"There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then there's another way; a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity."- Rumi
My brother is something of an earthy dude. A garden designing, bird-watching, Latin-foliage reciting fella with artistic sensibilities. He can be hard to shut up about the whole nature thing.
So it was interesting but not surprising as we were comparing iPhone applications last night that he owned quite the sophisticated weather app that he had programmed to give him a full spectrum view of the local weather. He has every town in and around the city programmed on a loop reaching out a couple hundred kilometres in order to, as he put it, ‘see what the weather is doing’.
This coincided nicely with a book I’ve been reading by the anthropologist Wade Davis, a series of recent lectures compiled and appropriately titled The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.
In it he describes the ocean navigation of the Polynesian tribes dating back to the 16th century and how they had mounted the mystery of the great Pacific to spread culture/civilisation to the lands of Polynesia, an area accounting for a fifth of the world’s surface.
Before Europeans had developed the tools to navigate longitude they were forced to hug the shores of the land to avoid being swallowed by the open seas. By contrast, the tribal peoples originating in New Guinea had as intrinsic to their religion, culture and society, developed a relationship to the water, clouds, stars and wind that directed their remarkable successes. The different ways the water laps against the hull; the various patterns the clouds make against the open sky; the ability to hold the land in one’s mind’s eye as an intuitive compass.
While I’m sure such voyages were rife with failure and tragedy (using that term loosely as a people’s relationship to life determines what is truly tragic), it is folly to undermine the ‘technology’ of this relationship, and its triumphs, borne out by documented cultural artefacts found at startlingly long distances from one another.
This is in part a relationship to the natural world without boundaries. In integral circles, this tends to raise alarm bells. Ken Wilber has coined the term‘Pre-trans Fallacy’, a pejorative that refers to a New Age impulse to elevate basically pagan sensibilities to the heights of transcendence. This has merit as far as it goes, but it only goes so far.
The retro-romantic turn of the New Age – and I suppose the Romantics themselves to a degree – tend to glorify principles of ancient peoples as boundless freedom. Equipped with modern minds, they then project their personal and unresolved ego boundaries out onto the natural world, hence the debilitating narcissism rampant in New Age circles. The ‘Be Here Now’ crowd is more often ‘Be Like Me’. This tends to elevate the underdeveloped capacities of the tribal, ‘pre-rational’ mind. The Mayans for example, far from being wholly in tune with the natural world, hurried their own eradication due in large extent to their foresting practices. Rather than being integrated with their surroundings, they were, in part, undifferentiated from them, unable to recognize certain foundational symbiotic principles. This has been somewhat crudely referred to as a state of fusion with the natural world (as opposed to one of no boundaries as was carefully stated above, and has been clearly drawn from one of Wilber’s books to indicate I suspect he might know where to draw the line).
The differentiation of the modern mind/ego moved consciousness beyond this somewhat animal state. On balance, self-awareness increased and consciousness developed. And in this modern mindset, we have produced maps and terms to explain and differentiate ourselves further from the reptilian stem of our brain. The modern sensibility leans heavily on the mind, and the maps produced by this sensibility are products mirroring this mind.
The inventory of these maps include terms like the ‘Pre-trans Fallacy’, and models like Spiral Dynamics and the Four Quadrants, artefacts all of the integral community, and being maps are extensions most prominently of the rational mind, and still very much aligned to modern sensibilities. Wade Davis reaches back as far as the 18th century to discredit the strictly linear models of development whose applications over time have usually benefitted those clever enough to develop them. In my opinion, he lands a knockout blow, but you’ll have to read the book to form your own opinion.
Whatever the Post-postmodern sensibility is, I am confident it is not an extension of the abstracted modern maps we have constructed to predict its emergence. Our minds and mind’s eyes will need to stretch much further to understand the subtle energies and natural forces – both internal and external – that hold sway over us. We will need new embodied metaphors that indicate the dress and gestures of those who have moved properly beyond the ego boundaries of the modern mind and its dissociated, debilitating limitations. Think Christ riding a donkey from the West on Palm Sunday.
I’m fairly certain the reason most progressive spiritual seekers never transcend the limitations of their ego boundaries (or strict identification with mind) is the modern mental models they hold and cannot move beyond (along with the baby of traditional sensibilities they threw out with the frigid bathwater). If modernity birthed the rational mind, the value of that mind is at best to orient and properly distinguish. Instead, we have hedged ourselves from immediate contact with the natural world and its latent intelligence – capacities like experiencing the connection of breathing to living or recognizing the fluid relationships intrinsic to all matter. The linear forms of our language, the directionality of time, the hierarchy of stages unfolding (as opposed to escalating experiences of depth) all conspire to keep the modern and post-modern minds beholden to their own limited experience.
A true alignment to what I think is best called ‘deep time development’ (to be explored in another post) will look much different and will include a relationship to the natural world (and beyond) that is grounded, immediate, intense, intuitive and subtle – a relationship that lets us know in our bones ‘what the weather is doing’ and why it matters.
If we are to produce future generations with sensibilities tuned to the principles of development and emergence, we will need educational forms unobstructed from the forces that animate life. How many parents even know the potency of the breath, let alone pass the information to their children? How many teachers can name the trees in their region and know their behaviours? Few, maybe less.
There is intelligence that matters but isn’t properly understood. Much of it is still latent or undiscovered. Much of it was born of the modern mind. But some lives importantly in a collective past whose wisdom is cordoned off by the strict abstractions of that same modern mind, a mind that echoes prominently in the post-modern and integral sensibilities of the current age.
