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.
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