WHERE IS THE HEART IN THAT

Australian Aboriginal Elder Lilla Watson:

"If you've come here to help me, you're wasting your time.
But if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

I’ve been reading Harvey Arden’s book on Aboriginal Australians, “Dreamkeepers.” These folks have much in common with the Native peoples of the Americas.  The interpretation of the word, “land” is a key to defining the difference between indigenous people and us immigrants.  Immigrants lack a primal connection to the natural world that supports them. They are often ecological psychopaths due to the early alienation from their Mother Earth. They seldom put down deep roots or emotional connections to place, which is why they are living on continents other than the one of their ancestors. Of course, most transplanted Europeans find a heart connection to a place incomprehensible.  So much of the modern world is about pursuing an abstract dream with voracious hunger. Quite different from the Aboriginal Dreaming and it rarely has anything to do with a genuine heart connection but more with pursuing an ephemeral mirage of social and material success.

 Symbol of the Heart Chakra (Anahata)

Someone wise (I wish I could remember who) once said that the key to our preservation as a species is the development of the heart chakra. The heart chakra is all about relationship and connection and its language is intuition. It is the chakra that connects the primal instincts with higher consciousness, the physical with the spiritual. It is obvious that heart is not healthy in what has become the global dominant and dominating culture, the one that currently hovers over the world casting darkness over our indigenous memory. On an individual human plane, a compromised heart chakra often results in heart and lung diseases, but on a social level, it accounts for the incredible destruction and cruelty demonstrated by our species. 

Most of my life is now in the past, one good reason for my love of time travelling backward (to be expected from someone with Saturn conjunct Uranus).  Nevertheless, it is more than nostalgia; it is about collecting the best pieces to sum up what my life is. It’s easier to forget who we are than we generally realize and sometimes taking inventory is a necessary prep for the next step. Trekking through the past is comparable to pulling up obstructing weeds in a garden until we find what we need to harvest. But, this doesn’t mean we have to stay there, nor is it even possible to remain in the past. Nevertheless, time is actually very mysterious and certain cultural assumptions will always direct our measure of time. We assume that time only moves in one direction yet that may be part of our conditioning. One thing undeniable about time is that it we can never capture it.  However, while floating down this life river, we may look in all directions even while the current flows continuously from past to future. 

Our species has enormous constructive and destructive potential. This makes wisdom essential for survival. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that our modern techno-culture is extremely unbalanced. Current faith in the wonders of science our current orthodoxy, will be regarded by our descendants as extreme naivety and irresponsibility.  What makes it so dangerous is lack of balance. Power and smarts without heart equals evil.  In individuals, it describes the developmental deficiency found in psychopaths.  However, in our modern society it is often a necessity for professional and economic success.

So much harm comes from ignorance of an organic way of seeing the world.  A basic difference is the belief that nature is merely a resource for use rather than our birth mother and source of life and purpose.  Until technology serves nature, it will be a disaster. It may support our disconnected economy now while killing the future. I’m thinking this disconnect is a result of taking the masculine mentality too far. The brilliant detached mind of a teenage geek, all gonads and brain but not much heart is running the world. The horror of this should be obvious but for some reason our culture is under its spell and willing to sacrifice the entire cosmos to technological masturbation.  

Perhaps the Creator left us to learn from our mistakes until we truly grieve and hunger for another way. I don’t have much faith that a change of heart (or any heart) will come until wrenching pain reaches to the top of the power chain. Perhaps those Alien invasion horror movies are actually about our heartless shadow chained in the darkest corner growing bigger and nastier the longer it feasts on denial. In reality, we moderns have become an invasive species. Interestingly enough, many indigenous people believe their ancestors came from the stars but they compensate in being lovingly adopted into and adapted to their earth mother and siblings. Perhaps belonging to the natural order actually transcends earth and the greatest challenge is to become a child of the cosmos. This means that escaping to the Moon or Mars to avoid the consequences of our sins will only make the shadow monster angrier.

“Everyone should know their place and where their borders are.” – Aboriginal Elder David Mowaljarlie 

Maybe that’s what makes white folks (and everyone following them) so dangerous, no borders.