From this story, this view of the world—that our manmade cities are civilized and the natural world is wild and people who live in it are primitive or uncivilized or savages—we have developed a psychology that acknowledges and praises only itself and its own culture and has lost contact with the real physical world and its extraordinary powers and mysteries.
When the early European/American settlers fanned out across the prairies and killed every buffalo they could find, the Native Americans watched in shock and horror at what they considered an act of insanity. How could the settlers take the life of the plains? How could they parcel up the flesh of Mother Earth? How could they be so crazy as to cut down every tree in sight? The settlers looked at the Indians and thought they were crazy to not take and eat all the buffalo they could. How could they have sat on this valuable resource for 10,000 years and not have used it? They had to be savages, uncivilized half-humans who didn’t have the good sense to know how to use nature’s bounty for the good of the human race.
For a while this worked for the conquering “Americans.” Just as Gilgamesh could cut down the cedars of Lebanon, just as the Greeks could destroy their own forests, just as Americans could strip half their topsoil from the land, the rapid consumption of “out there” to satisfy the needs of us “in here” worked for more than a few generations.
But it’s working no more, as we’re seeing in the “early warning system” of the developing world. In our inner cities, where people are afraid to drive with their doors unlocked or their windows down; on our farms, where dioxin or PCB-laced waste is spread across food plants as fertilizer; in our hospitals, where the primary waste from the manufacture of nuclear weapons (yttrium) is being promoted as an experimental “cure” for cancers (which are caused in large part by the air and food and drugs of our civilization)—in all these places we see that this world we have created can work for only a very few. It is the nature of hierarchical, dominator systems to end up this way.
Older cultures are older because they have survived for tens of thousands of years. In comparison, younger cultures are still an experiment, and every time one has been attempted (Sumeria, Rome, Greece), however great its grandeur, it has self-destructed, while tribes survive thousands of years.
Younger cultures are built on a foundation that is psychologically and spiritually ill: Freud’s “shrunken residue” of the true and historic beauty of human life lived in intimate connection with the natural world. Increasingly, we live in isolation, in “boxes”—and we suffer for it.
What It’s Like to Be in Touch with the World Again
It’s possible to climb out of the box and get back in touch with the world.
Over the past 25 years, I have taken several classes in wild edible or medicinal plants. Usually, the courses involved one or more trips into the forest and the fields in search of the plants being studied. One of our teachers carried with her a small bottle of yellow cornmeal. She said, “When I uproot a plant or cut off a leaf, I put some cornmeal on the earth as my way of acknowledging the spirit of the plants and giving an offering back to them for their giving some of themselves to us.”
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Columbia University psychology professor Julian Jaynes puts forth the concept that in prehistoric times (more than 7,000 to 10,000 years ago) people actually heard the voices of the gods.3 When they looked out into the natural world, they saw fairies, sprites, spirits, and other entities. This was because, Jaynes posits, the two hemispheres of the brain were more fully connected, so the auditory regions of the left hemisphere were directly connected to the hallucinatory regions of the right hemisphere (Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas) that, in modern people, are normally active only during dreaming or in schizophrenics. Because of this direct connection, Jaynes suggests what we now call hallucinations probably were a common part of the everyday experience of ancient peoples.
It was the rise of the Mesopotamian city-state empire, Jaynes suggests, and its use of written language that was largely responsible for the breakdown of this connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, causing all of us except the occasional mystic or schizophrenic to lose contact with much of the right hemisphere during our normal waking consciousness. Jaynes’s arguments are persuasive, particularly where they draw on historical record and contemporary neurology. If his perspective is accurate, we would expect that people living today in the same way all humans did 10,000 years ago would live in a world alive with spirits, energies, and voices. When people are removed from that world and “civilized” by learning to read and write, they quickly (in as little as one generation, perhaps within an individual’s life span) lose contact with that other world.
Another view is advanced by Terence McKenna in Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge.4 McKenna believes that the reconnection of the bicameral mind in cultures ancient and modern was and is brought about by the ingestion of certain plant substances. Hallucinatory plants are used by numerous cultures to open the doors to the world of the gods, McKenna points out. He even goes so far as to suggest that the rigidity, pain, and sterility of modern life are largely the result of our having lost access to those worlds because of the regulation and the control of these substances that once grew throughout humanity’s habitat. McKenna proposes that the use of these plants helped catalyze the birth of human consciousness in early primates. This in turn spurred the development of the thinking and mystical brain/mind and gave the human species the mental power to set about replacing the plants with its own ways of controlling the mystical or divine experience, principally through the force of law promoted by organized religions.
Both Jaynes and McKenna contribute significantly to our understanding of the history of consciousness. McKenna has lived among and studied tribal peoples who today use these plants to meet and talk with the spirits of their world, and Jaynes has extensively studied the writings of past civilizations and people who said they heard the voices of their gods within their own heads. Regardless of the technique or method, there is a consensus among them and others that ancient and “modern primitive” people share the ability to see, feel, and hear something that we in modern Western society generally do not.
When a Shoshone looked about for food, he listened to what the land told him, the voices of the plants and the animals and the earth itself. They showed and told him where his day’s meal would be found and also what types of ceremony would be appropriate to thank the world for this gift.
Contrast this with how European kings lived in the Middle Ages and how the dominator mind-set of that era has led us into an ironically unaware pseudo-information age and, perhaps unwittingly, into what author Daniel Quinn and the Australian Aborigines call “the great forgetting.”
Our minds and our cultures created our situation. There’s great insight in understanding this and much power in realizing how much of a role we can play in redefining the future of the planet for ourselves and our children.
From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, © 1998, 1999,
2004, published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
The Secret of “Enough”
From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight:
Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation
For I have learned, in whatsoever state
I am, therewith to be content.
—SAINT PAUL, LETTER TO THE PHILIPPIANS, 4:11
FIRST, THE TRUTH.
If you are naked, cold, and hungry and somehow you get shelter, clothing, and food, you will feel better. Providing for these necessities creates a qualitative change in life and could even be said to, in some ways, produce “happiness.” You feel comfortable and safe. Your state of mind and emotional sense of well-being have improved as a result of these external changes, the result of your having acquired some stuff. Let’s refer to this as the “enough point.” It represents the point where a person has security, where
their life and existence are not in danger.
Now, the lie or myth.
“If some stuff will make you happy, then twice as much stuff will make you twice as happy, 10 times as much will make you 10 times as happy, and so on into infinity.”
By this logic, the fabulously rich such as Prince Charles, Bill Gates, or King Fahd must live in a state of perpetual bliss. “Greed is good,” the oft-repeated mantra of the Reagan era, embodied the religious or moral way of expressing this myth. More is better. He who dies with the most toys wins.
Many Americans who lived through the Republican Great Depression discovered in that time that “More is better” is a myth. My wife’s grandmother, who died in her nineties and was still living frugally but comfortably, owned a farm during that time and was able to provide for nearly all of her family’s needs by growing her own food, burning wood, and making their clothing. Recycling wasn’t a fad to save the environment but a necessary part of staying alive and comfortable. Great-grandma had enough money in investments and from the sale of the farm to live a rather extravagant lifestyle, but she still bought her two dresses each year from the Sears catalog, collected rainwater to wash her beautiful long hair, wrote poetry, and found joy in preparing her own meals from scratch. She saw the myth for what it was and was unaffected by it.
Some, of course, came through the Great Depression so scarred by the experience that they went in the opposite direction and totally embraced the myth. The excesses of Howard Hughes, for example, are legendary—as is the painful reality that almost limitless resources never bought him happiness.
Similarly, the myth has become a core belief in the cultures of America, much of Europe, and most of the developing world. Advertisers encourage children and adults to acquire products they don’t need, with the implicit message that getting, having, and using things will produce happiness. Often the advertising message of “Buy this and you will be happier” is so blatant as to be startling to a person sensitized to the myth. “Forget about the ‘enough point,’” these sellers say, “this product or service will be the one that finally brings you fulfillment.”
The Meaning of Wealth
But we are the people—both those who feel that “enough” is a humble level of comfort and those who crave great wealth—of our culture. Like the air we breathe, it’s often easy to forget that we are members of a culture that is unique and that has its own assumptions. This younger culture is based on a simple economy: you produce goods or services that have value to others and then exchange them with others for goods or services they produce that you want or need. Money arose as a way of simplifying the exchange, but this is the basic equation. This concept of wealth as a measure of goods or money owned is intrinsic to these cultures; so, in this regard you could say that all of these different cultures around the world are really the same, variations on a single theme, different patterns woven of the same cloth.
The Wealth of Security
Although they number fewer than 1 percent of all humans on the planet, the result of a relentless five-millennium genocide by our worldwide younger culture, members of older cultures are still alive on earth. There are also people whose older-culture ways have been so recently taken from them—such as many Native American tribes—that while they may no longer live in the older-culture way, they remember it.
In these older cultures, the concept of “More is better” is unknown. They would consider “Greed is good” to be the statement of an insane person. One person’s eating near another who is hungry is an obscene act.
These values and norms of behavior are quite different from those we see in our own world today. But why? The reason is simple: security is their wealth, not goods or services.
In older cultures the goal of the entire community is to bring every person in the community to the “enough point.” Once that is reached and ensured, people are free to pursue their own personal interests and bliss. The shaman explores trance states, the potter makes more-elegant pots, the storyteller spins new yarns, and parents play with and teach their children how to live successfully.
But Aren’t They Dirt-Poor?
Because older-culture people usually work together to create enough food, shelter, clothing, and comfort to reach the “enough point” and then shift their attention and values to other, more internal pursuits (such as fun or spirituality), they appear to us in younger cultures to be poor.
I remember spending a few days with a Native American healer who taught me about a particular ritual I’ve promised not to reveal in my writing. He lived in a mobile home in the desert, on reservation land that was pitifully lacking in everything except scrub brush, cactus, and dust. His car, a 1970s Chevy, was missing major body parts, and he traded healing ceremonies with the locals for food, gasoline, clothes, and nearly everything else he needed. His income in actual cash was probably less than $500 per year; and if you added up the total market value of everything else he took in during the course of a year, it was probably less than $5,000. By any standard of contemporary Western culture, he was about as poor as you can be in America and still stay alive. And his lifestyle was nearly identical to the other 200 or 300 families who lived within 20 miles of him and were members of his tribe: they were all “poor.”
But he had things that most of the people I knew back in Atlanta living in upscale suburban homes lacked.
If he became ill, people would care for him. If he needed food or clothes, they’d give them to him. If he was in trouble, they were there with him. When his only child needed something, somehow it always materialized from the local community. When he got old, he knew somebody would take him in; if he lost his home, others would help him build or find another. No matter what happened to him, it was as if it happened to the entire community.
As we got to know each other and I met people in his small “town,” I discovered that his riches of security and support from his neighbors weren’t unique to him just because he was the community’s healer. The same was true of every person in the “town,” from the guys who did part-time carpentry work in the city 122 miles away to the town drunks. Everybody had cradle-to-grave security, to the maximum extent that it could be provided by the members of the tribe.
Our Poverty
After returning from my first trip to New Mexico, I had dinner with a friend who is a successful attorney with a big law firm in Atlanta.
“What would happen if you lost your job?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I’d probably get another one.”
“What if the job market was bad? If there was a recession or depression? Or what if you lost your job because of some monumental screw-up you did on a case?”
He looked at his plate of spaghetti with a troubled expression, staring at the twisted strands as if his future were there. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I suppose I’d lose my house first—the mortgage payments, insurance, and taxes are well over $2,000 a month. And the car is another $500.”
“And if your health went bad?” I asked. “If you had some serious disease?”
He looked up. “You mean without the insurance from my employer?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d die,” he said. “I have a colleague who spends most of his time defending insurance companies who’ve done that to people who got sick. They then start looking through the insurance applications to see if there was anything on there the people forgot to mention when they filled it out, like a pre-existing condition, or that they’d once been turned down for insurance. If they find it, they dump them. I know of several people who’ve died, who could be alive today if they’d had the money for the medical care.”
“And when you get old?”
“I have my retirement fund. My 401(k).”
“What if your company ripped it off, or if it was all in stocks and the market crashed?”
He shook his head. “I’d be living on the streets, or in my kid’s garage, assuming he could afford to have me. It wouldn’t be p
retty.”
Even more than his words, his tone of voice and his eyes gave away his essential insecurity. If his employer went down, so would he. He was living—as was I at the time—on a tenuous thread of debt, workaday income, and hope that the government could somehow manage to keep the country’s financial house of cards from crashing down as it had so many times in the past few centuries.
“If you could have anything at all,” I asked him, “what would it be?”
“That’s easy,” he said, smiling. “More time. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and I feel as though I’m on a continuous treadmill. There’s never enough time to spend with my kids, my wife, our family and friends, or even to read a good book. Three nights out of the week I bring work home, and I know that if I’m going to make partner in the firm one day, it’ll have to become five, and maybe even seven days a week. I have no time.”
My friend, surrounded by a wealth of physical possessions, a fancy home with elegant carpeting and furniture, a new Mercedes, wearing an $1,800 suit, was steeped in the poverty that is unique to younger cultures—the poverty of spirit, of time, of security and support. His life had no safe foundation and seemed to have little meaning beyond achieving the next level of income and creature comforts.
As my Native American mentor said of me, “Boy, you think you’re rich, but you’re poor beyond your imaginings.” So we must, as a culture, rediscover where the point of “enough” is, both materially and spiritually. By finding this point, you become infinitely richer.
From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, © 1998, 1999,
2004, published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
The Thom Hartmann Reader Page 17