Posted by milainyan on
March 28, 2008
Dan my friend, I got your’ message. Here are a couple essays for you and other readers. I wrote these papers for a college class last quarter. They’re short and, as far as I’m concerned, undeveloped but here they are none the less. I expect that I will make more posts in the near future similar to this one containing essays that I’ve written in the past.
Mythologizing the Self
The psyche is structured onto a basic common framework. Just as we recognize a common human physical form we too can recognize a common psychic form. This emerges from the evolutionary process as a result of the interface between form and function in biology. The common structure of the brain is the physical analogue of its psychic structure. The physique of the brain and the commonality of the human experience generate Jung’s archetypes. These archetypes emergent from common experience and structure are the foundation of myth and ground it as a biological/psychological necessity.
The psyche, in its entirety, can be compared to the abyss in both its depth and obscurity. Mythos gives stability to the ego in the abysmal depths of the psychic waters. This is the necessity of myth. The gestalt mythological function is to establish a basic paradigm through which we may operate in, interact with, and perceive the world, to let us float upon and guide us through the psychic cosmos. At its most fundamental level this guiding force take the form of archetypical psychic structures common to our experience and to our biology, such as the mother or father archetype which effectively act as signposts that through the lens of myth/story inform us of their meaning and how to interact with them. We all more or less have a common experience. We all experience mother, father, birth, puberty etc. Traditionally for 99% of human history and on these experiences have been framed in the setting of a complete cultural horizon, wherein the cultural cosmos is the only cosmology to which it’s inhabitants are exposed.
Here, where the experience of life and the world was tribal and wild, nature provides the negative form upon which a mythos is layered, exactly like a film negative. This was a setting in which all of our metaphors for understanding being were derived directly from a wild ecosystem and shared by all within the cultural horizon, which was, in essence, the entire world of our ancestors. It is from this space that a story arose to legitimize, conceptualize, and reconcile the human experience in such a way that is was digestible, comfortable, and common to all. This was our myth.
It is was not until the agricultural revolution that our ancestors experienced any kind of alternative, what Joseph Campbell has famously called “The Great Reversal,” when the basic human mythic form changed or by some considerations even began to break down. It was here where our story, the map of our cosmos, shifted from its basic affirmative form to an alternative conditional and denial form. These two new mythic structures today form the basis of our mythological thought but even they are so discorporate from the dominant culture, who’s own unrecognized mythos rejects the necessity of myth and story, that even these mutant mythic forms are falling into disuse and disrepair. One of the many results is a dangerous psychic break with our evolved psychic ecology. We have lost the map. We no longer have a map by which to travel through life. What then? Now, It is our basic task to…
1) Recognize the necessity of myth
2) Understand our myth
3) Engage/structure that myth
There is a basic story, which underlies each of our lives. Understanding that story can help turn the raging psychic sea into a placid lake. Joseph Campbell has said that both the mystic and schizophrenic have been thrown into the psychic waters. The difference between them is that the mystic treads in ecstasy while the schizophrenic flounders in terror. We need to be able to tread water. Mythologizing our lives can give us the tools to do exactly that. To float in ecstasy where we might otherwise drown in terror.
Myth occurs in three basic forms, affirmative, conditional, and denial. The affirmative myth has been the basic mythic condition of our species for 99% of its history. It is deeply primal and rooted in our psyches both personal and collective. The affirmative myth looks at the world and perceives the basic truth and condition of nature, which is that “life feeds on life”. This is where the image of the serpent eating itself emerges from and the image of life sprouting from death, which we see enacted in rituals in every single primitive culture throughout history, from the Dakotas, to Canaan, to Yucatan. The universe is eating itself and the affirmation of the myth is a resounding “yes”. The myth says “yes, this is the basic condition and I accept it wholly along with all else that is”. This is as opposed to the condition wherein the affirmation will only be acknowledged when a specific condition is met (i.e. the messiah must return, which will only happen when x), or as opposed to denial mythos who’s basic tenant is that the world is illusion, samsara, a dream. The affirmation doesn’t delegitimize other mystical forms or universes but it never delegitimizes the observers experience either.
What then is the function of this mythology? Mythos serves four basic functions. The first function of mythology and the most fundamental to its nature is the mystical function, which may also be called the magical function. This establishes the condition for all experience. The myth says “the universe is mystery, it is “wankan tanka” (great mystery), be in awe!” Mystery is the condition, and awe is the proscribed principal directive.
The second function, to which I have already eluded, is the cosmological or scientific function. The Myth maps out the universe and establishes a literal map of the cosmos by which we can relate to and understand the order and fundamental structure of the universe. In the Nordic cosmos of the spirit realm the universe is divided into 9 major realms connected by “Yggdrasil, The World Tree,” axis of the cosmos. Each place serves a finite symbolic function, which relate to the next two mythic functions, the sociological and psychological.
The third function of myth is the sociological function. Here the myth “supports and validates the specific moral order of the society out of which it arose.” (Campbell). This is the realm of ethical law, moral code, taboo, and where social structure is outlined. This establishes the attitudes and disposition of the inhabitants of the community and links those individuals to the design of the societal ends. The caste system, the pharonic system, kashrut and mitzvot, matrilineality, patriarchy are all examples of the sociological function’s phenotypic expression.
The fourth function is the psychological function. This might also be called the pedagogical function. It informs the mythologized individual how to live their life or deal with living. It is a personal map for navigating the trials, passages, vicissitudes of life and otherwise. It conducts the individual through the various stages of life, from crisis to crisis.
How do we construct a mythology that will fulfill all four functions and yet will still be affirmative? This is our task. Do we reach into our ancestry and reclaim some aspect of it? Do we adopt and reinterpret a specific incarnation of our ancestral mythos and symbolism as a foundation for our new mythology? Do we adopt a myth from an entirely alien culture? Do we create a mosaic concoction of myths to suit us? Do we construct one from scratch? Or are we already operating on a mythic basis without an overt awareness of it? Perhaps we need simply to reawaken our awareness to the reality of our personal myth? That’s the rub.
The Necessity of Rites
As a globalized culture we have lost our cultural horizon. Our social ecology is irreparably fractured. We have lost many of the vital features of a functional culture. One feature that has been sacrificed in the name of progress has been the initiation rite. We no longer are bound to a rite of initiation that is universally mandatory and capable of fulfilling it’s traditional psychic and mythic function for the individual and the community.
The initiation rite is an essential ritual. A ritual is the reenactment of a myth. We no longer have functional initiation rites and rituals because we no longer have a functional mythology. All three are vital aspects of psychic life. Myth, ritual, and rites need to be reclaimed in our lives on both an individual and collective scale. Joseph Campbell has said, “The principle function of mythology is to reconcile human consciousness to the preconditions of its existence”. The Myth tells us what the conditions are. The ritual is the vessel for the mythic lesson.
The initiation rite is a ritual by which we are brought from one phase of life to another. This is the vessel and actuating force behind the psychological function of myth. It is the force, which physically carries the individual through to the next stage of life, galvanizing them for the crisis to come be it puberty, man-hood, death, or otherwise. Rites and symbols are the enabling force that allows a society to affirm life and the conditions of life (life feeds on life) and to ensure that it’s values (the primary mask) will be passed on to future generations, thereby maintaining its cultural integrity and balance. The initiation rite enables the participant to recognize the new role that they have entered into – the new phasic function of the primary mask – informing them and enabling them to leave behind the old and adopt the new, to engage a new responsibility. This is the new primary mask.
The culture says ‘you are ready’ and they give you the new mask, your’ task as the initiate is to understand the mask and accept it. If you cannot do both of these things then the consequences, in most traditional cultures, are frequently extremely harsh. This role, the primary mask, is not just a persona, it is a mythological role, it is ordained and agreed upon by the entire universe, you do not have a choice and there is no differing. Here may arise the conflict that is so common especially to the myth of the occident, between the primary and the antithetical masks. This is a revolutionary act. It is a spontaneous personal transformation that is officiated in a very short period of time. Campbell, on the necessity of rites, speaks to this point
Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.
The initiation rite is not a function of layering the primary mask on top of the antithetical mask/persona, nor upon the ego, or self. The rite is about activating the dormant primary mask within the individual. It is a blooming, a “bringing forth”, rather than a planting or a grafting. This process can be likened to the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or larvae into a beetle. The rite is the vehicle of transmutation which identifies the childhood persona that lacks social and personal responsibility, prepares the individual to shed the persona, rips it from them, and replaces it with the primary mask of responsibility, responsibility for both the society en-large and the individual in their personal life. It appears outwardly as a transmogrification but it may be more accurate to say that it is truly a transposition of persona in the initiate. In catalyzing the transposition of masks the initiate enters into the process of syzygy, in Jungian terms, the pairing of “contrasexual opposites”, the crux of the unification of the self, the heart of individuation.
It appears as though the culture is saying “you are ready” but it only appears this way because it is only the culture, which has the foreknowledge of the life process, which gives it the capacity to make such a judgment and say so. Often enough the initiate also senses the change because it is not solely cultural it is also a biological phasic evolution. The individual is in crisis. ‘Something is not right, what is it? I must change something’, the culture comes along and says ‘we see that you are ready; we will carry you through this crisis’.
Why do we need rites? There is an African proverb, which says “If you do not initiate the youth, they will burn down the village”. Is it possible that that is precisely what we have done? Have we become a culture of uninitiated youth? Who have never been told what our roles are or how to reconcile them? Are we burning down the village? Can reclamation of initiation rites help to heal our village and us?
It is essential that we reclaim our inherited rites, a rite inherited through both our ancestry and morphic resonance, a rite that is as much a part of us as our legs or arms and equally as necessary. Even outside of a truly tribal life initiation rites can be maintained and must be maintained.
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Noah Milstein
My task over the past year has been reclaiming, rewilding, and detoxifying my heritage and ancestry. My task has been to interpret and understand my inherited mythology in a filtered non-toxic form. As a Jew, I have been drawing from my Judaic ancestry and trying to reinterpret my Judaic practices, beliefs, and ethos through a purely animistic light. I am trying to structure a mythology founded firmly in the Judaic tradition but within the frame of an affirmative mythos capable of easily fulfilling all four mythological functions with all of the traditional tools of a functioning living myth, such as ritual, ceremony, and story.
Part of this rewilding of myth and self has taken the distinctive form of rewilding ritual. Rewilding ritual is a kind of doing. It is more visceral than the rewriting or wording of Talmudic tales, haftorah, or otherwise. The ritual practice is the perfect forum onto which to project this mythological shift because it is the mythological space. Ritual is the enactment of a myth. It is the engaging of a sacred space, which is to make the ritual space transparent to the transcendent. The relationship between the ritual participant and the ritual space must be the analogue of the student to the master, the disciple to the guru. The student/participant must become transparent to the transcendence, which flows forth through the space, the ritual, and the guru. Transparency to transcendence is to transform oneself into a channel or vessel through which transcendence may travel. Transcendence is the light principal, the student is the bulb in which it is found. Joseph Campbell speaks to this point…
Sacred space is a space that is transparent to transcendence, and everything within such a space furnishes a base for meditation, even for the youngest child. When you enter through the door, everything within such a space is symbolic, the whole world is mythologized, and spiritual life is possible. This is a place where you can go and feel safe and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, you will eventually find yourself again and again.
It seems apparent that there are contained within many Judaic practices more primal roots and to the keen observer it’s animist past may shine through. The reflection of the lunar cycle, upon which the Jewish calendar is based, the welcoming of spirits, the traditional structuring of the ritual/myth, and the fulfillment of the four functions (mystery/awe, cosmos, socio, and pedagogy), among others. These animist origins can also be seen explicitly in the laws of kashrut, in which only certain animals and eating practices are considered to be kosher. This serves several functions.
1) Certain animals are wider disease transmission vectors; by designating them as traif the population is protected.
2) Traif animals then they become protected species, which helps to regulate their hunting and is a form of honoring of ecological contracts.
3) By regulating eating and hygienic practice, disease vectors are significantly reduced.
4) Regulated hygiene is also a natural boon to the hunter as camouflage/descenting.
Kashrut reflects the primal tradition of a social/ecological contract with the hunt or the animal master, which in Judaism is derived from the ancient Hebrews when they were hunter-gatherers emerging from Africa in the Levant. This contract, among others, can be seen in every single primitive culture. For example, numerous northwest Native American peoples share a myth of their ancestors being saved by a massive canoe tied to a madrone tree which anchored it during a great flood (the analogue of the Noah myth). As a result many of these tribes such as the Kwakwa’la have a strong taboo against cutting down madrone trees. This is a means of honoring the tree and honoring their ecological/social contract. This contract is also explicit in other parts of kashrut through the means of killing. Any animal that suffers in death in considered unkosher. By torturing the animal in death you fail to respect it and it withdraws from the blood contract. Blood is unkosher. The reason for this Halacha, I propose (as bolstered by Joseph Campbell), is that this is because the ancient Hebrews were a hunting-dominant culture that were in contract with the “animal master”. Part of the hunting contract is to give back to the provider (animal, animal master, earth) in return for the hunt. If the hunter fails to give back to the animal master, animal spirit/over-spirit, earth, then the contract has been broken and the hunt would disappear and the people would starve. By returning blood, or in other cases entrails, or a cut of meat, the contract is being honored by virtue of reciprocation with the wild community. Again this primal hunt association is illustrated in the hygienic laws of kashrut, which reflects both the hygienic survival advantage that cleanliness confers so common to primitive tribalists but also the hunting that is conferred as a pungent hunter is poorly camouflaged.
Rabbi A.J. Heschel speaks to the primacy of Shabbat
The Sabbath is a day of harmony and peace, peace between man and man, peace within man, and peace with all things. On the seventh day man has no right to tamper with god’s world, to change the state of physical things… the Sabbath, thus, is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things… creation, we are taught, was not an act that happened once upon a time, once and forever. The act of bringing the world into existence is a continuous process… every instant is an act of creation.
Shabbat from this perspective is about honoring nature and the natural order and ceasing the civilizing force, ceasing domestication, and appreciating the natural order, as it is, primal, wild, untamed, and free.
The ceremony is opened with a song. The singing of shalom alechem, which means “peace upon you”, engaging the sacred space, it aims to make the participants transparent to transcendence. This song serves the function of a “welcoming song” or a “four directions song” so common to Native American cultures. It is a literal invitation to “angels” or spirits. This is very common in animist practice to begin a ceremony with a welcoming song. It serves the function of 1) welcoming the “ministering” spirits and 2) engaging sacred space to make the participants transparent. This is followed by a series of baruchot (blessings), very much like a thanksgiving in which thanks and blessing is given for candles (fire), wine (drink), washing (hygiene/kashrut), and bread (food). This is the crux of the ritual, which is a basic thanksgiving so central and common to primitive ritual. This is the overt ritualized recognition of and enactment of the first mythological function, awe.
Shabbat also fulfills the third mythological function by serving the practical function of being a community forum in which, tension can be diffused and bonds strengthened in the group. The group comes together and is restricted by taboo from engaging in anything but study, thought, reflection, and the reliving of the myth. The myth, the ritual, engages the group as a whole in a sacred space, function 1 – ‘mystery/awe’, they are engaged in the story through thanksgiving, function 2,3, and 4, ‘this is the universe, this is our place in it, this is how we live, and this is why.’
Shabbat Shalom.
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Noah Milstein
Heritage
When I consider my heritage, I imagine it as the pre-history of me, my personal paleo-lithic. I see that history expanding outward in a series of concentric rings as in a still pond, connecting me to the rest of the pond. I see this history as being split into two primary vectors. On one hand I have my Judaic ancestry. On the other hand I have my wildness, my humanness, my natural ‘selfhood’. Both strongly define my identity and both play an important role in my life. Although it is easy, at most times, to differentiate between the two I nonetheless see this dyad as an entangled pair. As an animist I see the world as alive, I recognize levels of being beyond ordinary perception, and through this I recognize a spirit realm, a realm of ancestry. As an animist my ancestors are never truly gone nor are they inactive in my life or unconscious of me, their descendant. We are entangled through the medium of the ether.
I am engaged in an active dialogue with my heritage, through my ancestry, my ancestors. Their practices root themselves in space through morphic resonance and thus bind me to them, to the practice, and to the practitioner. My participation in and observance of Judaic practice goes beyond the security and esteem of in-group membership, it goes beyond community in the here and now it is an active dialogue with the universe, an active dialogue with my ancestors and an active dialogue with my myth. Judaism has formed the defining framework for my mythos, it the schematic structure to which I am bound and through which I gauge my experience. It allows my to connect with my ancestry, with those with whom I share ancestry, and with my personal myth.
Wildness on the other hand is a much wider relation. As an animist my humanness is profoundly important to me. I recognize that humans serve a specific ecological function necessitated by a Gaian weak-anthropic principal. My function is the ordinance of the earth and the earth is my mother to whom I am in service. Therefore it is profoundly important that I understand my humanness, my wildness, and that I embody both as they are a divinely ordained function built into my genes and rooted into me and the world around me by way of morphic resonance.
My heritage includes climbing trees, rolling around in the dirt, running through fields of grass, swimming in rivers, and howling at the moon. Wildness is a state that has not been, nor can it ever be, transcended. It is an integral aspect of our biology built into our physicality and into our psyche. It must be engaged and embraced. It is not haphazard or wanton or unruly, it is merely what our genes and our world ask and require of us. It is the path of least resistance, like an eagle riding a thermal or algae flowing with the current. Wildness is innate, it is not an ‘other’ of which I am in pursuit but rather it is a submerged mask that I am bringing forth, as though it were waiting to be washed ashore with the tide. I am human, wildness is the condition of my humanness, Judaism frames my experience of wildness and helps structure it into a coherent pattern, which, like a ladder, is easier to climb when ordered.
My heritage is primacy, prime, meaning first. The further I reach back the more deeply rooted my connection, the firmer my roots grip, and the wider the reach of their tendrils. This reaching back broadens the horizon of my connectedness, it is the context of my experience and that context is this place. We are a rootlet of the ancestor’s tale/tail. Reaching back far enough, all ‘living’ organisms are bound to a single common ancestor, to the trunk. When I reach back far enough I find that we are bound even to the Earth itself, to the rocks, stones, magma, tectonics, wind, erosion, condensation, and geomorphosis. We arose from this place, from the very soil and soul of it. My heritage, our heritage is a binding link to primacy, to place, to ordained ecological niche roles, to wildness. I am a Jewish-Animist and this is my heritage.
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Animal, Vegetable, Sandwich
The fundament of Barbara Kingsolver’s Book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is the supposition that a local food economy can ‘save the planet’ and be ‘more sustainable’. Her premise is to an extent correct. Eating local, seasonal, organic, non-GMO, foods are less pollutive than our current eating habits. It is healthier for us as individuals. It may even, as she claims, build stronger relations between consumers and consumed, self and family, self and community. What she fails to recognize is the fallacy of being “more sustainable”. Such a thing does not exist. Things are either sustainable or they are not. The assertion that a non-cyclic unit existing within a non-cyclic system within a non-cyclic paradigm, underlying a non-cyclic mythology (conditional and denial based mythos) and psyche could ever be sustainable is beyond absurd. Anything, no matter how self contained and sustainable, could ever truly be sustainable so long as it is built upon or within a destructive paradigm. It may be great to have a local, “low impact”, organic farming community but it doesn’t take into account the fact that ‘low impact’ is a relativism in relation to the damage already done and being done by the dominant culture. The biosphere cannot sustain a ‘low impact’ economy. The planet cannot sustain any ‘economy’. Anything short of total rejection of the paradigm of the dominant culture as an innately homicidal, suicidal, and ecocidal is flat-out denial.
These ‘more sustainable’ farms still exist in place of a wild functioning ecology. It is the ecology, which ultimately determines the existence of farms, economies, and cities. ‘Low impact’ ethos does not take into account the fact they exist as part of and due to a mythos of unlimited growth and the exportation and denial of death, which is the analogue of all agriculture. We would certainly be better off with a local food economy but it’s not going to save the planet nor will it make us more sustainable. To give an analogy, saying that bio-fuel will be more sustainable than petroleum based fuel is absurd. It’s still car culture, it still requires cars and the mining and production of those cars, it still requires cutting down forest to grow soy, it still requires cutting down forest to lay down pavement. It is like saying ‘it would be far healthier for me to chop off my left arm than my right arm because my right arm is more useful’. There is no such thing as ‘more sustainable’. It simply does not exist.
There is only one sustainable mythological paradigm or human culture that has ever existed and will ever exist. It is the paradigm that evolved with and through us in union with our ecosystem. It is primitive tribalism. The hunter-gatherer life way is the only sustainable paradigm of the five recognized forms. This paradigm takes three primary forms, hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and horticulturalist. Agriculture is not, never has been, and never will be sustainable. Industry is not, never has been, and never will be sustainable. Moreover it should be noted that industry is an outgrowth of agriculture and cannot exist without it.
We are in denial. Our culture is suicidal, homicidal, and ecocidal. It is built into to its very core. It cannot be reformed or changed. It is rotten to the core. Anything short of completely abandoning it is simply not enough. It must be destroyed, totally and completely. Furthermore the fantasy that there is no immanent total cultural collapse is absurd and the fantasy that our biosphere can sustain 7 billion people or even 2 billion people is also completely absurd. That was well beyond that planet’s carrying capacity when it was at it’s healthiest. Now, in such a damaged state that carrying capacity is certainly significantly lower. The only alternative, which must be recognized, understood, and accepted is the hunter-gatherer lifeway/primitive-tribalism. There is no alternative and there will be a minimal survival rate if any at all. We need to accept the obsolescence of our lifeway, our death, our cultures death, and perhaps even our extinction. Extinction is a very real possibility ignoring it is simply blindness, denial, and silencing.
We must become fully integrated primitive tribalist bands existing as participants in their ecology and truly fulfilling our naturally evolved functional role as humans, as caretakers. If every single person on the planet were to eat locally (as we have done for the entire history of civilization, excepting the past century or less – and which will never ever happen again) we may reduce greenhouse gas emissions by quite a bit maybe even by 50%, maybe even by 90% but there are still millions of tons of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere which will still continue to warm the earth for ages to come and there will still be more gases being produced by other sources and “industries”. There will still be clear cutting, and strip mining, egregious waste and dumping, and the toxification of every environment possible. There are already over 200 dead zones in our oceans, over 90% of large fish are gone from the planet, there are five major trash vortexes in our oceans with two so large (respectively in the Atlantic and Pacific) that they cannot be seen across, take days to sail across, and have even been compared in size to Texas. When will we declare the oceans dead? With less than 20% and counting of original forest left on the planet when will the forests be dead? With only 3% and counting of original forest in the US left when our landscape be dead? With the extinction rate up from a natural 5 species a year to 1 species every 10 minutes when will we recognize the global apocalypse and stop denying and silencing the obvious. Enough of this “more sustainable” garbage it is a fantasy, it is denial.
50 years from now if there are any humans left what so ever somehow eking out a life on the miserable planet that we have thoroughly trampled and decimated, I expect that they won’t care much if we spent our time recycling. They’re not going to ask us why we didn’t buy that ultra efficient car instead of the gas guzzling SUV or if we ate local, organic, or vegan, or other bit of nonsense. Nor will they ask if we composted, or bought fair-trade coffee, or voted democratic, or voted at all. That’s not the question that they’ll ask.
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Noah Milstein
Killing the Buddha; personal responsibility and action
There is a Buddhist koan that roughly translated says that ‘if you are walking down a path, and you happen to come upon the Buddha, kill him.’ There are several meanings behind the koan. At the moment the most relevant to my thinking is this. All growth and development must come from within. Any advance that we make towards ‘enlightenment, freedom, nirvana, Ziyyon,’ etc comes from within us not from any external source. We can be told something by a teacher or a book and understand it, we can play with it in our minds as an abstraction but the experience of knowing, to truly grok, can only come from within us and cannot be translated from one body to another.
To borrow from another koan, the Buddha is the finger pointing at the moon but he is not the moon. Only the moon is the moon, the finger is the finger. Each to his own, everything has a place and a function and needs to be recognized as such. The Buddha, the bodhi, the sadhu, the guru, is only the finger. That is their function, to be a finger. Part of the student’s task is to not conflate the finger with the moon; otherwise they may miss the moon entirely and be stuck entranced in the finger. There is a Vedic tale, that I heard first from Joseph Campbell, who has for me been a prominent finger, about a student and his guru. To paraphrase, the student arrives late in the forest to see his guru. The guru says,
Guru: “Where have you been? Why are you late?”
Student: “The river is flooded, it is raging and uncrossable”
G: “How then did you get here at all?”
S: “I simply said to myself that my guru is perfection, he is the light, I must come to him. So I sat by the edge of the water and thought to myself… guru, guru, guru, guru… and here I am.”
The guru accepted this and continued with his lessons for the day. When the day was over and he was alone this story, which had been stuck in his mind, was still with him. So he went down to the river’s edge and sat by the water. He said to himself,
G: “Me, me, me, me, me…” and he drowned.
The story is a lesson in place. We all have a function. The guru’s function is to be a finger pointing at the moon; he must be ‘transparent to transcendence’. He is the finger not the moon but when he sat at the water he said to himself “I am the moon, I am the moon”. He was no longer seeing himself as a vessel or light bulb for the light to pass through but as the light principal itself and in so doing he died. Realize the function of the teacher, they are the means to the end, but do not mistake them for the end. You must, in effect, by realization, kill them. Kill the modality of light; realize that the guru is only a vessel. This does not belittle the guru, the teacher, the finger, it merely is the recognition of its place, and it’s function. A finger is only a finger; do not think that it is the moon.
The finger, the teacher, is the catalyzing agent but you are the substrate and the light is the enzyme. The change must come from within you, the guru is there to catalyze the reaction, to say, ‘here is the enzyme’ it is incumbent upon you to say ‘yes, I see the enzyme and now I will pursue it’. You’re morphing is not your’ reaction to the guru but to the light within the guru and they are not to be conflated. The reaction is the result of your’ cognition and not of anyone else’s. The Buddha cannot give you enlightenment. He does not say, ‘here, let me grok for you’ but he does say ‘there it is, go for it’. Only the moon is the moon, only Buddha is the Buddha, only you are you. Personal responsibility is entirely incumbent upon you and no one else. Personal transformation and everything that happens within you is incumbent upon you and no one else. Hitting so well upon this point, Hillel II in the 3rd century CE famously said, “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” If I am not for myself, who will be? The answer is no one. No one can be expected to take care of us except ourselves, which is not to say that no one will help us but that we are not free to abandon our personal responsibilities.
In community relations it is equally incumbent upon each individual member to actively participate in that community. Membership whether assured or not is measured by action. We are ultimately defined by our actions and our place and role in community is assured by exactly that means, action. If we want change to be made, if we want to reach nirvana we will not beg at the Buddha’s feet and ask him to spare some of his excess enlightenment as though it were a commodity to be had in his pocket. We will be driven to action. We will find enlightenment, the Buddha may say, “there it is” but we are the ones who will walk there. Action and personal responsibility are key facets of functional community members. If individuals cannot take personal responsibility and act in their own self interest then they cannot be expected to be functional members of a group. Action is the murder of the Buddha; personal responsibility is the motive of the murder.
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Schooling
School is a perverse stand-in for the sociological myth function. It is the result of the transference of an innate cultural function through a perverse culture and expressed in a mutant form. The sociological function of myth “supports and validates the specific moral order of the society out of which it arose.” This is an innate function that occurs in all human cultures, it is one of the four primary organizing principals of human culture and therefore must always arise.
In the dominant culture this sociological function is expressed in a variety of forms one of which being schooling. Because there is so much dissonance with the evolved biological/ecological order, and according dysfunction, schooling too is symptomatically dysfunctional as a microcosm of the cultural dysfunction en-large. School, as the sociological function, is one of the culture’s primary transmission vectors for this ‘validation’. This poses a major problem because school as a compulsory system is a cultural bottleneck and any established “infection” within this vector will result in a high transmission rate of the cultural meme.
It is basically about control. Schooling “supports and validates the specific moral order of the society out of which it arose”, it facilitates conformity to the established cultural order, to the living conditions of that culture. Because the culture is innately psychotic, then the function of schooling is to reconcile the individual to the condition of that psychosis. Schooled or ‘educated’ people are conditioned to the cultural psychosis and reflect it in their moral and ethical cosmos.
It is important here to differentiate between the definition of schooling as I am using it and as it is generally understood to be any “place of learning”. In it’s use here it refers to the primary mode of schooling world wide, which is “compulsion model industrial schooling”. I do not which to conflate this definition of schooling with all other modes such as Montessori or Waldorf or otherwise which fall under an entirely different order of school. Education and schooling should not be conflated either. Schooling is a model of education that as a compulsion industrial model fails to live up to its intended function of ‘educating’. Education is a different animal entirely. Education is innate. It arises out of a cascade of biological mechanisms ranging from curiosity, imagination, and tribal conformity/in-group membership, to the basic need to survive. Education is an innate biological function and would arise naturally and organically if the environment would allow it to develop as such. Our culture has created so many impediments to the free expression of the educational urge that it is now being quashed on a global scale.
Education should be allowed to occur freely and should be encouraged and bolstered by a healthy cultural environment and most importantly of all a functional and healthy home/family environment. Curiosity, imagination, personal responsibility, among other values should be strongly stressed in development and a respect of the child as a person and not as an object to be treated punitively for behaviors for which they are not to be held responsible for as young un-imitated people. These are all essential for the healthy development of an educational ethos. The longer we fail to meet these most basic human needs among many others we will continue to fail in education and continue to school our children into machines.
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This following paper is pretty old. I need to rewrite it mostly because my thoughts have since evolved some and becaue my writing is not quite up to speed.
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Noah Milstein
Some Thoughts on History, Society, and Reality
The American Heritage Dictionary defines civ·i·li·za·tion (sĭv’ə-lĭ-zā’shən) as:
1) An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions. 2) The type of culture and society developed by a particular nation or region or in a particular epoch
Civilization also defines a cognitive system It is the principal law that “I am separate and/or above that/the other” (11), which manifested itself via the agricultural revolution and the will to domestication (3). This definition is in direct opposition to the “natural paradigm”, or the cognitive system of primitive peoples. This defined is by the belief that “everything is alive/aware, connected, and mysterious” (11). Daniel Quinn in his seminal work Ishmael noted this dichotomous split in cognitive systems among humans and divides the two into the Takers (civilization) and the Leavers (primitive). He describes this dichotomy as such: “The premise of the Takers’ story is ‘The world belongs to man’ … The premise of the Leavers’ story is ‘Man belongs to the world.”
This meme, which we know as “civilization”, exists beyond the evolved adaptability of the human animal, in that it has established an environment whose parameters for living exceed our evolved capacity to adapt to it. The civilization meme is fatally parasitic, to the extent that it bases itself in unlimited exponential growth on a limited resource base (11). We have become host to this meme and accordingly we have become a parasitic symbiont to our host agent, the Earth. Civilization’s modus operandi is exponential growth, which is impossible given that it possesses limited resources (it’s resource base being the Earth). This means that it will ultimately consume itself to death, as have many past cultures such as the people of Easter Island (4, 10). Unless we as a species abandon this meme we will drive ourselves to extinction. In Lessons of Easter Island, Clive Ponting speaks to this point saying:
The history of Easter Island is not one of lost civilisations and esoteric knowledge. Rather it is a striking example of the dependence of human societies on their environment and of the consequences of irreversibly damaging that environment. It is the story of a people who, starting from an extremely limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the world for the technology they had available. However, the demands placed on the environment of the island by this development were immense. When it could no longer withstand the pressure, the society that had been painfully built up over the previous thousand years fell with it.
The culture of the peoples of Easter Island facilitated resource consumption beyond the means of the Island environment to renew those resources. This led to a catastrophic break in the balance and function of its ecology and thus it’s ability to support the culture of the Easter Island peoples and thus collapse. There are numerous parallel examples of cultural collapse. Collapses caused by consumption in excess of the environments’ capacity to supply consumable resources include: Anasazi, the Hohokam, the Icelandic Vikings, the Norsemen at Greenland, and the Maya (4).
Civilization purports the perception that its existence is the result of a natural evolutionary trend (3, 11). I propose that civilization is not the result of a natural trend but is instead the result of a memetic mutation. In his essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race Dr. Jared Diamond bolsters this perspective noting the archeological data saying:
Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
This of course begs the question: does civilization convey a survival advantage and is its continued existence in our best interest as a species? The civilization meme has only been in existence for approximately 10,000-13,000 years, which may not necessarily be enough time for civilization to test its evolutionary fitness. All evolutionarily fit populations reach an ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) or become extinct. An ESS is evident when a population’s numbers remain steady. It is evident that civilization is not an ESS as evidenced by our growing population and it hasn’t hit a tipping point, as it has not yet collapsed. If civilization fails to reach an ESS then it is not evolutionarily fit and will collapse. If civilization is bound to collapse then it cannot convey a survival advantage to its population.
Looking back towards the inception of civilization, for some unknown reason, peoples of the Fertile Crescent abandoned their hunter-gatherer economy and adopted agriculture. This meant two things; 1 – there would more food available and 2 – there would be less variability and balance in diet and nutrition and thus decrease in general health (1, 9).
Civilization is not an ESS because it is bound by exponential growth. It is bound by exponential growth because it provides too much food. It provides too much food because our food supply is simulated. We stopped seeing ourselves as a function of our food supply when we stopped having a direct relationship with our immediate neighbors in the food chain. This occurred with specialization when only a few members of society (the farmers) were designated to produce societies’ food and to do so in a simulated environment (the farm).
Daniel Quinn in The Story of B discusses what he calls the “ABC’s of ecology”. One of the points he makes here is that a basic precept of ecology is that there is a direct relationship between food availability and population numbers: “Human population is a function of food supply” (8, 9, 11, 12). Phrased in another way: when there is more food there are more offspring, when there is less food there are fewer offspring. In Quinn’s words
“The A of the ABCs of ecology is food. The community of life is nothing else. It’s flying food, running food, swimming food, crawling food, and of course just sitting there and growing food. . . . The ebb and flow of all populations is a function of food availability. An increase in food availability for a species means growth. A reduction in food availability means decline. Always. . . . Without exception. Never otherwise. . . .
“There is no species that dwindles in the midst of abundance, no species that thrives on nothing.
“With more people, we need more food. With more food available, we soon have more people . . . Positive feedback, this is called, in systems terminology. . . . Positive feedback is what we see at work in this agricultural revolution of ours. Increased population stimulates increased food production, which increases the population. More food, more people. More people, more food . . . . Positive feedback. Bad stuff. Dangerous stuff.”
More food meant more children being born, more children meant more food demand, and more food demand meant more demand for farmable land. It is clear that this new agricultural community would need more land to farm in order to feed their swelling numbers. The solution for growth was expansion. In order to assimilate more farmable land neighboring peoples had to be displaced. In order to expand a soldier class had to be created, in order to farm all this land a farmer class had to be created, in order to organize this new community of specialized workers (farmers, soldiers, etc) an administrative class had to be created and so on. Agriculture necessitates militarism and hierarchy (5, 7). The agriculturalists established a hierarchy in order to become militarists in order to sustain themselves as agriculturalists as they had begun a trend of exponential growth (8). There are differing theories on how exactly these things occurred and in what order but the principal remains the same: that the civilization/taker meme necessitates agriculture, hierarchy, domestication, and poor health.
If civilization is a mutant unsustainable parasitic meme then it must be abandoned. If the civilization meme is abandoned then another cultural framework must be adopted. Of five recognized cultural models there are 3 remaining to choose from (agriculture and industrial culture are synonymous); foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists (7). These three food-gathering types all exist within the leaver/natural meme framework. Thus we are left with the meme from which the civilization meme originated, the natural/original meme, “everything is alive/aware, connected, and mysterious”. Daniel Quinn defined this leaver meme as “those who live in the hands of the gods.” to the effect that the leavers lived as participants in nature, subject to its limiting forces. A culture organized on the base assumption that it is ‘in the hands of the gods’ as opposed to ‘the gods themselves’ would necessitate a radically different psychology.
A new cultural meme means a new cognitive system; a new cognitive system means an entirely new mind, new perspective, new reality. The implications of rejecting the civilization meme and adopting this natural meme are great. We are faced with the incredible task of reconstructing our universe from the ground up. Many of the metaphysical assumptions that we make about reality are made from the basis of the perceptual field of the civilization meme. Thus, we must reevaluate everything when entering this new cognitive system. For example one major change in the perceptual field is that of “religion”. Monotheism is a natural outgrowth of agriculture, which is a natural outgrowth of the taker meme whereas the “religion” or metaphysics of hunter-gatherers are animistic/pantheistic (7). Animism/pantheism would mean the direct perception of the divine and the perception of divinity as being implicit in all things. Relationships would become defined by I-Thou rather than the I-You paradigm we now use (2). An I-Thou relationship would compel us to be more sensitive to the effects of our actions. If everything is both aware and divine then it would become increasingly difficult to maintain environmentally damaging habits. We would be compelled to directly perceive the effects of our actions upon others through the recognition of their divine nature. In considering this perception of connectedness and awareness/life, which is implicit in the meme, we can hypothesize a trend of environmental sensitivity. This alone would be an incredible perceptual shift but would eventually encompass every area of life. Our culture, as it is now, is deeply anthropocentric, we believe that “the Earth was made for us” but such a perceptual shift would shift this focus onto nature impelling us to be become an ecocentric culture (6, 11).
If everything is alive, sacred, and connected then we might be less likely to objectify and quantify our environment as an inventory of resources to be consumed and thus come into closer relation with it. This might result in a behavior or lifestyle resembling asceticism. This would also necessitate a primitive lifestyle, as we would be less inclined to cut down forests and mine the Earth. By directly perceiving the harm being done to these resources and the environment as a whole and in viewing those resources as divine entities it seems likely that we would not consume them in such mass quantities. We might also be less inclined to be materialists, as we would recognize the rights and wants of the resources we consume and the possible effects consuming them might have on the environment in which we and said resource participate. It seems clear that this meme would relieve considerable stress on our environment by reducing demand, which translates to a more sustainable culture (3, 7, 11).
I propose that this “natural meme” is embodied in primitive tribalism. Primitivism is the exclusive use of natural resources in a sustainable fashion. Tribalism is a means of social organization based in the dynamics of the local ecology in which it has evolved (11). So it appears that the natural meme implies primitive tribalism but it also appears that primitive tribalism implies the natural meme. If you are participating as an intimate and integral player in an ecosystem then you directly experience the cause and effects of your actions. For example if you are hunting more deer than you can use and if that demand is more than the deer can sustain then you quickly perceive that there are less deer available for you to hunt/eat. This might be interpreted as ‘the deer have been over hunted’ or metaphysically as ‘over hunting has upset the deer spirit’. The result and conclusion are the same; there is less available food. Therefore the logical conclusion to make is ‘don’t take more than you need’. This means that primitive cultures would be attracted to ecologically sound practices as any culture that adopts sustainable hunting or other permaculture techniques would acquire a survival advantage. This is one reason why this ethic is so common among primitive peoples as they would be more likely to survive than another culture that intentionally disturbed it’s food base. Daniel Quinn refers to this as the Law of Limited Competition, which he describes as such:
In short, “you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.” All species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct. The Takers believe themselves to be exempt from this Law and flout it at every point.
The Law of Limited Competition is a naturally evolved check against over-consumption: consume too much and soon there won’t be enough to support your’ population. The reason that we no longer follow this rule is because of our separation from our natural environment. Our natural environment includes primitive living, tribal organization, and a natural/primitive cognitive framework. This separation is the result of specialization, which is a symptom of hierarchy, which is a symptom of civilization. By recognizing this we can now reject it and return to our natural mind.
Don Juan Matus teaches that our perception manifests reality. By manipulating our perception we affect our thoughts by affecting our thoughts we affects our behavior, by affecting our behavior, we affect our world. If we can begin to perceive ourselves as participants in nature and not as isolated units then we can take the first vital steps to leaving this meme and to save the Earth and it’s inhabitants, especially, the human animal.
1. Bass, Stanley. “Primitive Man - His Food and His Health.” Dr. Stanley S. Bass Super Nutrition & Superior Health. 1999. International Natural Hygiene Society. 15 Mar. 2007 .
2. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. New York, NY: Free P, 1971.
3. Diamond, Jared. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover Magazine os (1987): 64-66. 9 Feb. 2007 .
4. Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. 1st ed. New York, NY: Penguin, 2005.
5. Godesky, Jason. “Thesis #10: Emergent Elites Led the Agricultural Revolution.” The Anthropik Network. 11 Oct. 2005. Creative Commons. 16 Mar. 2007 .
6. Heinberg, Richard. “The Primitivist Critique of Civilization.” Primitivism. 15 June 1995. International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio. 16 Mar. 2007 .
7. Hemenway, Toby. “Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?” Energy Bulletic. 16 Aug. 2006. 16 Mar. 2007 .
8. Hopfenberg, Russel. “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.” Population & Environment 25 (2003): 109-117. 16 Mar. 2007 .
9. Hopfenberg, Russel and David Pimentel. “Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply.” Environment, Development and Sustainability 3 (2001): 1-15. 18 Mar. 2007 .
10. Ponting, Clive. “The Lessons of Easter Island.” A Green History of the World: the Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Comp. Clive Ponting. 15 Mar. 2007 .
11. Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Bantam, 1991.
12. Quinn, Daniel. The Story of B. 1st ed. New York, NY: Bantam, 1997.
