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About Reproducing
Cultural Hubris
Out of what is this homo-centric hubris, this schizophrenic disconnect and
self absorption of modern techno-industrial production/consumption emerging,
each and every day, on the surface of the planet, intermixing with a delicate
and thin shell of life we now call our biosphere? What institutes and
perpetuates a bio destructive cancer on the planet like neoliberal polyarchic
pseudo democratic globalism that itself relentlessly destroys and displaces the
indigenous cultural forms that once did, in fact, interact directly with the
forces and forms of nature?
I'm suggesting we might benefit from looking at the forms our very lives take
and how we work our minds in relation to those, thereby creating our daily
process of life, which imbeds the memories and the very sense of who and what we
are as a daily, ongoing reality.
Ecopsychologists are suggesting that to understand that process, and ourselves,
we need to do something to actually change our daily forms of life. That
connecting with the natural world in a different way can begin to imbed
different forms within us that become not just conscious, intellectual
rationalizations, but that will go deep into our minds to be experienced
throughout our bodies, and become subconscious as well, with a deeper sense of
ourselves and who we are in relationship with the forms of our environment. They
are suggesting that as a "therapy," it can't be done intellectually, rationally,
any more than truly understanding what the "extent of anthropocentrism" actually
is can be done through a rational, intellectual process. Intellectualism is
easily recognized as a backward-looking, analytical process that actually occurs
after direct experience and direct mind/body response in a situation. With that
awareness of what we do with that process, we can see that we are fragmenting
our awareness of now with our memories, with the beliefs those memories
intertwine through accumulated processes of memory and thought, and we create
illusions of reality that we than place, like a template over the immediate
experience, thus potentially distorting what we can see, and in that distorting
our response to what is.
If you've ever been in one of those life threatening emergency moments where
everything goes into slow motion, perhaps you've directly been able to see your
body seeming to do everything necessary while the rational mind calmly observes it doing
it, actions the body seems to know to do with its own assertive intelligence, you are
somewhat mildly amused to discover as it seems to ignore your inept and slow
recognition that a real crisis has occurred, and without any guidance from this
ego-centric awareness one assumes is in charge until this moment of
emergency.
Another way of seeing this subliminal to liminal
intelligence, is if you've grown up around animals and dealt with some energetic
creatures of 1000 lbs or more, you recognize how your body is tuned to this,
especially in close quarters, or you've recognized that herding is something you do
by seeing
the characteristics in the animals, responding to a geometry that seems almost
to invisibly connect you and that animal, and you find yourself influencing them with your own form,
much as a
dog learns to do when it learns to herd. Those are just some suggestions from my
own experience.
This Jungian Analyst, Dennis L. Merritt, talks about his experiences growing up
and how they have influenced him throughout his life. His experience on the
dairy farm in Wisconsin mirrors my own in nearby Michigan:
I grew up on a small dairy farm in Wisconsin where I spent many hours of my
free time wandering the hills and marshes with my dog. A deep connection was
forged between the land and my psyche, much deeper than I realized. After
spending many years away from the Midwest, working on a doctorate at Berkeley in
the late 60’s in Insect Pathology (microbial control of insects), then a Masters
Degree in Humanistic Psychology from Sonoma State College, California, and
finally training to become a Jungian Analyst in Zurich, Switzerland, I was led
by a series of powerful dreams to return to the land I have felt so connected
to. I also became involved in sweat-lodge, vision quest and Sundance ceremonies
of the Lakota Sioux of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota that added a
depth of relationship to the environment I could not have imagined otherwise.
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Near the end of my training at the Jung Institute in Zurich, I had one of the
most powerful and simple dreams I have ever had. It was a single-image dream of
a typical upper Midwestern landscape. There was a meadow with very green grass,
flowers and possibly alfalfa. The topography was gently rolling with trees on
the horizon. Insects flew above the meadow. It was a beautiful sunny day with
puffy white clouds in a blue sky. What was most remarkable about this simple
scene was that it shown with an inner light. Every atom in the dream was alive.
Despite having seen some of the most beautiful scenery in the world—California,
the Grand Canyon, the Canadian Rockies, Switzerland, etc., I have never seen
anything as beautiful as this simple meadow scene.
This is an example of what the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called a numinous
dream—a dream with an inner light and a sacred sense. I contend that no
indigenous person has had a more sacred dream of the land. Every human is
capable of experiencing this sense of the sacredness about the land. Long ago
Jung recognized this archetypal need of a connection to, and love of, the land.
E. O. Wilson calls this “biophilia”.
When one has such a dream, the challenge is to let it lead one’s life and direct
one’s conscious orientation. To follow such a dream’s inspiration is to walk a
path with heart. Having grown up in Wisconsin, I knew the state affected me
deeply, but I had no sense of just how deeply until this dream. I began to look
at all elements of the Upper Midwest more closely—its soils, topography, flora
and fauna, seasons, etc. To deepen this process and help convey this sense of
the land to others, my wife and I set up a week long summer institute in 1991
called Spirit in the Land, Spirit in Animals, Spirit in People. The Institute
was so well received we ran a second one in 1992, followed by a reduced version
for the University of Wisconsin Extension in 1994. The talks I gave at the
Institutes became the genesis of the book I’m finishing, The Dairy Farmer’s
Guide to the Universe--Jung, Hermes and Ecopsychology. To convey my sense of an
interdisciplinary environmental education program, I am reproducing the contents
of three brochures announcing the Institutes.
Seeing a Spiritual
Connection Through Form
The possibility that we can be directed in this way by dreams and their
metaphorical implications for our entire being is something that hardly makes
it, it would seem, to the mainstream levels of popular culture. In a very basic
way, it may be antithetical to the fundamental paradigm of a rationally derived,
techno-industrial based society -- with a rational view that the world is its
resource and not a living whole in its own right, of which humans are only a
systemic part, not the top predator in a food chain meant to feed their, and
only their self derived hubris -- that itself may have gone off track from the
organic roots of being with its very liberal foundations of a rational,
philosophic approach to its undestanding of a tautological determination of its
social guiding principles of life. That is, unless the notion that violence and
the many damaging implications that are considered "inappropriate" for young
children to be exposed to are also taken seriously enough to be considered a
questionable exposure to our adult population's psyche as well -- not that I am
suggesting control measures, but just a recognition of what it implies. Is it
true that a constant exposure to images of violence only effect young children?
Just to be clear, I'm not asking about social control issues, I'm asking about
awakening a sensitivity to a seeing of how we are immersed in forms and how
those forms are part of our consciousness, and in the process, invoke a
wondering about just how separate we really are as assumed independent
individuals from all this. What are the sources of our consciousness? Can we
really be conscious and separate from our environment, like the mind is
contained in some sort of bottle?
But myth and mythical thought was an important connecting force to the
subconscious and our immersion in forms that our ancestors employed, by all
accounts. For me, I've always had a strong response to literature and poetry,
and the inspiring sense of imaginary power it can infuse. So in talking about
this topic, I'd like to point to this dimension as a source of imaginative
context and a way of seeing how the dynamics of ecopsychology can work for us,
reconnect us to elements of our world, whether we want to save the planet or
just want to have rich imagination related to it.
Also, in terms of language, this might in some ways relate to Edward De Bono's
Water
Logic and "ideas to flow" which speaks to the "voice" of the mind
speaking out of these forms in a relational process rather than the static logic
that retains a fundamentalist, or positivist nature. Lakoff, of course, as a neuro scientist, talks about cognitive categories and framing. Those are
metaphors of form as well. Pointing to dreams and the subconscious metaphors of
the mind may offer a view of language as a connection to the inspirational
within us to that which connects our minds and our psychic health to the earth
and its living forms as they are imbedded in the subconscious to then become
those connective metaphors. I suggest this to give a sense different where
language is used to abstract and analyze, creating in that process a
fragmentation and alienation from the actual ongoing process of life. This of
course is done through a different process, perhaps, so that's worth keeping in
mind. In other words, there is no need to binarily oppose them, for they may
both be present at once as a conscious process.
These imbedded forms may be the sources for those moments of epiphany, and the
quality and form of those epiphanies may depend on the stimulation, whether a
natural environment or human built one. Not judging one or the other, just
noting how our mind is complex and may respond depending on the stimulus, can perhaps open our mental doors to see how the
forms we live with daily confine our spiritual connection with our natural life
forces and the planet.
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Ecotherapy -- discovering spirit in the land, the
animals, and the people
