Category: Culture

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Tapping Your Inner Sap

by Mankh

Shootings are not just an American epidemic.

Headline: “Sweden Sees Deadliest Year With 60 Deaths in Shootings.” And quote from Magnus Gerell, an associate professor and criminologist at Malmo University: “Today it is more common that there is more than one shooter and that more shots are fired. It seems as if the killings have become more meticulously planned, which leads to more deaths. A trend we have seen for quite a while is that the victims and the shooters are becoming younger. Today it is often teenagers shooting other teenagers.”[1]

Guns, a product of colonialism (still going strong on steroids as US recently shipped billion$ to Ukraine, some destined for black market), have become a go-to choice for Euro-Americans for anger mis-management. Instead of reaching for a beverage or a deep breath, attempts at resolving extreme frustration and desperation are too-often done through the gun. A gun enables an immediate shock-value change, a faster than fast-food temper-tantrum gone violent AND randomly affecting others.

What this says to me is: Total loss of being in-tune with the natural ability of change, as, for example, a plant grows . . .  through concrete, or as the Tao encourages, blending WITH the natural world and going with THAT flow. Yet more than 2,500 years ago the Tao was well-aware of what could go awry: Sages “insure that what is taught does not cause violence.”[2]

From that I deduce: There is a shortage of Sages in the world! Being wise and peaceful somehow, somewhere became secondary to the fight to survive and, if lucky, be successful.

While the ancient Chinese understanding of “sage” may signify something different, the English root is from “sapere” from “sap –  juice or fluid which circulates in plants, the blood of plant life.” The Sanskrit root includes “milk, nectar.”[3]

Wow! Who knew? Sagacity is not some abstract holy man sitting cross-legged while levitating at the top of a mountain; sagacity is rooted in the soil and “circulates” like blood. Sages nurture.

Instead of tapping the inner sap, when people feel trapped with no way to vent their emotions, too-often they reach for the gun. Or maybe that’s psycho-babble and it’s just the side-effects of off-kilter prescription drugs. Whatever the case, violence is the immediate restructuring, injury, or elimination of someone or something. Violence is anti-life, anti-take-a-deep-breath and think about it first!, anti-feel-the-pain because big boys don’t cry so they repress emotions, becoming high school year-bookers voted most likely to make the news for shooting spree.
And by the way, what AREN’T they teaching in school that gets teenagers shooting teenagers?

Shooting ourselves in the feet?
Also, from recent mainstream verbiage, I sense other twisted efforts to eliminate.

“Net zero refers to a state in which the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere are balanced by removal out of the atmosphere. To ‘go net zero’ is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or to ensure that any ongoing emissions are balanced by removals.”[4]

Reducing is good yet how it’s possible to neatly balance the air/atmosphere while billions of people drive cars and stuff gets shipped worldwide is beyond me; not to mention that “net zero” is an aerial fixation, a high-wire act distraction ignoring the destruction of habitats and human along with non-human suffering happening now. Yet “net zero” is being used as the greenwashing rallying cry for the “clean air” industrial revolution 2.0. Oxymoron anyone?

“Zero-COVID: The goal of the strategy is to get the area back to zero new infections and resume normal economic and social activities.”[5]

Aside from the unwieldy and, to some, laughable “normal economic and social activities,” considering it’s a virus – while an admirable goal healthwise – this “zero” is a fool’s errand, as viruses are a natural part of Earthly life.

“Zero-COVID” is being used as a rallying cry for mass vaccinations without consideration of side-effects, not to mention the right to choose aka bodily autonomy.

In these contexts, “zero-whatever” contains a flavor of totalitarian control. If we can just get rid of whatever it is, THEN everything will be hunky-dory. But who has zero problems in life?

“Zero” goals promote the carrot of future salvation while overlooking the stick of current suffering.

How to wean from instant-gratification and it’s flip-side karma, instant-dissatisfaction-violent-rage?

Sorry, slogan lovers, another world is not possible. We’re stuck with dealing with this one. But there is another way: Respond rather than over-react.

There is another way:  More than 1,000 years ago the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy of Nations) Peacemaker planted the Great Tree of Peace, representing the Great Law of Peace.

According to Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper, Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation: “The Haudenosaunee Confederacy was formed by our Peacemaker over 1000 years ago, according to our Gayanashagowa, or Great Law of Peace;  and it is the oldest continuous democratic government in North America.  Our system of confederated government was acknowledged as the model for your government by the United States Congress in 1987.”[6]

There are many traditions worldwide espousing and living a Peaceful Way. It can require much discipline to change one’s behavior patterns from argumentative, combative and belligerent . . . to . . . listening, seeking common ground and open-hearted. Yet for simple starters: Remember that each of us knows somewhere inside, in the bones and blood, what peace feels like. And for far longer than human beings, trees and plants have known about peace and will continue to remind us . . .  if we would stop cutting them down and stop paving over them, and instead, start listening . . .

NOTES:
[1] https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Sweden-Sees-Deadliest-Year-With-60-Deaths-in-Shootings-20221212-0002.html

[2] Stanza #3 https://spirit-alembic.com/thou.html#text

[3] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=sage

[4] “What Is Net Zero?”
https://netzeroclimate.org/what-is-net-zero/

[5]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-COVID

[6] “The Great Tree of Peace”
https://indigenousvalues.org/haudenosaunee-values/great-tree-peace-skaehetsi%CB%80kona/
&
“The Haudenosaunee Confederacy:  Sovereignty, Citizenship And Passports”
https://www.onondaganation.org/news/2010/the-haudenosaunee-confederacy-sovereignty-citizenship-and-passports/

~ Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)
www.allbook-books.com

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Playtime (film review)

Playtime is a 1967 film by French director Jacques Tati. As a critique of modern urban life and comedy of personal pratfalls, it is unique and iconic, yet with echoes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. With the barest of story lines (one hapless wanderer encountering another for a few moments of charmed connection), the film proceeds with a pace that begins with excruciating calm and ascends with the organic chaos of life to a crescendo—set by a restaurant band that converts the autonomous drones of the opening to a gyrating dance collective, fueled by copious alcohol served by frantic staff—and then winds down, just as organically, to its dénouement.

Tati’s art is distinctive in revealing our humanity almost exclusively through movement and sound. The absence of dialogue is a revelation, opening to the wonder of raw human experience uncluttered with warring dialogue, nonstop chatter. Here the cacaphony of crowds suffices, distancing us from irrelevant speech and replacing it with pure observation, sensed familiarity and comic surprise.

The film’s constant magic is cast by impeccable choreography throughout, each step and hand gesture, each pedestrian crossing or lobby an arena for artful passing, or sudden collision, fish platter in hand. The chief character, Monsieur Hulot (played by the director himself) is a masterpiece set within a masterpiece, for his is a picture of awkwardness, yet with every misstep placed just so.

To return to theme… The futuristic set and mechanical movements of the citizens and tourists, each bent on their private mission in the city hive, paints a stark critique of burgeoning urban life as the sixties manifested…. all concrete and glass and steel, everything both transparent through glass and separated by glass… equipped with mysterious electronic systems and cheap construction (tiles, scaffolding) that fails.

Yet the film’s humanity redeems even in the clumsiness of the efforts of M. Hulot and others to perform their required duties. Here too is an echo of Monty Python at play, or Fellini… with the clowns and freaks each trying to make the best of an impossible situation, to find their purpose in the grand charade. Thus the party winds down with a volunteer band and general singing and shouting, a coming to life of the city in the early hours of the next day. The innocent American tourist, a laggard from the group of chatty Midwesterners, finally catches her moment to photograph a flower vendor and deliveryman on the morning street.

All is forgiven, all redeemed, by the innocence of a couple of inveterate humans who stray from the programmed herd, who find connection with each other in simple happenstance. Connection is also realized with the audience (fifty-five years later, and counting) in need of a laugh-cleansing detour, a stepping aside from the one-way corridor to a dehumanizing futurism. Playtime calls for each of us to witness our own halting movements through this hurried world of separation.

See also this great video review of Playtime.

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The Curse of Separation

Our once holistic world, our heritage as a sentient creature born of the earth, has fallen under a long, dark spell, a curse of separation. What is the nature and cause of this curse, and how can its damage be undone?

On one hand, so-called civilization has erred in its excessive and obsessive fixation, valuing material and rational concerns over all else. Organizing life and society strictly according to scientific principles, mathematical models, technocratic control. This paradigm has conquered the world and hijacked the human spirit.

Paradoxically, this very emphasis on the materialistic worldview renders it partial and therefore abstract. It substitutes its convenient version of the world for the real thing, the material, natural world itself. Purporting to be the only reality, it exposes itself as a mere simulation.

‘Evil is that which destroys humanity. It is becoming more apparent that the root cause of evil is the obsessional, and often fanatic, blind belief in the potential of the rational human mind. When a human being starts to believe that it can grasp the essence of life within the categories of its own logical understanding; at that moment, when this rational view is imposed on the world, it destroys all humanity and all life. I believe the root cause of evil, the original sin, is that hubris. It’s the belief that through human dominance, we can grasp control and manipulate life within and without us.

‘Every time you interact with another person who believes that they know exactly who you are, that they entirely understand us, and believe that they can decide what is ultimately good for us — they destroy the space in which you can exist as a free human being. If this is accepted, we become incapable of making our own choices.’

—Mattias Desmet, Looking Inward to Change the World

On the other hand, the ruling paradigm has doomed us by valuing the abstract, the theoretical, the specialized, even the so-called spiritual, over the concrete experience of living with nature, on the earth, in contact with the elements, with animals, to procure a living and commune with our fellow humans.

‘Ultimately, I am advocating a reversal of an age-old prejudice, which values the abstract over the concrete, the spirit over the flesh, and the spiritual over the material. This anti-materialism has caused tremendous harm to materiality; that is, to nature. Part of recovering from the spell of money (which is itself an abstraction of value) is to re-value the material, the soil, the flesh, the living, and the human.’ —Charles Eisenstein

The alternative to either path of fragmentation is reunion with our whole selves; a joining of the mystic and the mathematical, the logical and the magical.

We are of the earth and we must never forget it or neglect it while serving a pretence of artificial nobility, a patina of success.

And we are of the spirit and we must never forget it or neglect it, in service of our addictions and treasures, baubles of admiration.

We are of the earth and spirit, and we must never forget it.