[Terrapreta] Fw: Original Wisdom: Introduction

[David Yarrow]

i don't read this list a lot, and have less time to write.  too many projects; too little time.  and time is running out for industrial civilization.

but i've read quite a load lately of typical arrogant western intellectual fantasy about indigenous people, culture and spirituality, and it saddens me.  and yes, angers me, to see that 300 years later, the same blind mindset that wasted, squandered and eradicated the beauty of turtle island is still frmly entrenched and wreaking more cultural confusion and ecological chaos.

rather than type a long personal perspective on this continued fever of aggressive misunderstanding, for now i will simply paste below a story -- the traditional way to transmit culture and consciousness. a story about a western trained man who entered into a previously unknown indigenous culture in the forested mountains of the malaysian interior, and who experienced an indigenous mind, which is firmly anchored in the mind of nature -- as the lakota of the american interior say: "all my relations."

35 years ago i began studying acupuncture, and i read the oldest book on chinese medicine, the 3000 year old yellow emperor's classic of medicine -- a dialog between chi po, the chief physician, and the yellow emperor.  the yellow emporer asks chi po why in ancient times people lived to 120 year and had full possession of their mind and body, yet in their own time, people only live to 70 and become decrepit.  chi po explains why, and his answer includes detailed knowledge of the technique of acupuncture, among many amazing methods and ideologies of healing.

clearly, the ancient chinese were not emerging out of some stone age igorance of superstition, aggression and blood sacrifice.  clearly, the book was written to remember in words ancient wisdom that was being lost by the human descent into separate, darkness and denial of fundamental principles.  i was impressed by this medical philosophy, with its roots in unknowm, unwritten human history.  and herstory. and mystery.

also in the lat 30 years i've had personal associations with native americans and their elders -- mostly of the northeaast woodland tribes.  i've learned their view of the half-century of invasion of their homelands by boatloads of fierce men from europe spreading disease, death and deceit in every direction.  using every means to decimate 70 million people in a conqueset of the native people and nature, and destroying by exploitation and extraction the ancient ecological communities they depended on for food, clothing, shelter, water, medicine.  in less than a century, the elders died, taking with them the memories, story and wisdom, and indigenous culture vanished like a catastrophic book burning, or core memory meltdown.

nearly every person i read on this list is a victim of the industrial civilized mind, and is generally clueless to understand the indigenous tribal mind, and its intimacy of relationship with nature, the mind of gaia.  so, if an indigenous woman says that she learns from the plants how to use them, that the plants tell her what their medicine is, this ranks her among those considered bereft of reason.  yet there is ample anthrological evidence that ancient people did know how to talk to plants, animals, insects, the wind, the sun and moon, the yin and the yang, and the 5-step creation/destruction cycle.

today, even among indigenous communities, few have the gift of indigenous mind where everything is connected.

pasted below is the first chapter in the story of one man who found his way back into the indigenous tribal mind -- easily, humbly, in a personal transformation -- and returned to intellectual society to tell about his cultural leap and return.  but first, one quick digital reminder of two ill-informed mnds yukking it up again....

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <rukurt at westnet.com.au>
To: <terrapreta at bioenergylists.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 10:30 AM
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Fwd: Fwd: Global Carbon Cycle
> Kev Babeee---- you de man!!!!
> I love your scenario, said just what I thought!
> Developed Westerner often see native peoples as "Noble Savages" imbued 
> with special wisdoms and knowledge. And there is no doubt that they have 
> a lot of knowledge of their local situation. Unfortunately it is often 
> codified in terms of Sun Gods and Ancestral Spirits and other deities 
> that must either be propitiated with human sacrifices, beating hearts 
> torn from bodies and so on, or with saccharin adoration and the 
> construction of huge public buildings or both.
> The weather doesn't care if you hold up your virgin daughters beating 
> heart to the rising sun, it'll rain when it damn well pleases.
> 
> Kevin Chisholm wrote: Dear Lou and Code
>> I think it is a big mistake to attribute to the Ancient Peoples more 
>> knowledge and intelligence than that for there is evidence to support.
>> <<snipped>>
>> I can imagine a Meeting of some of the Village Elders at a local 
>> watering hole..  <<snipped>>
>> The rest is probably history... ;-)
>> Can anyone think of ANY resource they were lacking in order to develop a 
>>   "Great Growing System?"
> Not really, and having to use stone axes doubtlessly stopped them from 
> clearing thousands of acres, the way we do. Easy energy is modern mans 
> greatest curse.
>> "Merely because a cow does not understand the workings of her 4th 
>> stomach is no reason why she should not eat grass."
>> Best wishes, Kevin
>>

oh yeah.  speaking of 
>" propitiated with human sacrifices, beating hearts 
> torn from bodies and so on, or with saccharin adoration" --
have you been keeping up with the current death toll in the war on terror, and the pathetic poltical debate about how to bring peace to war-torn worlds --
war in iraq, war in palestine, war in lebanon, war in central america...
war on cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDS.....
war on weeds.....
war on climate.....
when will westerners stop seeing themselves in their mirror of history?

without further ado, here is your gateway to journey into indigenous authentic mind.....
through the looking glass....
the world behind your mirror.

David Yarrow
"If yer not forest, yer against us."
Turtle EyeLand Sanctuary
44 Gilligan Road, East Greenbush, NY 12061
518-330-2587
dyarrow at nycap.rr.com
www.championtrees.org
www.OnondagaLakePeaceFestival.org
www.citizenre.com/dyarrow/
www.SeaAgri.com
 
"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, 
if one only remembers to turn on the light."  
-Albus Dumbledore

Original Wisdom

Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing

Robert Wolf ©2001

Inner Traditions, Rochester VT

www.innertraditions.com

 

Introduction

As I am preparing this collection for publication again I think back to my childhood. I grew up in a very small town in Sumatra. My family-mother, father, and one sister-was small, but we lived among a dozen people and their families who helped us live a rich and comfortable life. Those people I thought of as my other family. During the hottest part of the day, when we were supposed to rest, I often joined them as they sat around in the shade, sharing gossip and stories. The stories were fables, I knew, but even after many retellings they never lost their wonder. Over the years fables became lessons that began to tell me what the world "out there" might be like. Even now, so many years later, I hear the rhythm of the Malay language, I see people sitting around, leaning against a pole or against each other. Life was never hurried. I learned without being aware that I did. I still remember the time when it dawned on me that relations between humans can be very complicated and difficult, but nevertheless it was impressed upon me that humans always exist within a larger context. I knew that people, despite great differences, are related as humans, as we are related to the animals and plants around us.

Now I am an elder myself. The fables I heard when I was a child have faded into the background of stories I have lived, my own stories that continue their life within me-wherever it is that stories are kept.

A number of years ago I began to write down a few of these and then put some of them together in a book, which I published in 1994. The book found its own readers; I never marketed it. Now, a new version of this collection may find its way to a larger audience.

* * * * *

My life has spanned what must be a unique period in the long history of humankind: a period of immense changes worldwide. The human population of the world has more than doubled in the last forty years; we have pumped more oil out of the ground after World War II than in all history before then. In the last fifty years, the millions of cars and millions of miles of roads we have built, and that have become commonplace, have changed the face of the planet forever. An ever-growing number of humans have access to facilities and luxuries kings could not have dreamed of even fifty years ago.

Westerners, who are in the vanguard of these changes, see them as progress, an assumption rarely questioned.

 

Perhaps because my perspective includes memories of a kinder, gentler world, I have become acutely aware of what we have lost. In our haste to create a world entirely based on artificial-that means man-made-things, we have thrown away much that is part of our heritage as creatures of this planet. By divorcing ourselves from Nature we have also removed ourselves from the wisdom that comes from living as part of What Is.

In this age it is not unusual anymore to visit and even live in faraway lands. We travel halfway around the earth for a week's vacation or for an assignment of a few months. Where French was the language of diplomacy not all that long ago, English has become the language of world trade. Tourists travel to outlying islands to find the perfect beach, or to an exotic big city for bargains.

And yet it seems that the easier it becomes to travel, the more difficult it is to meet people in their own world.

I feel blessed to have been able to meet the people who changed my life, a tribe of aborigines in Malaysia. In some ways they reminded me of the people I knew as a child, but they were more primitive. I can easily imagine they are a rare remnant of humans as we used to be a few thousand years ago.

 

After leaving Malaysia, where we lived for a few years, I began to read all I could find written by travelers and sci­entists who had known other aboriginal people. The more I read, the more I realized that Bushmen and Pygmies in Africa, Eskimos in the high Arctic, Australian aborigines, and isolated tribes here and there around the world were described in very much the same words: peaceful, nonvio­lent, non-aggressive. All the aboriginal people who survived into the twentieth century lived in areas of scarce resources: dense jungles, arid deserts, snow-swept ice fields. They lived in isolation, far from civilization. They were shy. They were nomadic, with few possessions, and their communities did not have elaborate hierarchies of power. And there was something else these groups had in common: they could not be "tamed," to borrow the word Laurens van der Post uses to write about the Bushman of the Kalahari Desert.

 

I wondered what it was that affected me so deeply about the Sng'oi of Malaysia. Certainly, they had a kind of integrity that I had not sensed in other people. I loved their joyfulness, their ability to be in the present, their utter sim­plicity. When I was with them I was moved by the strange synchronicities (c. G. Jung's term) that so often occurred. How was it possible that people without a telephone knew that I was coming to visit, when I did not know myself until a few hours before I left home? How could one person know what another was thinking and feeling and dream­ing? But perhaps more than anything else, with the Sng'oi I basked in a kind of unconditional love that is rare in Western societies and in societies that have become Westernized. I now know that I could find them only if they wanted to be found. They trusted me.

My love for a people who experienced reality directly, rather than through layers of learned concepts of what the world should be, allowed me to rediscover a reality of my own that is as immediate and intimate as the world of the Sng'oi. I recognized that I had hidden this reality deep inside myself. I had always known that the world and I were inseparably one, but had suppressed that knowing, buried it under words and theories.

My friends the Sng'oi, and others of these stories, helped me regain the reality of being part of All-That-Is.

* * * * *

Westerners are intolerant of other ways to organize soci­ety, other ways to be human. We cannot accept that others may value different ways of being. We seem to be stuck in the idea that all people must want what we have and what we value-all those things that we believe prove that Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement, the best, the future.

Science is so sure that it is the only truth that it has become incapable of accepting other ways of learning about reality. Medicine, as a scientific discipline, for instance, is certain that all other forms of healing are quackery and are not to be tolerated; they must be rooted out, destroyed. Such arrogant insistence has eradicated much knowledge and wisdom in the world.

I always knew that there were other, older ways of healing.

 

For many years my work took me to many parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. I recorded and collected what I could of methods of healing and herbal medicines. I became obsessed with the thought that I ran a race with time, that soon it would be too late because no one would remember ancient traditions. It seemed that all such knowl­edge was being erased by our intolerance of other-ness. I was deeply saddened by what I believed was an irreparable loss. In our rush to create man-made chemicals, we rejected age-old knowledge of the riches of the earth that are freely available all around us. We invented machines, but ignored talents and abilities we must have in our very genes.

 

My agony over what I thought of as a great loss stayed with me until one day when I was in Tonga, an island kingdom in the South Pacific (Tonga is one of the few countries that have escaped colonization, although not the overlay of a Western religion). I mentioned my despair over what we had lost to a woman who had been pointed out to me as a gifted native healer. So much knowledge and wisdom, I said, was lost through our crude but persistent efforts to eradicate native cultures.

She thought about that for a long time. Finally she said, "Yes, I know what you mean. Yes, we too used to have heal­ers and much knowledge of healing and herbs. Most of that is gone."

She paused again for at least a minute, then she sat up straight and looked me in the eye, her voice becoming stronger and more affirmative: "But"-and she pointed her finger for emphasis-"that is not the whole of it. You see, there have always been people who know. When we most need it, someone will remember that ancient knowledge."

She sat back, smiling. "So you see, traditions may be lost, but the information is in here and in here," she said, pointing to her head, then her heart, "and when we need it most, it will be inside us, for us to find."

She was referring to herself, I knew. Her gift of healing did not come from a Western education, nor did it come from training in traditional healing. It came from within.

I must believe what she said is true. I have experienced that knowing. There were times when I needed knowledge of the plants around me-and it came to me. Instinctively I knew where to find the knowledge (now we would say information) I needed.

The same is true in other areas of skill and experience. The ancient art of building canoes may have been lost, but when I was a passenger traveling on the open ocean in a fourteen-foot Boston whaler for twelve hours with no land in sight, the sailors who manned the vessel remembered again how to find their way by the stars at night, and during the day by the currents and "the little winds," as some Polynesians say. It is true that what remains of old tradi­tions is no longer a coherent system of knowledge and skills, yet individuals everywhere are rediscovering and re­creating what their forebears had.

There are kahuna (priests) again in Hawai'i. A century ago, missionaries did what they could to eradicate all rem­nants of heathenism, but somehow enough ancient knowl­edge survived. I knew a modern-day kahuna well; he considered himself a kahuna lapa'au, a healing priest. He agreed that what he knew did not always come to him in a straight line, from father to son, from teacher to pupil, but rather from his own knowing-from inside himself. Others have said the same.

 

Perhaps, despite great destruction of human experience, ancient insight and wisdom are not lost. Somehow they are still part of us, inside us. These insights can and will come back to us when we need them.

* * * * *

As a child listening to the people who were near and dear to me, I never thought that one way of looking at the world was better than another. When I returned to that part of the world as an adult I realized that our arrogant attitude toward other ways of being caused great pain, and eventu­ally the destruction of almost all indigenous cultures in these latter years.

That was brought home to me most searingly when I visited a small island in the Pacific with a few coworkers. I had no part in the job the public health people had to do that day, so I asked one of the local people to show me around the island. I told him that I was particularly inter­ested in learning about what I called native medicine. When he seemed doubtful I explained that, obviously, peo­ple who had lived on a small island, far away from other islands, must have developed ways to heal wounds. Certainly they must know how to assist in childbirth-per­haps even know ways to set a broken bone. "Oh that," he said, "Yes, there are some people who know."

We walked around the island. He introduced me to a woman who knew herbs, and to two sisters who were mid­wives. We met a man who knew which of the many differ­ent kinds of seaweed could be used medicinally, and several people who had other healing skills.

I took copious notes, although I soon discovered that people were not happy when I made notes in their pres­ence. So between visits, my guide and I would sit on a rock somewhere and I would write in my notebook. We talked.

It was afternoon when we came back to where the boat waited for us to take my friends back to the main island, and to take me back to the airport. The island did not have a har­bor or much of a beach, so we had to be ferried to the boat in local canoes. I was in the last canoe. Just as we were about to manhandle the canoe into the water, my guide of the day rushed up with a gift. He wanted to thank me, he said breathlessly:

"You are the first [white man] who said some things we have is worth."

 

His words made an indelible impression on me. I realized that what he said was probably true. Other white men may have visited his island, but nobody had ever taken the trou­ble to ask them about their lives, their practices, their beliefs, their knowledge-because we are so sure that whatever indigenous people have is not worth knowing.

 

The stories in this book are true in the sense that I lived them. I share them to honor the worth and wisdom of the many people I came to know all over the world.
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