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Good Day, Everyone!
Are you doing more than you had imagined? Which capability have you noticed you cannot help but perform well? Do you remember the last time you felt you were in your element, that your time was now?
Do you remember when you mentioned an acknowledgement of yourself to a friend? Feedback from a good friend can be golden, and your recognition of your friend can be the treasure he or she has been wanting but perhaps didn’t have the courage to speak on their own behalf. Acknowledging yourself for acknowledging another is one art in communicating feelings.
Some of us turn to art when casual chatting doesn’t seem to match our feelings. For instance, as we feel a helplessness for world affairs’ effects on us and our global sisters and brothers, it can be the courage of prose makers and poets, painters and sculptors, music composers and performers, playwrights and actors who turn to what they do best—creating art for communicating shared feelings.
We Earthlings are fascinating beings, and have been deceived citizenries, but our rainbow of feelings is common to all. Is it not feelings that make creating art universal? Art being one part of cosmology, isn’t art then a series of exquisite mirrors reflecting changing consciousness?
Here are two indicators showing us the changes in direction the winds of consciousness are gusting. Thusly, Staying Awake unconceals ideas that interrupt prejudices in some environmental circles.
On the sun. Many science-friendly citizens continue to endure moralized and highly politicized répété dismissing effects by the Sun on environmental landscapes. However, we are staying awake for articles about the Sun’s unavoidable effects (refer Staying Awake, February 5, 2006), and those reports are gratefully stacking up. Decades of records of solar flares and auroras in the Northern Hemisphere, plus measured water level records collected between 622 and 1470 A.D. of the Earth’s longest river, the Nile, allow the peering back in time by climatologists.
On climate cycles. Corporations, with thousands of jobs they offer, continue to choreograph their servile politicians’ messianic pas de deux on an erroneous theme of carbon dioxide. All the while, climate cycles have been studied by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As months ago NASA said they would, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory finally published a press release, which begins to describe a convincing link between long term solar and climate variabilities: Auroras (effects of solar flares) and water levels are an excellent means of tracking variations in the Sun’s activity. Refer JPL March 19 2007 press release.
If Earthlings are an evolutionary manifestation of the physical Universe in which we find ourselves, then the Universe has got to be more profoundly creative than we imagine or could imagine. And, our physical Universe is by no means a place we would consider peaceful, nor it seems is the human species. A peaceful, loving Universe is no where to be found, although that idea isn’t espoused by many sentimental metaphysicians.
All an observer has to do is view the collapsing of quasars, which is anything but peaceful, to notice the massive jets of light creating objects in space that are able over millions of light years to eventually create a species of anything. Evidently, creation isn’t born out of what appears to us as peaceful conditions.
There has likely not been peace for all Earthlings at the same time, at any time, as a profoundly creative his-story proclaims. In our present states of bewilderment occurring around the planet, the governances’ hopes for mongering fear appear to be the ideas propelling populaces’ hopes for peace. Peace is not the disappearance of evil doers, although that idea is contrary to beliefs of too many of the human species residing in the USA. For this writing, I suggest the word evil is a misnomer, because people deliberately behaving unpeacefully, or who undermine humankind, might be the part of our species that resembles the ways our physical Universe prepares for creation of another species for which humans would be a forerunner.
Within layers upon layers of cyclic evolutions of millions of species on Earth, it’s natural for species to come into being, then die away while some stay and change within their local geographical environments. So, humans being a species also, profoundly created by the Universe, it would seem even indigenous and industrialized Earthlings could be in line for some layer of extinction or displacement, each of which can be effects of natural environmental causes. ¹
As many of us observe, indigenous ethnospheres are not disappearing by natural causes to environments, but are disappearing by profoundly creative masculine profiteering tragedies. Lands are confiscated, Earthlings on those lands are violated, and vanishing are their ways of being. Beginnings of ethnocide can be followed by autogenocide of human beings. ²
Look at violation like this: What if your life was disrupted such that you were forcibly driven from your place of residence, and transported into a culture with Earthlings you had never seen, much less had known their ancestry or forms of communication? Can you imagine your feeling of outrage? Behind our backs, profoundly creative male violations are happening to millions of people. ³
In a simplified theory for this ezine, there is a global pushing of the nurturing feminine energy, much like being pushed down a birth canal, onto the masculine energy of masterful bankers and their warlords. Is there an unavoidable cycle of our species’ evolution that’s happening right in front of our noses? Are we experiencing the awesome, demonstrative universal feminine energy preparing her-story for balancing a species profoundly creative?
The remainder of this ezine was inspired by Wade Davis’ eloquent talk at TED dot com, a talk celebrating the extraordinary diversity of the world’s indigenous cultures and languages, their ethnospheres, many of which are disappearing. Davis, who reminds us that ethnospheres are humankind, is a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, an anthropologist and botanist by training; his TEDTalk was recorded February, 2003, in Monterey, California USA.
Davis speaks to the ideas of not only preserving the biosphere, but also the ethnosphere defined as “the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.”
The central revelation of anthropology is the worlds in which you and I live do not exist in one absolute reality for all. Peoples’ worlds of ideas and behaviors are the sum total of myriad realities of all Earthlings’ communities; the music of our languages dancing and singing together is like a web surrounding Planet Earth. This should fill us with hope: other Earthlings’ cultures show us the many cadences in the music of other ways of being, in other ways of thinking and orienting ourselves to the geographies we call Earth.
The peoples who still notice the wind against their faces, or see the beauty of rocks polished into shiny stones by the rain, or who travel beyond the galaxy during their sacred moments are the very ones who are being involuntarily displaced. Fifty percent of the world’s 6000 languages are no longer taught to children, as ancestral lands are lost and languages fade into oblivion. Displacements are caused by identifiable sources from which indigenous peoples have no recourse.
Ethnospheres are humankind magnificently displayed by the Universe in the indigenous ways of being, but reduced by human trafficking to the margins of an imagined real world in impetuous industrial lifestyles.
In just a few years, our grandchildren will look back with some wonderment not at the armed combats we allowed, but at the indigenous peoples and their ways of being we allowed to be quietly eliminated. This era’s generation may be remembered as having neither actively endorsed nor passively accepted the massive destruction of biodiverse, polychromatic worlds of being.
The problem isn’t change, because all species dance with the biological possibilities for their lives. And, the problem isn’t technology itself. The Sioux Indians didn’t stop being Sioux after giving up the bow and arrow any more than USA residents stopped being Americans after giving up the horse and buggy.
It’s not change or technology threatening Earth’s ethnospheres, it is power—the crude face of domination. Whenever you look around to other cultures, you realize these cultures are not destined to fade away. These are dynamic living human beings being driven out of existence by forces beyond indigenous capacities for adaptation. *
Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned. But ethnocide, the destruction of peoples’ ways of living is not only not condemned, it’s celebrated by many industrialists as urban development strategy. Some indigenous peoples view industrialized people as little brothers who are destroying the world.
It all comes down to the choice of living in monochromatic worlds of monotony, or embracing polychromatic worlds of diversity. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, once said (and the following is paraphrased) her greatest fear was that as we morph toward a blandly generic world view, not only would we see the entire range of human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but we would awaken from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.
It’s humbling to remember our species has perhaps been around for some 600,000 years. In the Neolithic revolution, a time in which humans discovered agriculture, we succumbed to the cult of the seed. Then, the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood; we created hierarchy, specialization, and surplus—only 10,000 years ago. The modern industrial world is only 300 years old, and that shallow history does not suggest we have answers to the challenges confronting us this millennium.
Polychromatic worlds of being, and indigenous languages and stories that create them, are not lost to artists, who reflect the modern mind that remembers the meaning for ‘the last shall be first.’
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Staying Awake :: an ezine with your awareness in mind