About time to leave Maui. Hawaiian shirts have been bought. Waves have been boogie-boarded. Some tropical photons have managed to make it through SPF 30 and gifted me a take-home tan.
I'll let a Maui resident, James Miner, do much of the speaking today. He wrote an intriguing letter that was published in the Maui News last Saturday—a philosophical cut above the usual letter to the editor fare.
It speaks to me on several levels. Over on my other blog I wrote a few days ago that Maui overdevelopment makes for sad sights. That's part of what Miner is getting at.
But just a part. Almost everywhere the land is being overdeveloped. So are our psyches. Surely there's a connection between the two.
Unnatural buildings going up here, the product of minds divorced from natural ways of being.
I've spent a lot of time in the ocean the past ten days, flowing this way and that. Swimming across Napili Bay I'd feel more or less in control. Boogie-boarding down the face of a large breaking wave—I was in the grip of something much more powerful than myself.
Regardless, the ocean is a great teacher. Even when you can't describe the lessons you've learned. Like Miner says, instinct trumps ideology the closer you are to nature.
Wave. Board. Man. Coming together just so…ahhh.
At such moments, life is marvelously simple and satisfying. Could every moment be such a moment?
Here's Miner's letter:
According to evolutionary theory, at some point in prehistory we were all indigenous peoples. We leveraged our higher intellect to survive and thrive while remaining consciously attuned to our instinctual roots.
We understood the language of nature because we knew we were a part of nature. We interacted creatively with the elemental world, recognizing the intimate relationship between spirit and matter.
At some juncture a division appeared in the indigenous mind between intuition and instinct. Intuition became deified while instinct was demonized. Our intuitive resources gazed heavenward, forsaking our original intimate relationship with earth and nature.
We began to worship ideals and forces disconnected from earth, succumbing to what many anthropologists call "ideological pathology."
Now we chase imaginary ideals like a carrot on a stick. We worship religious ideals completely devoid of environmental responsibility. We deify polarized political and economic systems. We crave mass accouterments of power and status. We laud attention on the fluff of celebrity emanating from the "divine" portal of video technology, hoping to avoid the eventual crash of our addictive denial.
Because we view life through such a narrow bandwidth of ideology, we comprehend no other language. We now view nature as this mute, foreign, organic substance needing to be conquered, consumed and manipulated. Because nature expresses without a human dialect, we proclaim it devoid of spirit.
This is how we view Haleakala – a distant molehill voyeuristically framed in religious or scientific fundamentalism. Can you hear Haleakala calling? Can you feel her?
Along this topic, you may find the works of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme (New Cosmology), and Diarmuid O'Murchu quite intriquing and inspiring.
For more inspiration, see the works of Genesis Farm run by the Dominican Sisters in New Jersey. http://www.genesisfarm.org/
Bob
Posted by: Bob | May 03, 2007 at 07:01 AM
I am feeling marvelously iconoclastic today!
This post reminds me of the bane of Mab, in the story of Merlin:
“…The country and its people drown in blood. A dying woman begs Queen Mab to help end the bloodshed. At first, Mab demurs. "I can't. Too many people have forsaken the Old Ways ... I no longer have the power."
The woman pushes her to help. "Save us, and the people will come back to you, and the peace they lost when they forsook you." Mab, seeing her destiny, makes a commitment: "I will save them, and the Old Ways. I swear it!"
Mab informs her sister, the beautiful, fair-haired Lady of the Lake, of her momentous decision. "I'm going to create a leader for the people," she declares. "A powerful wizard who'll save Britain and bring back the people to us and the Old Ways."
The Lady of the Lake cautions her sister to be wary, that her task may drain what powers she still has. Mab, however, vows to fight on, telling her sister that if people stop believing in the old ways, Mab and her kind will cease to exist.
Mab conjures Merlin out of a dazzling array of colored crystals…”
There’s an ideal behind pro-instinctualism – an ideal that the regaining of instinct would lead people to live better. An over-reliance on intuition de-humanizes us, somehow, by robbing us of what I’ll call our “sacheheit.”
Ideals are not an enemy of the universe, or of the green-blue globe. Let’s take the simple example of the corrective lens. It is contra-evolutionary and defies natural selection. The ideal is that more people will have better vision for a longer time in life. Anyone who wears glasses is certainly grateful for that common ideal. But really, we don’t know what will happen to natural selection with the introduction of the corrective lens. Does it diminish the interplay of other senses? Does it allow more time for collective creation and invention?
I can imagine this letter from Hawaii being read 30,000 years ago in a smoked and greasy cave, by a large man draped in a dried and un-tanned hide. Why, he is asking, are we so fascinated by what these sharp tools will do, in some imagined future? You do not need them today, leave them aside. Worship of tools, making tools that make more tools, we are ignoring what is right in front of us.
I pine for an imaginary past, and my view through the narrow bandwidth gives onto a mirror. From where does the idea come, that instinct and intuition are out of balance? Maybe idealism?
A substition is defined as "something that is true, but hardly anyone believes in." One unpopular substition is that the ideals behind magic, as represented by eastern and western alchemists, have been left behind. Look at our technology: instant communication with anyone, anywhere; vehicles that defy gravity; teleportation at truly dangerous speeds; machines that cook food immediately. And we pay an enormous wage in resources for these things. Indeed, it seems that the manufacture of microprocessors is paid in the wage of our very souls.
Magic has not gone anywhere. Just look at the sorcerers of phishing! Aiwass certainly hears Haleakala calling. Uncle Aleister drools in jealousy!
Posted by: Edward | May 03, 2007 at 04:25 PM
... and Thelema shines under the Hawaiian moonlight.
Posted by: tao | May 04, 2007 at 03:54 PM