Sacred Texts

Completely unnecessary, but also super useful

If paragraphs of purple prose don’t strike your fancy, you can skip to the poetry in the middle of things. It sings the same little song, with far less words. If even some silly poetry is too playful to seriously pursue, the entire thrust of the whole piece is right there in the first sentence.

I am currently reading Restoring the Kinship Worldview, from Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez. Hugh Brody's books Maps and Dreams and The Other Side of Eden, along with a nice long interview with Gabor Maté (who said ‘Darcia Narvaez’ and rearranged my brain) have recently changed some things about my understanding of reality. Maybe my excitement about the restorative precepts presented in this book was primed by those previous experiences, but man, I really am finding it to be quite revelatory!

I feel much better now…

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about Truth. (Objectively? Yes of course, absolutely!) Where does it come from? Why does everyone believe they have it? It is disturbing to observe how dangerous this idea can be in human hands. What is Truth? So easily it bends and breaks to our certainties, then classifies all it kills with a fevered exactitude. Is this ‘Truth’ then just all relative to our beliefs? (Does God forgive¹ with infinite grace, or will They smite five generations of your progeny in a jealous rage if you glance askance at some other god?) I find that the whole concept of Truth degrades directly into hypocrisy once one becomes 'aware' of it and attempts to work one’s way rationally and logically to some final conclusion.

The incredible variety of absolute (yet mutually exclusive) truths simultaneously heralded by human heads² has only one logical resolution in my mind: objective truth cannot be discovered by humans. What else can explain the infinite trail of our incredible failure to inhabit a shared objective reality that we are all convinced must exist? But this conclusion (however humble, honest and rational it may be) is hubris too! Maybe the modern human mind is simply not the correct locality to search for such a thing as truth. What if the truth has actually been found somewhere else, just forgotten, or forsaken?

From the introduction to Restoring the Kinship Worldview:

We adopt the idea that there are only two observable, essential forms of assumptions - worldviews - to choose from today. One has us as creatures that are intrinsically part of Nature, physically and spiritually. The other has us separated from Nature, also physically and spiritually.

The binary, discrete, either/or thinking³ of the latter ‘dominant’ worldview encourages a confidence in our ability to accurately categorise reality that does not readily admit that these categories are actually quite incomplete and uncertain, and also often very dynamic. This arrogance is not surprising coming from a people that believe they transcend Nature, they and their God existing as some special thing apart, and also above.

Our attempt to escape uncertainty by ignoring the great mysteries of reality (and boasting that we’ve solved them) narrows our field of possible experience significantly! How much of reality are we missing? It might be quite a lot. Could this explain the trouble we have with telling the truth from our fictions?

‘Nature’ just is, it just simply exists, it cannot be anything but real. If we revive the understanding that we are intrinsically part of Nature, it follows logically that we will find ourselves immersed entirely within ‘natural’ reality. What if the truth is not ‘out there’ at all, but right here, everywhere, always?

There is no ‘Outside’

So Wow! How refreshing is this stunningly revelatory reminder that the truth is everywhere around us. Reality totally exists, and also never lies....⁴ we only have to go outside, inhabit and experience Nature, and recognise the backwards and sterile anti-reality reality that labelling the real, natural world as outside creates.

---

Well.... phew! What a load off! Things have gotten a wee more muse-y-cal 'round here of late. So bear with me, I shall try to be precise. While my particularity is popularly (if not precisely) known…⁵ I am perhaps not perfectly practised with these particular pursuits. O well! Perfection can only possibly be pursued perpetually! At least for me personally.

Truth, Out!

On Standards
One does not write poetry
with a ruler and a scribe
Though measurement can build majestic!
  Towers of steel and thoughts sublime

Still, to stay in one place
invites chaos along
a force best moved with
not against!
Even granite must bow to the flood of time

In such a wind
those standing still mayn't stumble
for all their beauty and gold...
made steady with all mystery
masterfully removed
Still! One query remains:
how much longer can it hold?

But to flow!
with the shakes and the quakes
to dance
that rumble
is to fly;
with the beat of the drum
of the sky
and the whole wide All

build beautifully, but dream also
beautifully
and find the impossible corners
and contradictory curves
possible only poetically

...

Speaking, words of wind
Deceit
is solely civilised
Nature never lies!
so listen carefully
to the trees in the breeze
hear the shore and mountain roar
wonder words
up from the well worn wisdom of moss
and fern...

What multitudes!

Now notice voices still speaking
from a land before this time:
tri-millenial scholars!
keen students
of this place, this dream, this rhyme

#>???
<#(y, I did, and I'd do it every...)

NEW FACTS
Only recently I learned
that words were never meant to lie
They were invented to describe
the entire breadth of all the sky;
the path of dreams
the snow, the dew
the place we all
can come home to.

But most of all, they're meant to show
those many things we do not know.

Only recently I learned
that words were never fit to name
to sort, to claim, to tell, to shame...
They were intended to explain!
the things we do,
the things we see;
  the ways
  that we
  most want
  to be!

also meant for mockery, much important! this goes without saying, but is included here for completeness and correctness

__RandomInterlude__

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!>>>...
            {!}
,,,---===<<<-^->>>===---'''
          <<-^->>
           <-_->
            -?-
             1
             2
             0

__EndRandomInterlude__

Exclamation!
Each Tree
is a most honest and mysterious poetry
a truth teller
That tree is a poem on the mountain!


the final wor(l)d,,,
  how can a tree flow?
  though you see they always do
  waving in the rain

---

A Native Free Birth

I suppose anyone born into natural reality may find these little ditties of discovery somewhat silly, done better before with more brevity and a wider wit. But then again, maybe waking to this world every day has an infinite and eternal magic that always accepts even alliterative amateurs and additionally: all their antics and amusements as well.

Can I Have Confidence in the Permanence of Nature?

This one seems easy…

To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.

Ursula K. LeGuin - from her notes on chapter two of her translation of the Tao Te Ching

The extreme hubris and insane violence that appears to us as ‘all of history’ is a brutal and sad teacher that will devastate the mind of any sensitive soul. This history offers plenty of evidence that giving all our beliefs the permanence of absolute truth was maybe not our smartest move. Yet, despite such wilfully continuous self-denigration, there are wise women still, and many continue to grace our world with their words!

Ursula K. LeGuin’s body of work is an intentionally romantic⁶ exploration of some beautiful alternative possibilities to our own reality that do not ignore hard problems. She does not pull her punches, but her stories show a deep love for humanity. Since she cared enough for the Tao Te Ching to create her own translation, I wonder if she might agree that the belief that nature is reality and does not lie is belief of a different sort. Upon reflection, this indeed seems to me a permanent truth, simple and self-evident, unaffected by any observer, and so perhaps beyond belief entirely. Accepting it might reveals other truths in turn. What else am I missing, I wonder?

‘Our’ history is only a tiny glimpse of the whole. The past and present arrogance of our absolutist beliefs may not be a reliable measurement of the predilections of a whole humanity. It appears likely that confrontation with a vast unknown universe more often resulted in the common and basic human understanding that reality is dynamic and mysterious; somehow both beyond our reach and viscerally knowable at the same time.

Is this really happening?

Some have claimed⁷ that the concept ‘nature is reality’ is widespread today, and actually what we call science. However, that entire methodology is based upon abstracting reality into measurable, repeatable units. We build a model of reality that controls all variables beyond our immediate concerns. Does this conform to your experience of reality? Forgive me for pointing this out, but folks, science is not real at all.

Consistency between repeated, bounded observations can reduce uncertainty with an excellent efficiency; there is no denying the utility of throwing powerful machines into space, even if they outshine most stars⁸. Some of our models are very, very useful (even if all of them are wrong)!⁹ But we really do have a serious problem: a tenacious belief that what we cannot measure does not exist, and the corollary, a misplaced but widespread confidence that the measured results derived from our methodological boxes prove what is real and so therefore what is true. We may be just measuring the box itself! This is why many scientists spend their lives verifying the veracity of these boxes by repeatedly trying to burn them down.¹⁰

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. Names, measures, and other distinctions can never fully describe reality, at least according to one particularly popular sage purported to have put that pithy poem to pen some 2500 years past¹¹.

Can We Stop Lying?

Absolutely. Easy. I never lie anyway…

There are languages that have no equivalent to lie or liar. Closest translations would be something like ‘mistaken’, but some of these cultures consider intentional dishonesty a sign of insanity. Because I generally fail at the practice of tact and other subtle (and not so subtle) social manipulations, this is an incredibly validating thing to for me to learn! Furthermore, this absence of labels for liars is not some freak linguistic aberration; it is thought to be a basic general trait of hunter-gatherer languages, spoken by cultures representing 95-99% of our human experience on earth. Somehow these people had no use for untruths and deceit, for thousands of years?!¹² I was not there (cannot confirm), but it is instructive that these languages still live (and sadly, die) today in places as spatially disconnected as South Africa, Nunavut, the Amazon, and northwestern British Columbia.

Words are Sacred (Truthfulness)

This is precept 12 from Restoring the Kinship Worldview. The supporting text from EdMcGaa, a.k.a. Eagle Man says, in part:

… Nature can be depended on as being supremely truthful. Nature does not lie!

I believe that unless modern two leggeds can learn that high state of truthfulness, eventually we will lose the planet and we will suffer a great amount of disharmony before we arrive at that fateful destiny.

…

There is no silver lining nor comfort offered in the remainder of that quotation. Just certainty that reality will remove us with severe prejudice if we do not learn to control our modern commitment to dishonesty¹³.

Such a calamitous fall seems our almost certain fate. Dr Gabor Maté and others assert that a childhood containing fear, dishonesty, and the confusingly consistent denial of love, food, warmth and togetherness (typified by our standard approach to raising children, reality can get much worse) produces traumatised adults with an overactive fear/anxiety/stress response that can easily create attachment to the certainty and illusory ‘safety’ of authoritarianism¹⁴ (not to mention the whole disturbing range of issues many of have with reality that we label as 'disorders'). Without much confidence in one's existence, the dynamic reality of the egalitarian individualist¹⁵ then looks uncertain and chaotic, and so seems quite dangerous and scary indeed! Chaos is rich with possibility, so more easily navigated with probabilities in mind than with expectations borne of certainty and other neglect. These egalitarian individualist cultures thought it healthy and wise to send six year old kids out alone into the deepest night to discover reality for themselves (for as many nights as it might take). Is it really responsible to teach humans to be afraid of the dark? Recall Ursula K. LeGuin's handy instructions one can follow to find safety that I included earlier.

This modern affliction of fearful anxiety can be treated by being in Nature¹⁶. But so many of the 8 billion of us live deep inside an urban jungle intended to exclude the ‘outside’ world, with no means of escape, and no room to breathe. It is bad enough that we mostly live and think in a capitalist, patriarchal, hierarchical, domination culture, but actual Authoritarianism is now popular not only in evil communist/fascist states and scary stories. Our ‘beacons’ of democracy have promoted safety over reality, and have enacted unprecedented¹⁷ punishments for those who question the form and fit to reality that these boxed up abstractions provide. We are being directed to believe, 'or else'. Fear is now a widespread and acceptable currency throughout our institutions and our daily existence. We have many observations of what results these conditions generally produce. The basic arithmetic of our situation seems quite fucking grim, to say the least.

So let us return to Restoring the Kinship Worldview and contemplate something we can do about it (quoting Jiddu Kristnamurti):

… To live is find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom… We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it…¹⁸

Some things are certain. One day you will die. We will each come to know only a speck of all that lives and dies. But absolute and limiting beliefs about truth and reality do not make us safe, they make us blind. Our trajectory does not suggest that we can actually see where the fuck we are going. Should we fear the somewhat certain calamity of a chaotic reality? Can we face an apparently objective meaninglessness and our absolute impermanence? We may want to look away from these questions or try to build around them. But reality is everywhere. Escape can be great fun, but is only fleeting.

So WHY NOT INSTEAD create immediately an atmosphere of freedom? I believe this is the path we should follow if we truly seek a shared and stable sort of safety, one built upon a foundation of natural and resilient truths that we can all continually discover ourselves and can know, share and experience directly. What meaning, connection and purpose might be found in this manner?

The freedom to experience the real world is the freedom to make our world real. If we want to safely inhabit this world, I believe that we can succeed by trying hard to avoid the cartographic cul-de-sacs we draw with such certainty. With access to an unfettered reality, we can be free to travel farther along those pathways of probability and possibility. We may transcend the map entirely.

Can we replace fear with the intelligence to revel in wonder at such endless and marvellous mystery? Can we turn certainty into curiosity about (and acceptance of) all those paradoxes and unknowns? Can we intentionally generate that natural love of being together that we all know, and share it with other beings? We can. We should absolutely try to share the joy of our natural reality with those other twoleggeds, our friends and foes; they all too often struggle so.

Honestly… Should it be hard to learn a skillset practised with ease by many a wee human child raised by the most ‘primitive’ of peoples to ever walk the earth?¹⁹

So: Live to be free so that we might all be free to fully live!

I cannot imagine a better place to start (or continue) this journey than Restoring the Kinship Worldview. This is honestly, absolutely, and truly a most beautiful book.

Yup, been done better before: To Live is To Fly - Townes Van Zandt

1. Thievery is art. Thanks Lauren!

2. Folks, it is really fucking disturbing how often these mutually exclusive absolutes originate from a single source of certainty.

3. Yes the authors do address the contradiction of describing an absolute binary and then blaming binary thinking for everything that is going wrong. Read the book to find out how they get out of that one.

4. How’s that for certainty? FUCK! What more could you possibly want?

5. I may also revel in ridicularity, but that is mostly mild.

6. Anyone that thinks romantic is extraneous to the full experience of reality probably needs to get laid. But seriously folks: it may not be super sexy to romanticise your lover, but a romantic engagement is an incredibly beautiful thing whether it represents a meeting of minds or a union somewhat farther down. More on this later!

7. Source: teh internet. So copious with claims yet short on style!

8. Isn’t it kinda fucked to fire a bunch of complex junk into space, and then use it to find the corner store and optimise our arrival somewhere we’ve been many times before? Not only have we pinned and named every possible point of interest, we’ve rated and classified them too.

9. If you want to wade into how this statistical aphorism applies to science more generally, this paper explores the idea. We’ve just been through an interesting period where modelled predictions and other prescriptive presumptions were continually invalidated by the empirical evidence of actual experience. The very common demand that we ‘believe the science’ seems a most perfect irony to describe a reality more informed by political posturing than measurement and consideration. From the paper: The consequence of this is that no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive. The outright refusal to even consider a single one of the so very many counterexamples to the promise of masks as effective public health policy is something I simply cannot comprehend. It keeps me up at night. Too many nights.

10. Protip: this is quite a lot easier when the scientist that built them is dead, though we may not have that kind of time.

11. Today’s publication is brought to you by the letter ‘P’. Sometimes I get carried away. O right, sorry: Who is Lao Tzu?

12. Yes, I know that some of these folks were so savage as to never have invented the wheel, or the ability to count past five. If they survived and thrived without these things in environments that would kill us easily inside a couple of weeks, then it is pretty fucking obvious that they did not need them.

13. You think you can outrun a fateful destiny? This is equivalent to being ‘totally fucking fucked’ in the more modern common usage.

14. See: the present day. The things we have done to children and young people in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘caring for communities’ over the last few years fills me with sickness and rage. This is objectively, absolutely, entirely NOT FUCKING OK.

15. Egalitarian individualist is how Hugh Brody describes the indigenous peoples he has lived with and studied as an anthropologist.

16. I almost included ‘as well as creating relationships with other humans’, which maybe shows how the deep the idea is that humans are not part of Nature…

17. Yes, I know variations on these punishments are actually quite ‘well-worn’, and all too common in both the recent and distant past for various invented crimes of thought and existence. Irony may be dead, but I hope not forgotten… if the joke is still too obscure, consider the myths we continually tell ourselves about how fair, free, equal and just we are making this world. You may also consider that some of the things that actually happened during the pandemic were mocked as conspiracy theory not so long before they actually occurred. They are still happening, despite being pretty damn ineffective at achieving their stated goals, and of deeply questionable morality. Not unprecedented, but certainly unexpected by anyone that believes human decency is both common and completely compatible with a deep and abiding respect for personal freedom/self-determination. It was really not so long ago that one of these ideas implied the other. So much for progress!

18. “Truth is a pathless land”. Well Fuck me that presents maybe a wee navigational challenge. We may need a couple-few runs at this… Shit. Can this old beast even handle the terrain? Does this rig even have enough clearance?

19. OK, this might actually be pretty hard for those of us born into the one true absolute reality, but I think the alternative will be a lot fucking harder. If we have had the gall to mock those that never imagined a set of wheels they could never use, we may be overdue for some massive mockery ourselves…