Prehistoric cave paintings often display men with part animal bodies. Was this a way of drawing the spirit of the animal closer or to bring the man’s spirit into the animal’s essence for purposes of hunting or medicine? Like attracts like; the human and animal worlds were not separated the way they are now. Perhaps we are slowly making our way back to accepting the reality of our common beingness.
The longer I live the more I’m convinced that we humans are
still on a primitive level of development and like adolescents, we think our ancestors
didn’t know very much. We make amazing instruments for convenience, healing
(more accurately patching) and destruction, and yet we aren’t actually happier,
healthier or more in synch with our environment. We pursue power and
immortality without knowing what they are. The lesser mind is attempting to
control its own source. With all the sophistication of our medical instruments,
health seems to be declining. I recently read that cancer treatment is no more effective than it was sixty years ago, and cancer is more prevalent, perhaps because our lifestyles and values are not
people friendly. Is this really about progress, or more to the point, why do we
deify progress?
A great separation of time and mentality divides nowadays
from the time of the cave paintings of
 |
| This cave is a reproduction but the contrast is still huge. |
Most ancient cultures viewed time as a circular or at least
spiral process rather than the linear process by which our modern world abides.
Personally, the more birthdays I collect, the stranger time seems. An event last year may seem a few weeks ago
while memory of an event last month is like the distant end of a long chain of whiles. How much is our sense of time actually
cultural conditioning?
How about balance? .It isn’t a fixed state but a constant tide
between movement and stasis. The Tiwa people, my husband’s tribe, don’t trust
the dominant culture of America, and keep their religious beliefs and the
meanings of their ceremonies strictly to themselves. They even hold their
language within the tribe. They base their distrust of the dominant culture and
its ways on bad experiences in the history of their relationship with Spanish
and Anglo subjugators. Even more to the point is the recognition that base
values are so different that even with good intentions the cultures don’t mix
harmoniously. Of course, the modern global culture affects them, if culture is the right word. They drive motor vehicles, eat fast food,
shop at super markets and use TV’s, computers and smart phones. Some of the
children don’t even speak Tiwa, but they are very aware of being an alternative
viewpoint and believe they perform their ceremonies and hold their tribal
identity for the good of the entire world. At the very least, it preserves something
fundamentally organic about being human in the cosmos.
I am now thinking of time in the mode a plant or an animal begins
and ends and the Sun and Moon divide their movement to give us an instinctive
go by through our cosmic territory.
Without a beginning or end, there is no time and no existence on this
dimension. Without the borders of time, there is no-thing. Our normal way of
thinking is dependent upon an agreed upon canvas of space and time on which to
paint our life’s portrait. Yet in this fractal universe, we are intricately patterned
offshoots of Creator’s primal energy body. I’m getting lost and a little dizzy now.
Why did I start this? It reminds me of a childhood game I once played. Staring
at the night sky I would imagine what was beyond the stars and what was beyond
that beyond until I fell down from dizziness. Light and darkness are opposites
but they differ in that light exists and darkness is the background that
reveals its existence. There is a border
between them that we recognize but can’t explain without destroying the thought
of one or the other.
Lascaux remained in
darkness for ages just as most of who we are as beings exists locked in a dark
vault waiting for the need of a critical evolutionary
key to arise, a call from the future. Is this desire part of the creative
force? Now and then, I rediscover a book that was very important at one time in
my life and was then lost to memory. Is
it really chance that it re-emerges just when I need a particular piece that will
enlighten the present darkness? Amazingly, I would never have recognized the
need for this key without perception acquired since the first encounter. The
past and the future seem to be in constant communication at the juncture point of the
present.
PQ and I enjoy watching a
micro-world in the backyard over morning coffee. There are three cats (that was
yesterday, now there are four), many birds, prairie dogs chirping over the
fence, dogs barking on both sides and numerous insects from which to learn or
at least notice as existential players in an ongoing creation story. A
beautiful blue dragonfly dipping and swooping across the backyard disappears
somewhere through the leaves of the cottonwood.
How could it once have been as large as the magpies perched on our
neighbor’s globe willow? A prehistoric creature that existed long before our own
species has changed only in size. There are flies and aunts imbedded in ancient
amber that haven’t changed at all. Then I realized that we are held in space on
a big ball that has existed for so long that the numbers of its years bounce
off my overloaded brain and float away into the incomprehensible.
Could it be that we humans are still in early dawn of our
development? I hope so. The
shortsightedness of our species threatens the existence of everyone who shares
this big ball. We humans have a large
brain, powerful reasoning ability and that deadly prehensile thumb, added to very
little wisdom about how to use these instruments. We are still the Sorcerer’s
Apprentice when it comes to a relationship with the Master Wizard and yet we
hold onto our familiar beliefs as if they were the final word of truth. Now it seems that the upstart religion of Scientific
Materialism is going down the same road to intellectual taxidermy as it’s
religious predecessors. This may be due to a hardwired component of
the human psyche. However, the greater problem is a lack of heart connection,
that gravitational pull that binds our thoughts to the cycle of creation, exacerbated
by fear of mortality. The ancients were right to correlate the heart with the
solar center that magnetically powers our cosmic organism. The view looking out
from inside our skin gives us the idea that we are isolated entities and
everything outside of this thin and penetrable personal border with its minute
lifespan is either a potential enemy or something exploitable.
Yet all borders
exist within still larger borders, and all edges disappear when viewed panoramically
with a cosmic eye.Unless we acknowledge all our relations from the heart,
nothing on heaven or earth will penetrate our isolation illusion and organize
our passions like the spirit images on the walls of dark caves did for our
ancestors. The mystery of time reminds us, that the creation
of the world is happening now as it always has. It has bothered me since early
childhood that I can live only in one place at a time, whatever it happens to
be. I sometimes envision a plane of grazing mammoths, prehistoric bison, lions,
dire wolves and all the other plants and fauna of 20,000 years ago from where I
sit for coffee each morning. Then, at other times, try to imagine life in
pre-Roman Europe, Renaissance Europe, Egypt, Mesopotamia and so on. Nevertheless,
the focal point for all of that is now, and the sum of everything that was is
now. It is an awesome bank of resources for now and the next moment and the
next.
