renewal of our
societies depends. The collectivist and intellectual
turned `intellectualist', the promoter of `isms' of the
intellect that are to the sanity of being and spirit
what viruses are to the body, will no doubt find it
absurd but it is precisely because the Bushman has been
a scout and frontier guide to me from infancy in the
same dark labyrinthine underworld of human nature which
Shakespeare entered precipitately with Hamlet, that I
have been compelled to tell the world about him. From
time to time during my life I try to reappraise what the
Bushman has done for me and here I do so probably for
the last time. I cannot disguise that for many years I
lost conscious sight of him as I went my own wilful way
but instinctively he was always there and bound never to
mislead or fail. He could not fail, as I realized
looking back on to the vortex of the movement which he
started in my imagination, because I recognized with the
clarity and precision of instinct of the child that he
was still charged with magic and wonder. He was an
example of a `spy of God', to follow beyond the well-dug
trenches of the aggressive Calvinist consciousness of
our community into some no-man's land of the spirit
where he had taken upon him the mystery of things. He,
too, was from the beginning `such stuff as dreams are
made on' and had soldiered on in the field where the
prophetic soul of the wide world also dreamed of things
to come. [pp.125-6]
Always it seems, whenever change has occurred that manifested a
greater awareness and illumination of the meaning of life, it
originated from individuals who had taken upon themselves the
mystery of things and set out into the unknown to discover and
explore whatever was waiting there for them. The meaning of
Shakespeare's image of a spy is expansively inspired to say the
least: one is spying out a new land where things are not yet known
-- or conscious -- and initially this seems to be the way
conscious awareness manifests and is increased. Lived out
individually at first, it is only after one scouts out -- on one's
own -- whatever new land such a spy of God will detect, that this
can then be made accessible to the society one exists within and
belongs to.
It occurred to me in time that this kind of
separation, even in the animal, was necessary to create
a greater awareness which it was impossible to acquire
in the context of sympathetic numbers of their own kind.
In the years I had already spent in devout observation
of the creatures of Africa, it was most striking how
these lone phenomena developed senses so keen that the
beasts who preyed on them and their kind would leave
them alone, because they realized they were no match for
the qualities of vigilance produced by loneliness and
isolation. It was, in fact, far easier to prey on
animals who assumed that there was safety in numbers. If
this were true and necessary for the increase and
renewal of animal awareness, I often wondered how much
more necessary it was for the human being. Unlike the
animal, the human had no sheer, blind obedience to the
will of nature which is instinctive. On the contrary, he
had an inspired kind of disobedience to the laws of
nature which led to a recommitment of life in a more
demanding law of individuality designed for the growth
of consciousness. This growth set the implacable
pre-condition that any new awareness had to be lived out
in isolation before it could be understood and known,
and made accessible to society. [Yet Being Someone
Other, p.75]
Increasingly for my self, i find that living out this being
"specific for the sake of the whole" imbues a richer and richer
appreciation of the life expressing itself within and without, as
well as bestowing a deepening sense of meaning and purpose i grow
daily more grateful for. In all this i feel i once more belong to
the world, and am somehow known to it and by all of the life in,
on, and around it. This embodies an increasing sense of wholeness
within similar to something felt in the first years of life, but
augmented now beyond what existed without conceptualization or
abstraction in childhood by making contemporary in my consciously
maturing self the experience of re-linking to the cosmos with a
commensurate cosmic meaning surrounding the ineffably mysterious
nature of life and its infinitude of expressions of being. And i
know somehow, more and more now as i approach the middle of my
fourth decade, that with respect to my own journey i've needed to
find out about this by spending a great deal of the ensuing years
alone. Such loneliness and isolation has, without my consciously
realizing or seeking it out, bestowed one of the greatest gifts i
can imagine any one ever receiving: "the increase and renewal of
animal awareness".
The title for this ratitorial was chosen to convey what has been
gleaned more consciously of late than previously understood in the
school of life: just as a seed in the ground does not spring into
the form of a mature plant overnight, so has it been repeatedly
demonstrated recently how significant events in life have achieved
a state of maturation only at their own tempo of development. On
the surface level of the physical senses, this relates to the
energy required to expand the repetoire of songs i'd like to be
able to play for children which in turn requires patience,
dedication, and a strong sense of affinity with the composers who
lived out their lives creating such quintessential expressions of
what it means to be human, with all the contradictions and
apparently irreconcilable opposites intact and present in such a
soulful form of art. And on the deeper level of the spirit is the
ongoing hunt and search for meaning, for that which is perceived
to be significant and of high value. While the surface level of
energy i am concentrating my focus on requires much time (as
measured by the earth spinning through space) for new songs to
mature so they can be played for others, the time it takes to
capture an understanding of expanding levels of inner meaning and
self illumination can occur instantaneously, provided one is alert
to the significant clues life all ways presents us with at each
moment. On both these levels, the image of planting seeds in the
ground of being -- to then nurture and cultivate so the unknown
possibilities of life can sprout and release their transformative
energies -- feels especially appropriate.
For everyone who actually reads this, i can only hope each finds a
similar re-connection with their own story and inner flowering of
meaning. The possibilities are limitless. This wintertime of the
human spirit is reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 where people
congregated together who shared a similar interest in preserving
the wisdom and understanding from works of literature by
memorizing whole books and keeping them alive by reciting them to
interested listeners. Oren Lyons, faith-keeper of the Onondaga of
the Iroquois Confederacy, speaking in an interview about the
challenges facing human kind today, said his people were told,
concerning the power of the ceremonies of the Longhouse and the
thanks giving they were instructed to do, "``As long as there's
one to sing and one to dance, one to speak and one to listen, life
will go on.'' So as long as the instructions are being carried out
even if it's down to the last four, life will go on."
In the last quoted paragraph of Laurens' interpretation of the
Christian myth he states, "Until we transcend this darkness in
ourselves, we shall never be able to deal with it in our
societies. It is an axiomatic law that no human can take an
institution or a situation or another individual farther then he
has travelled himself, inside himself. And here we have a fact of
tremendous religious importance." To me this implies what
maturity, in the best sense of that word, means: to recognize and
unconditionally accept -- and rejoice in -- the fact that once one
is a physically mature adult human being, one is utterly response
able for one's own state of mind and spirit. Seeing the fact that
in each moment, we choose how we interpret what it is we perceive
in precisely the way we choose to interpret the events occurring
within and without us, gives us the full measure of the power of
response ability we each are born to fulfill and manifest here.
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