August 25, 2011
- Martin Prechtel on Building and Re-Building -
“We knew, too, that the whole world was spiritually endangered. Shamans knew this because we were shown during our training and initiation how the world is actually one big body. The world is also a sacred building called The House of the World, and our own individual bodies are made like it and are also called House of the World. Inside the other world of our bodies, everything that can be found in the outer world also exists. When spirits see us, they see a beautiful house, a temple. When we see them, we see the world.
<…>
When an individual falls ill, something in his World House-Earth Body is being attacked, gnawed away, eroded, shed, burnt, dismembered, or is beginning to fade because of neglect. The shaman assesses the destruction and, after dealing with the cause, begins rebuilding the World House of that person’s body by remembering all its parts back to life – by making it echo off the Original Flowering Earth, what shamans call creation, the Big Earth House Temple.
<…>
The secret of village togetherness and happiness had always been the generosity of its people, but the secret to that generosity was village inefficiency and decay. The House of the World, like our village huts and our human bodies, no matter how magnificent, is not built to last very long. Because of this, all life must be regularly renewed. To do this, the villagers come together once a year at least, to work on putting back together somebody’s hut, talking, laughing, feasting, and helping wherever they can in a gradual, graceful way. This way, each family’s place in the village is reestablished and remembered.
If a house is built too well, so efficiently that it is permanent and refuses to fall apart, then people have no reason to come together. Though the house stays together, the people fall apart, and nothing gets renewed. Smart people might be able to invent excuses to get together, but this is too abstract and hollow, and some contrivance insults the soul. People have a genuine need to make things with their ingenuity and with their hands.
This coming together to gather water by hand, to do communal tasks gracefully – tasks that a machine could do in an instant anonymously – or to repair rickety houses ensures that the very smiley togetherness so missing in the pre-planned, alienated lives of modern civilization. When a Tzutujil (Mayan) says he needs to be healed, he asks the shaman to chumij, or replaster, him. When we begin to fade, the shaman plasters us with remembrance so that we can shine again.
Ironically, the great amounts of unnatural violence, senseless killing, and mechanized warfare that we see these days signals extreme fear in the face of natural death and decay. These difficult conditions come about when a people are not truly at home. Unable to re-create the House of the World as we shamans do, subscribers to modernity jettison all ideas of ritual life and feeding the spirits. Instead they look for permanent solutions, such as nuclear bombs, war, concentration camps, laws, and ideals that must be upheld and defended. All this activity is a search for increased security to protect uninitiated people from what they perceive as a hostile universe.
<…>
Though the modern world can appear somewhat soulless and its people numbed and asleep, I discovered that deeply in the World House of their bodies live resourceful, intelligent, soulful refugees who, like myself, waited and wondered when they would ever be welcomed back home again.
When I divine the Earth Bodies of many people of today, their worlds look like a post-war country, bombed out, dry, flowerless, and tired. That flat devastation wreaked upon these people’s Earth Body needs renewing. Their World House needs reassembling, replastering; it has to be remembered back to life, so that the faraway native souls, their natural indigenous beings, can return to their homes. Maybe this is why Chiviliu sent me away, to sing and speak these people’s lives back together. After all, he said that the destruction was coming from them. Our world was being killed by people whose naturalness had been disenfranchised long ago.”
That middle bit is how I have come to see knowledge. Every generation has to re-invent it, ‘feed the spirits’.
To do my job I have regularly to track down old second-hand books from before about 1990. After that, people seem to have stopped writing useful things down. It seems that either (a) businesses clamped down on the publishing of material, possibly linked to that recession, or (b) people began to rely on the simulated expertise of machines, thereby not having to re-learn everything from a written kernel every time. Actually I think the two are linked: collectively we decided that machines could do our learning for us.
And as Thought for the Day pointed out this morning, true learning is like love: it studies a subject for its own sake. If we lose learning by turning it into a business transaction (as Mr. Cameron seems to favour), we lose other things too.
Comment by speedbird — August 26, 2011 @ 2:22 am
This is a very powerful book and raises issues that are key to remediating the pathological nature of modernity. Within this and other indigenous cultures is the key to understanding our human genius, our Ancestral legacy of harmony with nature and each other. 500 years of modernity cannot hold a candle to 3 million years of indigeny.
Comment by Ukumbwa — August 26, 2011 @ 2:30 am
I should read this book. I have been reading a lot of books like this lately. Right now I am reading the “Andean Codex” have you heard of it?
I have always felt more like an indigenous person than a modern person, because I always felt that people were more important than things and schedules.
Comment by Ted — August 26, 2011 @ 9:17 am
@speedbird:
Yeah, I hadn’t noticed the parallels between this and our discussions on “IT”, but they’re totally there. Different arena, same idea.
The trouble there, as I see it, is a loss of faith in the idea that learning for the sake of love (of the subject) will somehow be enough. I think it IS enough, but requires that we investigate our motives closely. I don’t think its as easy as it sounds (as easy as I’d like it to be).
@Ukumbwa:
Glad to see you here buddy, thanks for the comment. The indigenous soul is indeed in need of some re-cognition, re-connection, and re-embodiment.
@Ted:
It’s a great book, definitely worth searching out. If you’re into Mayans and shamanism, this guy’s the real deal. There’s a lot of heart in this book, and a lot of poetry too. I think you might like it, especially if you’re reading things in this vein already.
Comment by Ian — August 26, 2011 @ 4:55 pm
>> a loss of faith in the idea that learning for the sake of love (of the subject) will somehow be enough.
That’s the worship of Mammon for ya. :)
Comment by speedbird — August 27, 2011 @ 1:28 pm
Are his other books good? This one os not in my library system but a couple other ones are
Comment by Ted — August 29, 2011 @ 5:21 pm
@speedbird:
NIce! Hadn’t thought it through to that conclusion but you’re totally right! Success over love, always a loss.
@Ted:
I haven’t read his other ones, but they should be good (I both imagine myself and have been told that they are). This one gives his background though, so it might be worth reading first. Maybe see if you can interlibrary loan it? No worries if not though, just read one of the others.
Also, a general comment. I’m currently reading Peter Kingsley’s “Reality” and in it, he points to exactly where we Westerners were “disenfranchised”. Seems we can basically blame Plato for it, though to say it that way oversimplifies things… :)
Comment by Ian — August 29, 2011 @ 7:01 pm
Wow! I’ve been reading some stuff about how Plato is behind the “rotten root” of Western Civilization, also. Its really deep and I don’t understand all of it, but apparently he got some ideas from one of Pythagoras students that garbled up some stuff.
Its related to math, geometry and the music scale. Plato wanted to have some type of symmetry between math and geometry but it didn’t work. It has something to do with time and infinity, anyway math is based on music.
So it boils down to Western Civilization wanting to contain infinity. So that’s why its destructive.
Here is the Link to the pdf. book
http://www.filejumbo.com/Download/E87E698A59E79E6F
and here is the Guy’s website:
http://naturalresonancerevolution.blogspot.com/
He is really into QI GONG, I think you might like his blog.
Comment by Ted — August 30, 2011 @ 9:27 am
Crazy stuff man. Thanks for sharing.
Comment by Ian — August 30, 2011 @ 11:30 am