To ‘The
Global
Aama
Bombo - Tamang -
Margaret Behan - Arapaho/Cheyenne -
Rita Pitka
Blumenstein - Yup’ik -
Julieta
Casimiro - Mazatec
-
Maria Alice Campos Freire - Amazonian
Flordemayo
- Mayan - Highlands of Central America/
Tsering
Dolma Gyaltong
- Tibetan
Beatrice Long Visitor
Holy Dance - Oglala Lakota -
Rita Long Visitor
Holy Dance - Oglala Lakota -
Agnes Baker Pilgrim
- Takelma Siletz -
Mona Polacca
- Hopi/Havasupai/Tewa -
Bernadette Rebienot - Omyene
-
Clara Shinobu
Iura - Amazonian
Dear Grandmothers,
I have been hearing of your ‘healing’ initiative and wish
to support you in some way, and perhaps one way to try to do this is to share
the questions re your initiative that come into my mind.
If you are adepts at channelling natural truths, how shall
you ply your trade within a society that has become ‘superbly’ skilled at lying
to itself, ... so much so that the ‘traffic in lies’ is so thick and toxic as
to be near impermeable to the passage of truths?
You speak of your concerns in similar terms to those that
we who lie to each other use;
We are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction
of our Mother Earth, the contamination of our air, waters and soil, the
atrocities of war, the global scourge of poverty, the threat of nuclear weapons
and waste, the prevailing culture of materialism, the epidemics which threaten
the health of the Earth's peoples, the exploitation of indigenous medicines,
and with the destruction of indigenous ways of life.
You
speak of ‘cures’ that are ‘prescriptive’, that may come through this “new alliance”, that “comes
together to nurture, educate and train our children”.
The
‘lies’ that we tell ourselves in our western acculturated society, a western
acculturation based on lies that has ‘infected’ all strains of ‘indigenous
peoples’, some earlier and more deeply than others, but which simple
observation suggests, has infected even the bulk of the population of North
American native children.
Like
a few of my friends, I have spent most of my life trying to understand the
nature and origins of our lie-telling, and I can tell you that it does not
‘make friends’ to do so, in our society. Our society does not want to
know about it or to even hear mention of it. This is in spite of massive
good intention at a level that stops short of admitting that we have built lie-telling
into the foundations of our culture.
If
one does not understand how one is lying to oneself or how much of the
foundations of one’s thinking is lie-ridden, how can one open up for the
assimilation of truths that you, the grandmothers, are intent on sharing with
your grandchildren?
My
message is one of support and good will for your initiative.
It
has been my observation and experience that our children’s ears and hearts have
been largely closed to the assimilating of truth, because of the superb lying
skills that our western acculturation has brought to us, which comes to us
through education, politics and business and which permeates our everyday
lives. It is my further impression that this ‘closing down’ of the
mind and heart has to be dealt with directly to increase the receptive opening
for the entry of natural truths.
The
gist of this message, supportive of your initiative, seeks to share with you
the findings of myself and a few other co-explorers into the nature of the
self-deceit ‘built in’ to the theological-scientific foundations of our western
culture.
At
the heart of the deceit is the notion of ‘sovereignty’. This is the
belief in ‘local, independently existing entities’ that we purport to have
‘their own behaviours’. It is a secularized western theological concept
and it has also been made foundational in ‘western science’ (the popular
science that supports what we would call ‘western scientific thinking’).
In
believing in ‘sovereignty’ we tell ourselves a huge lie, ...
and that lie is ‘locked in place’ by its ability to alleviate our fear of
uncertainty. The ‘local sovereign nation’ and the ‘local sovereign
being’, we say, have their own internal powers of originating dynamical
behaviour and are thus ‘fully and solely responsible’ for ‘their own
behaviour’.
From
this foundational lie, upon which modern western culture has built its
educational, political and business institutions, we get the notion that the
sovereign nation and the sovereign individual are fully and solely responsible
for their own creative and productive accomplishments.
If
our children believe this lie, their ability to assimilate truth is greatly
constrained. This lie is celebrated in the history of science, in
the story of Galileo Galilei and his formulation of
the principle that all material bodies fall to earth at the same rate
irrespective of their weight, provided that they fall IN A VACUUM.
What Galileo removed from this formulation, a general way of
formulating scientific thought, was the accommodating backpressure of the
dynamical naturespace we share inclusion
in. Whether we are in a crowd dynamic, on the freeway, or
negotiating life passage over years and decades, our real-life experience is
that the dynamics of the common space we are included in is always actualizing
and shaping our behavioural potentials. Our dynamical behaviour
does not really originate fully and solely from within us, and thus we are not
really ‘sovereign beings’. We are included in nature, and without the
possibilities inherent in the dynamical commonspace
of nature that we are included in, ... our behavioural
potentials could not actualize and blossom into shape the way they do.
The
same is true of the ‘nation’. It is a gross lie to say that the dynamical
behaviour of a nation is fully and solely the responsibility of that nation.
Without the possibility inherent in the dynamical space the nation is
included in, that actualizes and shapes into blossom its behavioural
potentials, the nation-behaviours that we see could not possibly come to pass.
This means that it is a gross lie to say that the nation (and/or
individual) is fully and solely responsible for its own creative and productive
accomplishments. This means that it is a gross lie to speak of the
‘sovereignty’ of a nation as if it were a ‘natural reality’. There is no
such thing as ‘sovereignty’, either of a nation, a person, an organism or an
object. ‘Sovereignty’, the property of having ‘independent existence’ and
the power to internally originate one’s own behaviour, is a gross and impudent
lie. It is a secularized theological concept [1] but it does give those
who believe in this lie a (false) sense of security, as if they are in control
of things, as if they have the power to determine what is going to happen to
them.
Good
lie telling, that is told so as to allay fears, is an artform
which succeeds most when the lie is of the most impudent and aggressive order;
”...in the big lie there
is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation
are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature
than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their
minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since
they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to
resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to
fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have
the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which
prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still
doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other
explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even
after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in
this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people
know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.” – Adolf Hitler, Mein
Kampf
Ask
our western-educated children whether we, as nations and/or as individuals are
all fully and solely responsible for our own positive creative and productive
accomplishments. They are likely to lie to themselves as we have taught
them to lie and say, ‘yes, this is true’. This is how we can elevate
crooks and criminals to the greatest heights of empowerment and influence in
our society.
Ask
our western educated children whether we, as nations and/or as individuals are
all fully and solely responsible for our own negative creative and productive
accomplishments. They are likely to lie to themselves as we have
taught them to lie and say, ‘yes, this is true’. This is how we can
declare war on criminals and terrorists, without ever owning up to how we
jointly condition the common space we live in, so that it inductively
actualizes and shapes the behavioural potentials of crony collectives and
selectively suffocates the growth of potentials of others.
Galileo’s
way of formulating dynamics was to vacuum back the material entities so that
100% of the originating of the dynamic is invested in the material bodies, the
‘independently existing’ material bodies that have ‘their own behaviour’.
By vacuum-packing objects and organisms in ‘Euclidian space’, Galileo
removed the real-world quality of ‘accommodating’ or ‘opening up possibility
to’, that characterizes the dynamical commonspace
of our natural experience. When a crony collective are claiming that they
are sovereign beings that exist independently and are fully and solely
responsible for their ‘own’ creative and productive accomplishments, the others
who we term ‘less performant’, ‘under-achievers’ are
sucking vacuum, the absence of possibility that must be present to inductively
actualize and shape into blossom one’s behavioural potentials.
Those
who are deprived of possibility by the crony monopolizers
of the possibility-giving commonspace, become angry
and they know it is a lie to say that everyone is fully and solely responsible
for their own creative and productive behaviours, but they can’t do anything
about it because this lie is built into the very premises of their sovereign
nation-state and it has been institutionalized in western education, politics
and business. Each person is held to be a sovereign being, in the
manner that each nation is held to be a sovereign nation, and thus deemed to be
‘independently existing’ and capable of its own internal origination of
behavioural dynamics. This lie of ‘sovereignty’ is protected by western law.
Western law protects every individual in the independent pursuit of his own
self-interests.
Where
did the sovereignty of nation-states come from? Anybody who has the
power of force can create his own sovereign nation state. In
western law, sovereignty was first based on ‘discovery’ of the land, and later
changed to ‘possession’ of the land. If one has the power of force, one
can take possession of lands and declare the ‘independent existence of a
sovereign nation with its own internally originating behavioural dynamic’, ...
a gross and impudent lie that is challenged by some Native Americans who say;
‘Canada and the United States do not really exist, ... they are artefacts of
how Europeans fought over how to divide up what they stole’. The lie
is exposed in this statement, but who is listening? In order to secure
the lie, immigrants were promised co-ownership in the possessed-by-force lands
in exchange for swearing an oath to promote ‘belief’ in the existence of the
sovereign nation, and to bear arms and give their lives if necessary, to defend
belief in and perpetuation of the sovereign nation. The whole basis
for the western concept of sovereign nation-states is built on lies and the
defence of lies.
Of
course, there are natural-world people-communities there which can also
describe these regions of Turtle Island known as ‘Canada’ and ‘The United
States’, with good people in them, many of whom would put the brotherhood of
man in precedence over the western concept of national sovereignty, as in John Lennon’s
song ‘Imagine’ that has touched the hearts of many who are tired of
nationalist pride and the concept of Darwinist ‘survival of the fittest’ that
is bundled in with the sovereigntist lie.
The
lie of sovereignty, a secularized theological concept that is built into
popular western scientific thinking as well, has been thoroughly
institutionalized in our westernized society that now dominates worldwide, in
our western education, in our western national politics, in our western
medicine, in our western psychology, in our western business.
How
shall our children re-assimilate natural truths while swimming in these
institutionalized lies?
This
is the issue that I am raising with you, that comes together with my heartfelt
support for what you are trying to do, in the hope that we may discover some
way to lower the ability of cultural lies to block the assimilation of the
natural truths that you are seeking to share.
mitakuye oyasin,
Ted
Lumley
[1] Peter D’Errico, AMERICAN INDIAN
SOVEREIGNTY: NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T http://www.umass.edu/legal/derrico/nowyouseeit.html