Ecological Intelligence

by Ian Mccallum

  And then came the Nicene Creed. A little over a thousand years ago, in the year 869, in the ancient city of Constantinople the all-male principals of the Holy Catholic Church finalized what we know today as the Nicene Creed—the formal and final statement of the chief tenets of Christian belief as adopted by a previous Council in the city of Nicaea eighty-two years previously. On that day, at that meeting in Constantinople, says psychologist and writer James Hillman, soul finally lost its dominion. “Our notion of a tripartite cosmos of spirit, soul and body, devolved into a dualism of spirit (or mind) and body (or matter).” Soul as an image of depth, darkness, warmth, moistness, and animation, in short—creativity and femininity—was displaced, or rather, incorporated into the more masculine-orientated notion of spirit. Hillman continues, “What the Constantinople Council did to soul, rejecting this image, only culminated a long process beginning with Paul, the Saint, of substituting and disguising, and, forever after, confusing soul with spirit.”

  Spirit and soul are not the same. Like the rows of thorns on the ziziphus, they anticipate each other. They are complementary opposites. Spirit is cool, pointed, and soaring. It gives us wings. Soul is Earthbound and warm. It gives us roots. It loves the Earth and everything that comes out of it. Soul knows about the shadow. And as any-one involved in healing will tell you, the wounds of the spirit are most often healed by soul.

  In the psyche as it is in the world “out there,” what we subdue, deny, and dominate comes back to us—if we let it. If we don’t, it comes back at us. It is evident, in spite of the Nicene Creed and the long history of attempts to negate the pagan belief in animal deities, the image and influence of animals in the human psyche refuse to go away. As biblical scholar Louis Charbonneau-Lassay wrote,

  Our unconscious bond with animals might explain why the fantastic stories of animals, birds and trees brought back to the West by the first great world travelers of the second half of the Middle Ages were so rapidly taken over by the Western symbolists to represent the gifts of God and even Christ himself.

  It may also explain the shared and troubled visions of the seventh-century Hebrew prophet Ezekiel and the evangelist Saint John, both of whom saw the coming to life of four animals in the mysterious crown of Christ:

  And the first beast was like a lion and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had the face of a man and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And they were saying holy, holy, holy—which was and is and is to come.

  Is it any wonder that these visionaries were troubled? Is it any wonder that we have established societies to prevent cruelty to these creatures—these second-class citizens of human society? And is it too much to suppose that the core of the modern feminist as well as the environmental movements of our day are the inevitable psychological rebellion against the long-standing negation and oppression of soul?

  When the great myth of Pan is reviewed, it should become clear that the pagan god of the wild did not die at all. Instead, he went underground. His hiding place, for the past two thousand years, has been in the shadowy depths of the human psyche. Psychologically, the death of Pan can be interpreted as the repression of the instinctive, spontaneous, raw, or wild parts of the psyche that occurred with the rise of a monotheistic consciousness. Great Pan did not really die, however, for nothing in the psyche dies. Like molecular particles, which can be changed but not destroyed, ideas can be repressed, yes, but extinguished…no.

  It is well known, in analytical work, that that which we reject we project, and in this light, says social scientist and naturalist Herbert Schroeder, it is no wonder that the horned and hoofed image of Pan was so easily incorporated into the Christian mythology of Satan. This tells us that when a natural archetype such as Pan is repressed, it becomes part of our shadow, only to reappear in a negative form outside of us, as the great enemy, a source of danger, suffering, and evil. In the case of Pan, however, the inner psychic struggle between instinct and consciousness, between our biology and what we might become, was then projected beyond the concept of Satan to the outer world of soul and Nature—the playing fields of Pan. What ensued has been an ongoing, archetypal battle between Light and Darkness, with wild nature, including the wild parts of ourselves, cast in the role of Darkness, a phenomenon to be conquered, civilized, and subdued.

  The history of colonialism bears testimony to this claim, an example of which is the 1492 “discovery” of America by Columbus, the same year that Jews, by royal edict, were evicted from Spain. Barry Lopez writes “a process was set in motion that would lead to the incredible sixteenth-century atrocities by the conquistadors against the natives of the New World.” It was against those who lived close to Nature and to the animals. These atrocities were not confined to the Americas, by the way, but to almost every country where indigenous people were deemed by those who colonized them to be heathen, pagan, and in need of conversion to their way of thinking and to their notions of Nature and of God.

  And what about the notion of Man as the apex of creation? A clue as to the perpetuation of this inflated belief can be found in the twenty-eighth verse of the first chapter of Genesis: be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the face of the Earth.

  At great cost, not only to ourselves but to the environment, we have taken this admonition all too literally. Looked at critically, it can be seen as an admonition for survival, and not without profound biological undertones either. It tells us that the enemy is out there, that we are the in-group, the champions, the blessed, and the inheritors of the Earth. It has played right into our genetically driven needs for territory, rank, status, security, esteem, attachment, and belonging—us versus them. Inevitably, it has reinforced the inf lated belief that human beings are at the cutting edge of creation. But it has done more. It has defined the other as different, to be subdued, and there-fore less than us. We have tended to regard the importance of “every living thing that moveth upon the Earth” not according to the intrinsic worth of all living things, but according to how useful they are to us. We have forgotten not only the meaning we derive from them, but, more importantly, the profound inf luence they have in our lives as soul makers.

  If there was indeed a voice from the Greek Isles announcing that the great Pan was dead, how different is it from that of the eighteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche (1844–1900) who, in his book Joyous Wisdom, shockingly announced “God is dead!” What did he mean and, in the light of an ecological intelligence, what—if anything—is its significance? Could it be that the voice of Pan is being heard once more, this time in the psyche of the human animal, telling us that the animals are within us, that every living thing is an expression of God and that we are the keepers of our zoo? For me, analyst Edward Edinger answers this question beautifully: “God has fallen out of heaven, and into the psyche of man. Each individual is now obliged to find his or her own unique relation to the numinosum.” In other words, each individual must find his or her own relationship to the religious experience. Then there is writer Thomas Elsner, who sees the “death of God” as the beginning of individuation in Jung’s sense of the word, and also the beginning of a process of transformation and a renewal of the God image itself. The “death of God” then, is the shedding of a skin.

  It is time to shed our prejudices against things that are wild, untamed, or unconverted—more especially our animal nature. Historically, almost every animal—from the fabulous beasts, the phoenix, sphinx and centaur, to birds, sea creatures, insects, and domestic animals—has, in some way, struck a chord in the human psyche. How can we forget them? They are on our family crests and they are in our dreams. More than forty constellations in the southern night sky are named after them, and every other sports team has its animal totem.

  In any modern home there is bound to be a picture, a painting, or a calendar that features some kind of nonhuman animal. We have toy animals, a
nimal carvings, and animal stories. They are in our blood and in our imagination. And now, with the unraveling of the human genome, we have proof of a kinship of science and soul. And let’s not forget those animals that rarely feature on our family crests—hyenas, vultures, and the other shadow animals in our psyche. Let’s welcome them back again. After all, we named them. They, too, are our soul mates and we can learn a lot about ourselves from them. Life without animals would be unthinkable. It is what the poets and the shamans have been trying to tell us for years. Let’s remember our wild side.

  So you see, if you fall into a lion’s pit the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it’s hungry or because it’s bloodthirsty… but because you’ve invaded its territory.

  Yann Martel, The Life Of Pi

  One of the biggest intellectual challenges of the 21st century will be to construct unified images of human nature that do not denigrate our animal past or our future potentials as members of the human family.

  Jaak Panksepp

  5

  REMEMBERING OUR WILD SIDE

  IN A WORLD THAT GENERALLY REGARDS REFINEMENT AND DOMESTICATION of everything from sugar to human instincts to be the hallmarks of civilization and progress, we need to be mindful that invariably something significant has been lost in the process. Civilization, for all its socalled advances and advantages, has cost many of us, perhaps too many, our sense of wildness. Sometimes we are not even sure what this wildness means, but it does not take much analysis to realize that deep down we really miss it.

  To be wild is to be alert to the needs of the flesh and the warning calls of distress. It is to be spontaneous—to live one’s Earthiness and one’s notions of God independent of outside approval. It is to dance, to work and to play with passion, and, when called upon, to act dispassionately, swiftly, and without personal feeling or bias. It is to be as patient as a heron—to be able to wait for hours at the edge of hunger. It is to understand the double meaning of the word outrageous—to act without rage, to do something out of character, to cross-dress, to stilt walk to a disciplinary hearing, to use a shoe as a basketball, and to make a fool of yourself without being stupid. Its other meaning is to act out of rage. It is to be aware of the fury at the edge of an inner hurricane and to know your way back to the calmness at its eye. It is to conform every now and then, to be streetwise, and to be unafraid of entering those inner and outer territories where shit happens. It is the man-child, woman-child in us that admires this kind of wildness in others, especially in our fathers and mothers. It is that same child who loves the wildness of nudity, who longs for a larynx that is free to sing and shout, and who loves to go down to the river and to watch it as if she was watching the flow of her own blood.

  Poet Robert Bly reminds us that the wildness of the wild man is neither criminal nor psychotic. Rather, as Yeats puts it, it is to be “mad as the mist and snow.” And we do miss that madness. How many of us remember, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with envy, the wild, benign mischief makers of our youth so aptly described by Rumi in this poem, translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, “Has any-one seen the boy?”

  Has anyone seen the boy who used to come here?

  Round-faced troublemaker, quick to find a joke,

  slow to be serious, red shirt,

  perfect co-ordination, sly, strong muscled,

  with things always in his pocket: reed flute,

  worn pick, polished and ready for his Talent

  you know that one.

  Have you heard stories about him?

  Pharaoh and the whole Egyptian world

  collapsed for such a Joseph.

  I’d gladly spend years getting word

  of him, even third or fourth hand.

  Children love the wild anecdotes of their parents. Porous to the psychic conditions that surround them, they love the hidden stories of the soul, often demanding to hear them again and again. It is a strange fact that children often grow up to become the champions of the unlived wildness of their parents. These children are sometimes known as the black sheep of our families.

  And then there is Rilke who, in this masterful poem, writes of the caged wildness of the panther in all of us:

  His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

  has grown so weary, that it cannot hold anything else.

  It seems to him that there are a thousand bars,

  and behind the bars, no world.

  As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

  the movement of his powerful, soft strides

  is like a ritual dance around a centre

  in which a mighty will stands…paralyzed.

  Only at times,

  only at times…the curtain of the pupil lifts…

  quietly an image enters in,

  rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,

  plunges into the heart

  and is gone.

  I think we can all, in some small way, relate to the stuckness of that elegant yet pathetic animal in the poem. We are the only animal who can turn our back on our animal nature and it is then, and precisely then, that the bars come down on our world. To be caged is another way of describing a loss of creativity. Watch out for it. It is a well-known condition among all men and women who “go to work.” It is called burnout—a condition in which the sensing of the dream of what one always wanted to do or to be enters one’s thoughts, plunges into the heart, and disappears. It is about a career that began as a passion, then became a duty and, finally, a burden. Be aware of the process, for in its early stages, the signs are subtle. You will hear it in the sharpened cynicism of your speech when you talk about your work. You will feel it in the growing heaviness of your body when the subject of work is raised. Because our identity is so intimately linked with our work, and with it “the complex, volatile chemistry of approval, self-worth and the instinct to provide,” says the poet David Whyte, it is vital that you keep asking yourself, “What has become of me in my work?”

  Creativity, passion, and vision invariably go together, which is why Rilke’s poem of the panther is so significant. Try not to forget the vision, the energy, and the wild archetype—that great inner artist that drew you into your work in the first place. Try to remember who, or what, put you behind those bars, if not you? After all, said Camus, “a man’s work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

  To lose touch with one’s wildness is to mistake it for brutality—the shadow, or the dark side of wildness. As Bly confirms, “some boys are so afraid of becoming domesticated that they become savage.” They become defiant, aggressive, coarse, and self-destructive—the very opposite of the wildness that we miss. And as many of us know, there is sometimes a fine line between what is savage and what is wild. Poet Theodore Roethke captures the knife-edged fineness of the line—as well as the fear of what could be unleashed when it is crossed. In his poem “My Papa’s Waltz,” it can be found in his description of the face of a mother watching her husband, lost in a drunken dance with their young son.

  We romped until the pans

  Slid from the kitchen shelf;

  My mother’s countenance

  Could not unfrown itself.

  HUMAN SURVIVAL—WILD STRATEGIES

  From bacteria to buffalo and brain surgeons, the history of everything organic can be described by British science educator Michael Poole’s acronym MR. GREE N, which stands for movement, respiration, growth, reproduction, excitability, excretion, and nutrition. It is at the same time a history of self-preservation and protection, involving competition, challenge, cooperation, collaboration, opportunism, deception, risk taking, and even altruism. It does not matter who or where we are, our lives at all times will involve subtle and sometimes obvious combinations of these survival strategies. Whether we are lions, hyenas, or humans, we engage in these activities for the same reasons—for food, turf or territory,
security, approval, sexual partners, rank, status, attachment, and belonging. And our emotions and residual feelings come along with them—anticipatory pleasure, anxiety, fear, joy, disappointment, envy, hate, frustration, panic, distress, contentment, and love. In the interest of self-preservation, we employ these strategies not only to establish ourselves, but also to promote and to protect ourselves. This is nothing to be ashamed of. For example, cooperation, that essential social endeavor to share one’s life with another, is, at its roots, an endeavor to enhance one’s own protection and survival.

  It is difficult to find a creature that is not equipped with some form of self-protection. From the exoskeletons of beetles, tortoises, and lobsters, from stingers, thorns, and claws, to the burglar bars, jagged, written warnings, and barbed words of human speech, every organism has a way of dealing with external threats to its existence. Every creature is, in some way, geared to being sensitive to and escaping from danger. Some organisms rely on speed or brute strength to protect themselves, others on electrochemical defenses such as toxic juices and repellent sprays. And that includes the human animal. How many of us live in homes surrounded by electric fences or have been on the stinging end of an accusation designed to shock? Attacking language is a part of the evolution of the human tongue and so is the socially expedient ability to say “I’m sorry.”

  When they are balanced, our survival strategies are healthy—they hold families, units, teams, societies, and civilizations together. On the other hand, any excessive or underuse of any one of them is a guarantee for individual or group disharmony often presenting as frustration, withdrawal, isolation, anger, passive aggression, and depression—some of the reasons why people seek psychological help.