Ah, Walker ....
I read your words, and though glad your emotions are engaged (always a good sign that the archetypal zone has been reached), I realize that I must not have explained myself very well. I love the experience of wild- erness or I wouldn't have spent so many years attempting to share that experience with students. As you know, it is an incredibly rich teaching- learning environment -- that, for starters -- not to mention the aesthetic and soul refreshing qualities of the experience, and the physical benefits from the exertion required just to get our asses out there with the copious amounts of food and the kitchen sink, the snug tents and sleeping gear, etc. we seem to need to carry on our backs. And I mourn the continued political and resource pressures on these remnants of what our planet once was, as well population pressures and and the wastes from our cities slopping into these "demilitarized zones". (And at this moment, and one reason this response to you has been so slow, are attempts to dissuade the U.S. Navy from using wild- ernesses nearby, surrounding Olympic National Park, for "training in electronic warfare." As if wilderness is "empty" and expendable. One way or another, from ecotherapy to hunting to military practice, our commodity-crazed culture sees wilderness as something to get from, rather than as a place to know, let alone revere. (A shining recent exception: our beloved Elwha River now recently cleared of dams already reverting back to a mighty spawning ground for Chinook salmon.) ************************************** We embrace the concept "nature" knowing it carries multiple meanings -- layers upon layers -- perhaps "modes of knowing" connecting with our own million-year history as mammals come down from the trees, and all phases of our evolution since then. (Thus, it is so ironic that, for all this journey, "wilderness" was the dominant context of our evolution, it is only very recently that the majority of our fellow humans defines wild- erness as a commodity, psychic or otherwise.) As past or present wilderness guides we tend to equate "wilderness" with "nature" (wilderness is where you can really experience nature!) and I think this may get us off the track of what it is that really needs healing -- in us individually and in culture as a whole -- in order to reverse the continued and escalating damage to the natural systems of the planet. By saying that "dualism" is the fundamental psychological process needing healing, I've over-simplified this process and thus masked the points I'm trying to make. Yes, all civilizations (from indigenous to the now-becoming-global Western Civilization) tend to "fall away" from a unified "embeddedness" in the "pre-minded" natural systems. Note that though there have been many attempts to apply Darwinian natural evolution to social progressions, by evolution we still tend to mean the unfolding of nature at the pre-human level and thus now, with the human impact daily becoming more ubiquitous, we find ourselves "at odds" or "separate from" what we imagine to be "natural". Again, "nature" as pre-human; wilderness as the most obvious locus for that state of being. So it is "natural" that we tend to think of getting back inside that "most natural place" as the best place for our various needs to be, well, "natural". ************************************** It seems that this "falling away" (mythologized in the expulsion from the natural "Garden of Eden) is a function of the emergence of cognitive behavior in all cultures -- varying because of various "modes of knowing" accentuated at different historical epochs, and institutionalized to varying degrees in different cultures. But there is a universal "stepping back", a pause in experiencing, distinguishing differences (for most of our history necessary for survival), codifying those distinctions, interpreting them in varying ways, etc. Western Culture is unique, not in it's accuracy about human-nature relationships, but in it's penchant for pushing the distinction- making process to a point where not only is embeddedness diminished but there is a complete breaking of the common reality with context, the breaking of relationships, which spawns beliefs in different and un- connected realities. Beliefs we, "at higher planes of consciousness" -- or at levels of resistance to our culture's favored cognitive processes -- may define as false, as the distorting of the natural world, as well as human identification with that natural world. Yet as we know with increasing vividness, "freedom from context" -- a release from the awareness of our dependency with natural processes -- this sense (belief, delusion!) of separateness has brought incredible power to our species through the utilization of "that which is separate from us" -- the creation of technologies and other artifacts of awesome power and utility -- awesome, (and addictive) but cognitively separate. That is the dilemma now apparent, the destructive fruits of our dualistic posture with "the natural" -- but that is only one of a nested hierarchy of dualisms that impinge upon our mental processing, whether at conscious or unconscious levels. And further it is assumed by both evolutionists (such as, say, Wilber) and "flow cognizers" (such as, say, Whitehead), and especially by visionary anthropologists such as Richard Grossinger)-- it is assumed that this artificial break in realities creates a myopia, a kind of cataract of our senses, if not an active resistance or blocking to the inflow of information emanating from the very Cosmos -- our ultimate context, as it were. Our culture, through various assumptions, beliefs, fixing of ideologies, transposed into institutions, seems to have become very adept at nurturing and fixing at a "closed" or limited view of psychic interaction, a level of separation whereby exploitation of a separated "Other" can run amok, without the responsibilities required of an interactive relationship, let alone a kind of stewardship to be expected of our impact on the planet. Yet, this "inflow" is irrepressible, so it continues to pop out everywhere, from Mumbai slums to pristine wilderness -- especially when certain "practices of opening" are followed. It is in this "repression-of-cosmic consciousness" sense that I see the drama of overcoming this Big Delusion revealed in our understanding of dualism as a complete break with reaiity, whether with our ongoing relationship with plants in the backyard, or a forest, a food source, a wilderness; or with, say, weather, planetary events, or the stars in the night sky. And in this general (or cosmic) sense the "healing" of dualism can happen anywhere -- anywhere our bodies or minds (via imagination) can take us. I believe this is happening on many fronts (in subways and apartment towers, in slums and country estates, and so on. And given the entrenchment of a ubiquitous and dominant culture, still globalizing, this seems a project that will take hundreds if not thousands of years. It is a kind of 'bootstrapping" evolution of consciousness (or rather, the evolution of the capacity to access consciousness). Wilber has mapped this course (via Teilhard, Plotinus, Koestler, et al) as are various elements of arcane philosophy, theosophy and the like -- all with their logic and merits and comforts. It is course of recovery from Big Dualism -- perhaps an attempt to regain intimacy with the ontological framework of the universe, brought into our now vast neurophysiology, having reached a level of complexity that can imagine, if not actually access "messages from the universe" (cf, Robert Blys "New of the Universe" poetry, all of Jung's visions, and now, especially, Richard Grossinger's "The Night Sky" and other recent writings.) That's assuming that the irrepressibility of this "information" wanting to "get with us" can reach our level of functionality given our embeddedness within this culture. ******************* This cosmic evolutionary program, at the heart of which is indeed the resolution of this "loss-of-Eden" dualism that is deeply locked in to our present Western Culture, I see as a necessary direction, an orientation for individual lives, communities of fellow travelers, a so-called hope (often couched in very romantic terms) for a "Great Turning". Every single relationship we have expresses our "progress" in this regard. But meanwhile, back here on the earth, the "focused effects" of this dualistic mind-set, both spawning and utilizing the objectified "mode of knowing" that too easily morphs into a fundamentalist religion, into "scientism" to poorly name it, we know the damage to the earth's natural processes seems to be escalating. And though there are many noble attempts to resolve this, most resolutions deal with symptoms rather than causes; we are all implicated it seems; and too easily the causes seem masked. Anomie sets in. The issue for me is whether this "cosmic overcoming of dualistic belief and practice", a program wending into a distant future, also breaks down into "sub-dualisms" -- the many daily breaking of relationships within systems meant to be functioning holistically. It appears to me that, with a "cosmic dualism" "behind" all our basic perceptions and thought processes, it is understandable that in minds programmed to pull consciousness into "egoic processes" (i.e.., "need fulfilling functions), there would be many "sub-dualisms" that could actually be "treated' separately. ("Healing" thus becoming a many-levels phenomena.) And thus it would seem to me that the "split" between humans and nature -- said often to be rampantly growing -- is one example of a sub-dualism, and something that can be "treated" -- by bridging between "culture" and "nature" using many ways of "connecting" that are available to us -- whether gardening, running, horseback riding, eating, sex, sleeping, and so on -- all the myriads of things we do (mostly unconsciously) that are neither all culture, or all nature -- but a blend of both. Becoming aware of these ongoing connections would be a "healing" of one of our many "sub-dualisms" rattling around our daily-life mindedness (or not) lives. This, then, would be the crux point dividing many approaches: simplistically, (1) doing an "end run" around current culture and current culture-spawned earth damaging problems -- going straight for enlightenment! vs. (2) finding "here-and-now" "it's 'just this'" reason to daily resolve our habits of distancing, finding ways to connect in all that we do -- and since our cultural lack of connection with "nature" seems to be diminishing our opportunities for further evolution anyway, practices (including the wilderness experience) that connect make sense. Thus, going to the wilderness with the intent of "connecting" would exemplify the healing a "sub-dualism" -- along with connecting with one's neighbors, co-creating a sacred marriage, making the food process a connected one, and so on. So I praise the wilderness excursions (though I insist that they are indeed a function of a wealthy society able to set aside large tracts of supposedly "pure naturalness", and able to take the time from survival processes in order to do so). We know, and have spoken of, the need to "break the cultural hold" so a wilderness experience is not reduced to an experience of a cultural projection. And I have proposed that a "real ecopsychology" can help us in this endeavor. Basically, I've proposed, all along, that we'll learn by doing -- but that the need to get on with it grows daily. And we know -- or at least, towards the last of my work in wilderness it's the conclusion I reached -- that the wilderness (1) may or may not open to the "cosmic duality" mentioned above, and (2) reveals as much about "the opposite pole" -- the culture in which we're embedded, as it does about the wilderness per se -- though knowledge of the various systems and dynamics so beautifully found in wilderness may be of fabulous pleasure and benefit as well. For, it is the culture we carry, the culture to which we return after a few weeks "away", and even with the grip of that culture perhaps loosened to some degree, there it is, revealed by its relative absence; revealed by the contrast between a "revealed" quasi primitiveness for a short while, and the return to the rampant, burgeoning technological race to a merging of mind and artifact, rather than mind and nature. Robert Greenway Corona Farm Port Townsend, WA January 12, 2015
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AuthorDiscussion between Walker Abel and Robert Greenway. Archives
January 2015
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