Life is the only true master

Given the choice between investing in our next lives and investing in comfortable retirement in this, how many of us would choose investing in the next life?

Not many, I suspect.

And that points to one of the core problems of our times. Our own sense of who we are is so narrow and restricted. While our little lives – our sense of identity as socially constructed – no doubt ends at some stage, the underlying life force which supports this fashionable outer garment is eternal.

Life is soul-energy endless recycled.

Our other lives are all around us, as we hear in the songs of whales. So too in the lives of other peoples. Nothing is surer than that when we cease to be in this life, life itself will re-emerge ready to take on a new identity.

That we (as part of life) cannot realise this about life demonstrates that who we are is also the outcome of ethnocidal processes which have oppressed the means by which we (as part of life) may relate with ourselves.

Ethnocide towards other peoples was first carried out in relation to what we are now encouraged to regard as ‘at home’ – as constituted by the modern nation-state.

And before that, the ‘spread’ of Indo-European represents a major shift to the polarising ‘vertical’ metaphors necessary for the establishment of unearthed elites.

No doubt these also existed in post ‘neo-lithic’ times but in a less pronounced - more earthed way as life remained within the bounds of good faith which we know as "Paleolithic times".

There was a long process of suppression of the better parts of our Being to produce empires, hierarchies and – more recently - the modern nation-state.

The resulting ‘culture’ we acquire, in our compulsory State schools and universities, has the better parts of our Being excluded.

The creation of a landless working class in the United Kingdom (note well the title!) has been very well documented by scholars such as Hill. Writers like D. H. Lawrence were alive to the amputation of Being which passes as part and parcel of a ‘normal’ human Being.

For the greater part, “making it socially” (and even eating and having a place to live) requires creative people to fashion themselves to the norms they imagine lie at the core of life – but these as the cuckoo norms of a false meta-DNA cloned into living cells and kept in place (since rejection is the healthy response) by the use of force.

In joining the healing task of removing ethnocide from the lives of First Peoples, Westerners are also engaging in the challenge of overcoming the damage done to our lives by our own tradition.

Why? So that they-we may live their lives without the suffocating domination which has been imposed upon them-us over the last five centuries (and longer).

In seeking to fashion forms of representation which treat as sacred that which others insist is sacred - in rejecting as adequate forms of representation which made secular fetishes out of sacred life - we invariably have to re-activate that which is 'divine' within ourselves as Earth-Beings.

This is what we can do to ensure that the re-emerging life can gain from the long processes of realisation which are part of the cosmic challenge life sets for itself.

Life is the only true master.

Becoming Otherwise – ending an ethnocidal epoch.

One of the life challenges which faces us, as ‘we’ who live Western lives move away from ‘modern’ arrangements, is to creatively fashion the means by which we can relate with people with Ways different to our own.

What is necessary for this is a sense of ‘self’ which can realise that ‘we’ are those ‘others’ – and a sense which neither makes us feel obliged to change our other-selves to be like us nor for ‘us’ to abandon our Ways to become like ‘them’.

Exchanges need to be respectfully carried out between cultural partners, with the things being exchanged being of real value. There is no place for forms of capitalism which institutionalise – and invite us to regard as ‘normal’ - systematic short-changing of one trading partner to produce ‘profits’ for the other.

Co-existence is a fine art, and one not much practiced within ‘modern’ nation-state arrangements. Their alignment, in the West at least, with capitalism is regarded by Pierre Clastres as a root cause for their ethnocidal treatment of people in other Ways of life (having already relied on a more localised form of ethnocide to bootstrap themselves up).

The deal is this: People – other versions of ourselves - who are different from us have a ‘right’ to Be just as we too have a ‘right’ to be.

But it is nor merely a ‘right’ – this kind of thinking has to attain an ontological status – that is, to have that degree of privilege by being built into the core of the epistemologies by which we know our cosmos.

We are Earth-Beings.

And our cosmic composition is better characterised by a ‘yin-yang’ complementary-opposition than by the prefabricated senses of identity which come from membership of modern nation-states.

The task of earthing our Being – bringing a dangerously unstable civilisation safely back to ground – is one which requires us to find new senses of identity.

These new senses of identity, as we learn from life over some centuries now, must provide spaces for our Other-Selves.

We must become wise to the ways of Others – Otherwise.

Being and Cosmos

In this blog i will add some thoughts on reconnecting Being and Cosmos using insights i have acquired from both Western and indigneous Australian sources.

Reconnecting our Being with Cosmos is a healing challenge.

At present i am writing "Becoming Otherwise" about the need to end ethnocide - and will post my initial materials here for comment and feedback.

From my former anthropological teacher, Prof Jan Pouwer, i learnt much about the importance of complementary opposition as a useful tool for looking a life - an inclusive both-and healing approach in comparison to the exclusive either/or divisive logic which is part of the self-styled "age of reason'.

From Warumungu/Alyawarrea senior men i learnt the need to try to get non-indigenous Australians (and others) to understand their true surroundings.

My other blogs include one on Cosmology (in the wider sense).

Lately, as part of the Darwin 200 celebration, i have been writing about Darwin, naturalism and related matters. See http://songlinesoz.spaces.live.com/

And, as part of a peoples well-being movement, Songlines htpp://www.songlines.org.au

cheers

Bruce
22 may 2009