DREAMS IN A BACKWATER

PART SIX

II

(Fuel of the mind:  anger, love, hope, fear, desire, anxiety.  Scattering the mind, fueling the mind:  the restless, pulsating surge of emotions.  Do not pretend to yourself that you know who you are.  But pretend it to others.  Knowingly.  Knowingly.  Smile and frown.  Laugh and cry.  But don't give yourself away.  Be true to the moment.  But knowingly.  Knowingly.  Don't give yourself away.)

(1)

SONG TO THE GREAT SPIRIT

The earliest sign of springtime's arrival is subtly given.  It comes even while the ground remains buried under snow and when yet more snow is certain to fall; weeks will pass before the glory-of-the-snows and the crocuses unveil their blossoms.  The first sign of spring is a change in temperature comprising only a few degrees, and lasting no more than an hour or two one winter's afternoon.  It's a mere softening of air, a slight freshening of the breeze – that is all.  But for those who are attentive, the sign is clear:  the tide has turned; winter has begun to recede; now all that is required is patience.  Easier said than done, of course, for one who awaits the coming of spring as eagerly as the return of a lover!  But there soon follows a day, then two or even three days in a row, when the temperature rises just high enough just long enough to cause the icicles to begin their slow drip, drip from the rooftops of the houses.  The fangs of winter begin to melt; the wolf that barked and howled so savagely at the door turns and trots a few paces away.  He does not go far – not yet – not yet; he has still to snap his jaws and snarl a few times more; but his journey to some other part of the world has at last begun.

Up at the cemetery, the snow begins to grow patchy.  The sky up above is patchy as well:  the hard, grey clouds of winter break apart to reveal a luminous, if still somewhat watery, blue.  The grass where it shows is matted and sopping; the ground squishes like a soggy sponge underfoot.  Little piles of round, hard pellets – rabbit dung – appear here and there; twigs and small branches lie strewn across the surface of what snow remains, the colorless surface of which reveals the scattering of debris to be quite uniformly distributed:  it's as if the whole of nature had given itself a great shake, showering the earth with bits of old leaves and twigs, hard nuggets of bark and broken acorn shells and tiny pine cones.  The ground gives off a dank odor, and this dank odor fills the air, whereupon it impresses the senses, paradoxically, as the odor of freshness.  The body knows what the mind can only be told:  that the earth is rousing itself from its long sleep and is at long last coming to life again.

Today as I cross the cemetery and begin to follow the path into woods, making the long, slow descent down the side of the gully to the creek at the bottom, there crossing over and climbing the steep slope at the far side, I feel both body and mind begin to slowly relax.  The animal inside me stretches and blinks, sniffing tentatively at the air, probing gingerly at the world all around.  Its senses alert, the human in me finds his ease, instinctively trusting the animal within:  it knows what it is about.  My thoughts blow away.  They race and hurry through my mind, jumbling up on each other, separating again – but not to be pursued and contemplated:  they simply scatter and are gone.  I am eyes and ears only, smell and touch, without the distracting presence of an abstracting intellect; my mind correlates what my senses reveal but does not judge either myself or the world to be anything more than what my senses reveal.  It does not need to:  this untamed awareness is enough.  I feel myself to be at home.  That which blows through my mind, scattering abstract thought and leaving the senses newly born, is that which blows likewise throughout the whole of nature; and since I myself am born of nature, what more than this do I need?

Oh, of course, it is true that were I to live in this wild world always instead of for only a few brief, stolen hours, I would need to know it much better than I do now; but of course, had I been born to such a world that need would be answered:  I would have learned through experience what was necessary for me to know.  And, of course, not all the answers given would have been to my immediate liking:  nature is often harsh, and frequently cruel.  And yet it is our truest home – why did we humans forsake it?  "Greed and vanity, vanity and greed" is the constant reply my bruised heart gives; but of course I know that the truth is more complex and subtle than this.  What we wanted was only what any animal wants:  safety, protection, comfort.  Our damnation consists in the fact that we have been made too well-equipped for success; we are, in a sense, too capable for our own good.  "Damnation" I call it (though the end of our story cannot be foretold) because, at some point in our distant past we developed into a civilized species, and, in so doing, lost awareness of the profundity of our connection to the earth, to the natural world from which we sprang.  In consequence, we lost touch with that vital force which connects us to the world, a force which, running like an invisible thread through all of nature and therefore, as creatures born of nature, through us well, reveals us to be inextricably bound to it, made of the same substance and quality, the same whole cloth.  I can find only one word with which to name this force:  that word is Spirit.

What do I mean by "Spirit"?  Consciousness, I suppose – if consciousness can be understood to exist and be perceived without words.  Yet Spirit I hold to be the more suitable word, for it connotes something not quite so formulaic, not so subject in its causality to human thought alone, as that which "consciousness" suggests.  No, what I perceive is not a matter of human invention.  Yet neither does it exist external to humanity in any greater degree than it derives from each individual's sense of having a singular and unique causality:  it is not a god or power that we can appeal to; the only appeal we can make lies in understanding its existence as opposed to attempting to bargain with it.  And its existence is properly beheld as being both within and without us; it is both personal and impersonal, objective as well as subjective in its manifestation.  It is not stronger than we are – hence our belief that we can make it subject to our will; but nether are we stronger than it:  and this crucial fact is what the modern human has forgotten.  We are both "self" and "other"; the two forces are profoundly intertwined and wholly interdependent.

The mode of perception giving rise to such thought does not, however, last long in me.  It is too fragile, and I am too much a creation of civilized society, of the modern, industrialized, computerized, digitalized world, for that to be.  Soon enough, thoughts born of my connection to that world come fetching back into my head:  I am the angry, frustrated, and somewhat self-pitying man I commonly know myself to be.  But this too is no more than another form that Spirit takes in me:  aggrieved witness to the sabotage of nature, furiously wailing that my true birthright has been stolen from me.  I belong to nature, yet can no longer return to it.  Perhaps some future generation will, but not mine.  And so Spirit takes this form in us:  the futile anger of men and women, shaking their fists into the face of an angry God.  Fools are we all.  Of course, we no longer believe in God, and so shake our fists at society instead; yet it comes to the same thing:  we are angry at a world of human creation grown beyond human control, and have discovered that it now dominates our existence in the manner of a god.  We have been separated from Spirit, and so feel threatened by this new mutation:  a world born of humans, predicated by necessity on the precepts of nature, but divorced from the knowledge that it and we are one.

But not wholly, I insist:  never wholly.  Spirit, existing within me as well as without, can never be driven completely away.  Even now I have begun to call it back, and to wonder what kind of knowledge its deeper understanding might bring.  I have a growing sense, for instance, that this interconnecting capacity of Spirit is that which I have previously postulated as lying behind the surface of the world I see around me.  This I have named before as the subconscious; as the nexus between the objective and subjective realms; between self and other; probably I have formulated it in other ways as well; certainly I have postulated often enough that it needs to be perceived in a manner other than that of abstract intellectualization, however well such abstraction might illuminate via its descriptive powers the path towards understanding.  But I wonder, for instance, if the reason humans, now as always, respond to the shapes and forms of nature, to that which their senses apprehend, is that something exists within us which knows itself to be in intimate connection with these shapes and forms; and that the true knowledge of our relationship, and hence of the core and substance of reality itself, depends upon its apprehension through the "eyes" of Spirit.  That is to say, if I see (for instance) a tree, my apprehension of the tree is dependent in its causality not so much upon my visual sensing of it, but in that which we both alike share ("Spirit"), my eyes being the mere tool by which that sharing manifests.  I am still, and always, myself, just as the tree is, and always will be, the tree; we are separate even as we are one; as I apprehend the tree the tree apprehends me (though not, obviously, in the same way).  The unity which connects us both lies deeper than our separateness:  it is, by definition, more complete and whole; and this being so, in our very separateness I and the tree are each whole, for we each partake of this unity.  To understand the truth of this, and what it means, is, I am convinced, to understand that which constitutes "dreaming" while yet still awake, and holds the key to gaining insight into how to awaken to that which gives the dream its power to manifest reality . . .

But there still remains this to be said:  that the compassion which humans feel towards the suffering of both human and nonhuman animals alike, when it springs from an anxious, self-consciously derived belief in the essential aloneness of each individual being, is both faulty and false.  Rationally speaking, one knows that death, for a nonhuman animal, is in all probability quite a different experience from what we might imagine it to be.  It's true that death at the jaws, talons, or claws of a predator would likely inspire something akin, if not precisely analogous, to the panic and egoistic fear we ourselves imagine when contemplating the encounter with a similarly brutal and violent death.  And the animal that meets death through exposure to the elements or through privation of food and water would, one assumes, experience the approach of death much the same as we ourselves would, by a slowly growing sense of fatigue which, gradually overtaking the body, likewise overtakes the mental faculties.  It seems fairly safe to assume, however, that nonhuman animals do not, in facing the various forms that death takes in the wild, experience the same quality of fear as do humans.  That nonhuman animals have a sense of their own singularity, of their uniqueness as individual biological entities, cannot, I think, be seriously contended; but neither can the fact that this sense of individual presence, this recognition of a self-sustaining cohesiveness, increases according to the complexity of species involved.  Taken as a whole, nonhuman animals may be assumed to lack the development of anything greater than the rudiments of that self-reflecting consciousness which gives members of the human species a belief in their essential aloneness in the world.  Yet this belief is, as I have said, in its essence a false one, representing both a superficial understanding of our relationship to the wider realm of nature and a self-indulgently one-sided apprehension of our importance with regard to that relationship.  For humans "know" consciously what nonhuman animals do not:  that we are born of, and are thus profoundly intertwined and interconnected with, the world of nature.  This fundamental truth is, of course, scientifically unassailable; but the spiritual aspect of that relationship, such as I have described it above, also has a scientific – that is to say, a biological – basis.  What else can the impulse towards compassion be truly correlated to but an inherently existent cognition of our connection to all of nature?  To argue that compassion is born of mere anthropomorphism, the displacement of our own fears upon the subject of another, is to place too much weight upon our separateness from nature, and upon that aspect of psychology which allows for this sense of separateness; it ignores the fundamental unity which connects all of nature's inhabitants, and pays too little heed to our knowledge of such a unity.  Compassion itself speaks of an inherent awareness of this; it is the form which our recognition takes that, in harming nature, we harm ourselves.  The whole of evolution, it might well be argued, has operated in order to bring forth a species capable of expressing such compassion, which, properly developed and understood, allows us to recognize the equality that exists between nature's other inhabitants and ourselves, even while recognizing that we are all, human and nonhuman animals alike, separate individuals, each of whom are, factually speaking, separate and alone.  Thus humans exist both apart from and in unified cohesion with the surrounding world, are more highly evolved than nonhuman animals and yet no more than their equals.  Giving moral recognition to ourselves as members of a species which nevertheless remains inextricably bound to the whole of nature, we thus become obligated to extend the same moral consideration to other species as well; and the enhancement of our potential for this formulation of compassion is, I believe, the one goal towards which we should most wholly strive.  It might be said that the decision is not wholly ours to make – and yet I would ask:  At this point in our evolutionary development, why should it not be?