I’ve been reading Fritjof Capra’s “The Turning Point.” On
most mornings, I get up about an hour before PQ and take a cup of coffee and a
book to my sacred rocker along with a pencil because I have to write comments
and insights as I read. Also, I let the cat out and frequently after reading a few
pages, join her, look at the mountain for a few minutes and ask how to
put insights and ah haw moments to work. Now, back to The Turning Point, I’ve
had a pristine copy of this book for a very long time. I really don’t know how
long but the book was printed in 1982 and had never been opened. It obviously
dated to before my days at the Tattered Cover Bookstore because their sticker wasn't on it . That means that I was still working at ARCO and probably bought
it at Together Books now long extinct, where I often stopped on my walk home
(yes, I walked the mile and half to and from work every day in all weather).
This was truly eons ago.
Looking for another book to read last week, since I didn’t
have the cash to buy a new one I browsed through my old books and spotted The
Turning Point. Of course, I was shocked when I noticed it had never been opened
and the pages were turning yellow from age. I came very close to putting it
back on the shelf since surely it was outdated after 30 plus years. After all, technologies that didn’t exist
back then are necessities now. However, I decided to look it over for the
quaintness it must inevitably contain.
Instead, I was shocked to discover that all the problems it exposed in
our techno corporate growth driven competitive world are even truer now than back
then. The one change I can think of is
that the wolves now wear sheep skins and talk politically correct mumbo jumbo
but they are even more rapacious than they were thirty years ago.
Maybe we are on a runaway train of exponential consumption
and nobody knows how to get off safely. We are tied tighter into the same monster
system than we were in 1982. When I was
about 13 years old, I had a horse named shorty.
One day I decided to ride him with a snaffle bit instead of the usual
curb bit. For those who aren’t into riding, the rider has a lot more leverage
with a curb bit. Shorty decided he wanted to go home when we were about a
quarter of a mile away. He took off for
home and I couldn’t stop him. We approached the corral gate at a full gallop
and I was riding bare back. I saw the gate coming up and knew that in another second,
he would put the brakes on and I would be draped over it. I just relaxed into
the inevitability of my fate. I wasn’t injured, not even bruised. Perhaps there
is something about relaxing into fate that makes survival more likely. I don’t think anyone knows how to fix the
problems of economy, ecology and ecosystems of all kinds.
Humanity has backed itself into a corner and most of the rescue plans issue
from the same mindset as the problem. When things really get bad instinct
begins to stimulate the creative mind and I don’t believe reason will ever
solve these lethal problems.
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| Mother Earth Dreaming the World, Acrylic on Canvas |
Wu Wei comes to mind. It is the Taoist way of non-struggle
and allows the spirit of instinctual knowing and intuition to emerge above the
Fray. I’m always amazed at the way conservative
Christians attempt to project the anti-Christ onto one charismatic leader after
another when it is obvious that the anti-Christ is the shadow side of our patriarchal leader/savior
concept projected onto this or that screen over and over. This must be one of
the greatest projection screens in world history seriously dwarfing IMAX. The patriarchal
warrior warlord mentality is probably at least 12,000 years old, and we have
the luck to live at its pinnacle when it seems to be climaxing like a super
nova.
In the time of the Old Testament, prophets often lived out their
prophesies as an example of what was happening to the nation; street theater at
its best. We have a situation in which the human mind is back in the pre Iron
Age world while technology has developed a disconnected mind of its own that
rules us all. Idealistic terrorists blow
themselves up and isn’t it a mirror image of what our society is doing slowly
and sometimes not slowly. We recognize the madness in individuals but not in
societies especially ours. I recently
ran into a bookmark I scribbled on at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre.
We
are getting the usual scientific myopic reductionist analysis of what was wrong
with Adam Lanza, i.e. a faulty brain, but what if he is an example of a cell of
humanity acting out its disconnect and lack of functional membership in the
body of humankind. I’m thinking holistically. He wasn’t pure evil but a
frustrated, alienated creature who didn’t have any place in his environment. His
situation is similar to a caged wild animal that suddenly turns on its handler
and whoever is in range with explosive rage. It is the compromised cells in the body that break
down first under stress, and if we were paying attention, we would see that as
a warning.
Disconnected information is blasting at us like a sandstorm
that won’t quit. There is no way to take it all in and stay in one piece. We don’t
know what’s going on next door but we get constant information about what is
happening across the world, even though it is filtered information. Ironically, knowledge becomes more and more
specialized. Attempting to understand the world organism by analyzing the parts
is not working. It’s time to put away
the microscope and see a bigger picture. The whole is more than the sum of its
parts. I hear the avalanche of reality starting to creak and groan at the
beginning of its journey from the mountaintop.
