Now that I am no longer spending the bulk of my
waking hours doing what my boss tells me to do, I'm beginning to
entertain some heretical thoughts.
I am beginning to believe that civilization has so warped us that, to a
greater or lesser degree, we have all forgotten who we really are.
Perhaps some of us never knew. Who are we? We are each our own story, a
culture of one. Our story begins at birth with a discovery, an
exploration, a connection with the world around us. Whether we are
human or animal, we are at first profoundly connected to the rest of
the world through our senses. We are filled with wonder. We are
incredibly vulnerable, but we are not
helpless. It will take several years before the brainwashing of those
who have forgotten who they really are convince us that without them,
we are helpless. The real truth is that we are brilliantly equipped for
survival. Evolution has seen to that.
If we were living outside of our terrible civilization, the first
things we would learn would all be through our senses. Our senses are
there to give us joy, to make us want to live, and to help us survive
and thrive in communion with the rest of life on Earth of which we are
a part. As animal babies we immediately start to move around and see,
hear, feel, smell, and taste. We do the things that give us sensory
pleasure. Our instincts guide us -- they tell us to smell our Mother's
breath to learn what is good to eat, and find those things to eat, and,
for reasons we don't really understand, or need to, not to
eat other things. And our instincts also tell us when to flee and what
to flee from, when to migrate, and when to stay and, if need be, to
fight. We learn enough language, depending on our species, to
communicate the location of food, our presence, and the presence of
danger, and to express ourselves. But most of our time for our whole
lives is spent just experiencing sensations and enjoying life.
Those of us born into civilization soon start to follow a very
different path. As our animal kin's brains are forming to reflect the
memories of sensation and place, ours are forming to reflect the
language we our taught. Our sensory exploration and learning is
interrupted, from a very young age, for abstract lessons of language.
We are taught definitions, that what a thing is, is its word
-- kitten, puppy, Mommy. Bizarre learning that has no resonance in the
three million years of instinctive knowledge wired into our DNA. And
then, immediately, we are taught, and taught and taught
what is 'good' and 'bad', what is 'right' and 'wrong', what is
'rational' and 'irrational', 'logical' and 'foolish'. And we begin to
be judged not on who were are (or, as the lessons proceed, who we used to be),
but rather on what we've 'learned', what we 'know', and what we
'possess'. And we are judged on how our behaviour reflects and
reinforces that terrible learning -- on our conformity
(tellingly, we actually use this word in describing pet training
'success'). For the rest of our lives we will be taught, and told, what
to do, how to do it, and how to behave, learnings that are utterly
abstract and disconnected from who we are (or were). We
will, as we have been taught and told, fill our lives with arduous,
full time work, with fearsome consequences if we 'fail' (poverty, being
labeled and shunned as a 'failure', the shame and terror of not having enough). And finally, we become that abstract other that is our strange learnings and behaviours. We learn to live outside ourselves.
I will leave it to others (at least for now) to pass judgement on why
we do this. I am, as usual, more interested in the solution than the
definition or cause of the problem.
How can we reconnect with the true self that we leave behind when we
take that strange abstract journey into otherhood? How can we remember
who we are (or were) before this terrible world stole that identity
from us? There are many ways to reacquire some of that subsersive
knowledge. If you're a woman, you'll probably find it easier than men,
because in my experience men are, for the most part, more enthusiastic
about abstraction and all its rules, and less attuned to and
comfortable with the sensory world.
Probably the easiest way is to spend time outside of civilization. Walk
in the forest or the park, unassisted by and as far away from man-made
artifacts as possible. Slow down. Stay, or keep doing it, until you
feel yourself changing, until your abstract brain gets bored and turns
off and your senses take over. Take along an animal friend to show you
the way. Look Until You Really See: Move in close, so you divert attention from individual
objects and start to see instead colour, texture, shape, shadow,
reflection, pattern. Find an unusual perspective from which to look -- get down
on the ground and look up, look at something through trees, through a
microscope, or by candlelight, anything that will let you see things
differently from usual. Look at things under unusual conditions -- in the fog, at
night, right after a heavy rain, just at dawn or dusk. Stimulate your other right-brain senses -- get your nose up
close to things, listen to birds, or insects, or train whistles, or
music. Walk in your bare feet. Walk or bicycle without a pre-determined destination,
direction or time limit. Study something -- birds at your bird-feeder, time-lapse of
a flower over the course of a day or a week, a spider-web, how moving
or dimming the lights in a room changes its character, how a bottle
looks different when viewed from different angles.
Or turn off the buzz at home. Spend an hour, or an evening, or a day,
without the distracting sensory inputs of civilization. Burn candles
instead of lights. Turn off the TV and the radio and the PC and spend
the time doing something that requires no electricity. Then invite some
friends over and do it again. If you can't get rid of the background
urban noise, put on a CD of natural sounds or instrumental music. Or
grow something from a seed or seedling. Or meditate, or use some other
exercise (ideally, outside) that focuses your mind on the here and now,
and makes it still. Or eat a meal (ideally, outside) that consists
entirely of natural, organic, uncooked, unprocessed foods.
What other ways have you found to re-connect with who you really are, or were?
It is hard to describe what happens to us
when we do regain connection with our true, instinctive selves. It is
liberating, warming, exciting, stimulating. But it is also deeply
unsettling. It can irrevocably change you, make you dissatisfied with
that other you that you had become. It can cause you to question
everything you believe, radicalize you (in the true meaning of that
word -- taking you back to your roots). It can make others afraid of
you and angry at you, and even, alas, dissociated from you. Human kind cannot bear very much reality,
as Eliot said. It is like getting a day pass from a prison you have
lived in all your life, but never realized was a prison because you had
nothing to compare it to.
But be careful with this new knowledge, the knowledge of who you were
before our well-meaning civilization made you like everbody else. It's
dangerous.
Cartoon is by Dan O'Neill from the 1970 Jefferson Airplane CD 'Volunteers'.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
