Discuss: Down with Descartes

On the inside of every human pate, there is an attached manufacturer’s warning that says “Full operation of this vehicle is prohibited until the driver is sitting in front of the white line of unconditional love.” The big question,in deep ecology as I understand it,is: at what point does the spiritual life of the human merge with, or become aware of, the spiritual life of nature? There are many answers out there. Descartes’s is only one. I’m posting the methodology and fragments of mine at fivelements.net. Where’s yours?

“Deep” must be experienced, that’s the thing. One can have an intellectual understanding and a belief system that supports acknowledging “oneness”, and that’s great. But once you experience this, for real, however you do, then everything changes. Because your perspective has changed. If everything is alive and conscious and connected to everything else, including us; and has spirit (“standing” as Winona LaDuke has put it) it becomes more difficult to act in old ways. Patterns still have power, but the heart helps change them, not just the mind.

Descartes was a latecomer to the split that began with humanity’s physical abstraction from the natural world (agriculture, fences, domestication, accumulation, hierarchy, civilization), our intellectual abstraction (alphabet, writing, theorizing, mechanizing, scientism) and the consequent emotional and spiritual abstraction both from authentic self-in-relation and from the larger ground of our being.

We evolved (and lived for millennia in harmony) as nodes in the web of life. When we cease singing solo and rediscover our part in the symphony of the uni-verse, we will re-member the aboriginal harmony we have rejected and re-place ourselves in the web which sustains us.

I guess that both Descartes, and the Genesis book vefore, have become manipulated as we humans tend to do: we narrow the landscape that books and thinkers and artists paint in front of us, and from there - hanging from one sentence - we use these as “culture”. As an Italian, I should know, having this suffocating presence from the Vatican over, around, inside, beneath the very fabric of our Italian imagination.
This said, as a writer myself, I can only agree with “Down with Descartes”. That is precisely what I am trying to put across over here - and it is very, very difficult - but a growing number of persons are feeling uncomfortable with the homocentrici vision. Even extremes as animalists-integralists group, seen from this perspective, can be ascribed to this. When “The Future of Nature” was released I read it and wrote an essay, still unpublished (will be out in my new book soon) and it was precisely about this subject: this means that there are a lot of us across the world who wander the same landscape. A really exciting perspective in order to contribute and change some of the perceptions around us, but we should be prepared to face the biggest issue. We are too many on the planet: we have to find a way to use less resources, to become more animal-like. To only use what we need. To NOT accumulate. To return to the “small nature”. The other day I saw what a bear did here in my mountains: he took the honey, he left the eggs. He was only hungry. He did not want to capitalize on this natural resource. Life leads animals. Humans have more of a virus behaviour, and I guess we should seriously consider this without feeling threathened. I know we can make it. It will take a huge collective effort, though.

As much as I agree with any critique of the hyper-individualism and acquisitiveness of modern, Western culture, I also think we need to take an honest look at the history.  Some now admit that Descartes was not merely an evil, ego driven dualist, but rather a very learned articulator of an important step in human evolution.  I believe we need to view the ambivalence of the individual and the communal, the integrative and transcendent nature of people and Nature.

Shamanistic, indigenous peoples were not the high point of culture and a great deal of good has come from taking objective views of reality with the subjective.  Anyone typing on a computer or reading this on the internet is benefitting from the industrial stage of Earth’s story.  The world will evolve again beyond this once we can show that a return to “oneness” is more inspiring than taking the SUV to the mall for an OrangeJulius run.  If you can’t convince a 6th grader to spend more time in a garden than in a mall, then maybe you need to stop blaming Descarte and agriculture and religion and start being a better gardener.

I think that Descartes has taken a bum rap as well. But I do think that the Eastern,Christian, Native American, Sufi,and Orthodox spiritual disciplines (among others) do shed light on “letting the fly out of the bottle”.

One of my favorite passages from Thomas Merton has this to say on the matter:

“When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest.When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you, tells you of it’s unreality and the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God. For now I know that the Creation, which first seems to reveal Him in concepts, then seems to hide Him by the same concepts, finally is revealed in Him, in the Holy Spirit. And we who are in God find ourselves united in Him with all that springs from Him. This is prayer…”

Eisenstein’s article is delightful.

The Cartesian Ontology was useful, as a tool. Tools can take us to a level of sophistication and then new tools can take us to another level. I think the Cartesian Ontology has hung about a bit too long as a tool and is overdue for a replacement in human evolution. Quantum physics, to name only one contemporaneous area of human striving for meaning, points to a holographic model of the universe - very non-Cartesian.

“Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us until we take the greatest stride of Soul folk ever took.”  Christopher Fry from The Prisoner

Those familiar with The Prisoner will understand the context, but let us say that new frameworks are developing all about us, as they must in response to our changing physical environment.

To Jean let me say that at the same time that I hold no beliefs, I also hold no doubts. In an infinite universe all conceptions of God and no conception of god are equally probable. It is a very liberating, holographic concept. Hail Eris! Hail Discordia!

I have a quote on my desk by the other Einstein—Albert—who in 1921 stated, ” A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task ust be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”