Wild Free and Happy Sample 01

[Note: I’m going to be posting a series of rough draft sections from the book I’m working on.  The plan is two per month.  My blog is also home to reviews of 196 books, and more than a dozen of my rants.  Feel free to wander.]

Introduction

I’ve been waking up with the ravens lately, around 5:30.  They celebrate each new day with enthusiasm, jabbering joyfully in the treetops.  Then they take wing and spread out across the land, to spend the day exploring, foraging, hanging out with friends, and celebrating the perfection of creation.  Near the end of the day, as the sun is setting, they return home from their travels, perch high in the trees, and chatter about the day’s events.  They’ve been living like this for more than a million years, and they have left no permanent wounds on the ecosystem.  Experts say that ravens are among the world’s smartest animals.

After the birds have departed in the morning, the neighborhood begins rumbling.  The ground dwelling tropical primates are getting up, taking a crap, eating Fruit Loops, drinking coffee, and then jumping into 2,200 pound (997 kg), 124 horsepower motorized wheelchairs, with luxurious seats, air conditioning, entertainment systems.  They join hordes of speeding wheelchairs, fanning out across a once-thriving wild ecosystem now mutilated by countless permanent wounds.  It’s time for another excellent day at the cubicle farm.  Joy!

As you can see, the two ways of living are radically different.  One is ecologically sustainable, and the other is ecologically insane.  Like the ravens, our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos, have lived in the same place, in the same way, for several million years, without degrading their ecosystem.  We share something like 99 percent of our genes with them.  Chimps, bonobos, ravens, and all other non-human critters have never forgotten who they are.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, our ancestors lived as intelligently as all the other critters in the family of life — wild, free, and happy.  That is who we are in our genes.  That is what we evolved to be.  It is our culture that has forgotten our birthright and identity, and turned into a freak show.  A few isolated groups of humans still remain wild, free, and happy.  But their survival is now threatened by rapidly growing mobs of folks who are lost, entranced, and destructive.  Why?  How did they get so lost?

The venerable historian William Cronon was the son of a history professor.  One day, his father gave him the magic key for understanding reality.  He told his son to carry one question on his journey through life: “How did things get to be this way?”  Sometime, when you’re feeling a bit bored, eager for thrills and excitement, get a library card and spend the next 25 years reading.  Search for answers to Cronon’s question.  Read 500 books on environmental history, ecology, anthropology, night after night, year after year, and type thousands of pages of notes.  I did that.

In the imperial sagas of our culture, we are told that humans are superior to all of our other relatives in the family of life.  We are living miracles that excel in the juju of science and technology.  Life has never been better, and the best is yet to come.  The sagas do acknowledge that there are still a few minor rough spots in our manmade utopia, but they are nothing more than pesky annoyances that can effortlessly be bleeped out by industrial strength magical thinking.  With our legendary big brains, there is nothing that humans cannot rationalize, deny, or wish away.  Progress rocks!  We are the greatest!

Relax and enjoy!  Shop like there’s no tomorrow!  Everything is under control.  Highly trained experts are protecting us, and there is no problem they cannot lick.  Our purpose in life is to work hard, spend like champions, constantly enhance our display of status trinkets, and patriotically contribute as much as possible to our local landfill.  It’s almost as if, from their earliest days, our kiddies were taught to be gravediggers.

In any culture, it’s perfectly normal to trust what your elders taught you, and to retain that mindset until your dying breath.  It’s perfectly normal to spend your entire life being surrounded by people for whom that mindset is as real as the sun and moon.  In healthy, time-proven, sustainable cultures, this is exactly as it should be.  In insane cultures, blind faith accelerates our plunge down paths that lead to nowhere good.  Among our worst options is to mindlessly live and think like a suicidal society expects us to.

Greetings readers!  Welcome to Wild, Free, & Happy!  My name is Richard, and I’ll be your loony heretic for this word dance.  Please take a seat by my campfire.  I have stories to tell.  I want to tell you the saga of our ancestors’ journey, the four million year voyage from tree dwelling primates, to planet thrashing thunder beings — from wild, free, and happy, to frantic stressed out maniacs, zooming down the fast lane toward the zenith of meaninglessness.  Yippee!

Big Mama Nature is being gang-raped by an absolutely insane society.  She is not enjoying it, she is screaming for help, and she is furious.  This society cannot hear her, and seems to be enjoying it.  Rape is the engine of perpetual economic growth, the golden goose.  We are the Crown of Creation.  We are all that matters.  Big Mama’s purpose is to satisfy our insatiable hunger for every imaginable pleasure.

This is what happens when generation after generation is taught nothing but the ridiculous imperial sagas of human supremacy.  It’s very easy to understand why this society is lost in a thick fog of magical thinking and pathological illusions.  Growth is our god word.  Our society trains us, and expects us, to devote our lives to the gang rape.  We deeply admire those who excel at the game, accumulate immense wealth, proudly display their lavish status symbols, and frequently appear on our glowing screens — as champions and role models.  How smart is that?

Our society, of course, is a horrifying masterpiece of spectacular insanity.  What would it be like to explore a wild, free, and happy version of the human saga, a clear and simple version of the story minus the mountains of bullshit and bad craziness?  I mean, seven-point-something billion people are charging at top speed, right past the signs: Wrong Way!  Do Not Enter.  We are on a dark path that dead ends with our extinction.  How smart is that?

Every newborn that squirts out of the womb is a wild animal that evolution has fine-tuned for foraging, scavenging, hunting, and thriving on healthy tropical savannahs.  Their genes are fine-tuned for a wild, free, and happy life — like newborn chimps, bonobos, raccoons, chipmunks, and everything else.  Sadly, our newborns glide out into a family and society that is the opposite of wild, free, and happy.  This culture has no memory of wild, free, and happy — and it proudly celebrates our transformation into hollowed out consumer zombies.  How smart is that?

Maybe it’s time to remember who we are, turn around, begin the long journey home, and return to the family of life.  Maybe it’s time to unlearn, question, and change.  Maybe it’s time to strew tons of banana peels in the path of the monster.  Maybe it’s time to goose every sacred cow, and delegitimize the toxic beliefs that make our culture crazy.

Please be aware that this book contains zero miraculous silver bullet solutions to our slithering multitude of predicaments.  It provides no instructions for conjuring a powerful magic spell that will throw open the gates to an ecological utopia of love, peace, and happiness.  On the following pages, you will find a banquet of outside the box thinking, which may result in something like a mental enema, flushing out a torrent of stinky brown accumulated crud.  This book is a hopelessly crazy-assed effort to break the trance.

We’re about to walk right past the No Trespassing signs, jump over the fence, and take a long strange trip, down an ancient path, to a realm of ideas forbidden by the grownups.  Please toss your cell phones into the shit bucket.  We’re about to begin.  Trust nothing I say.  Think for yourself.  Good luck!  Have fun!

 

What Is A Human Being?

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a gorgeous tropical rainforest in Africa.  Among the many beings living there were three tribes of primates.  They were the ancestors of modern chimps, baboons, and humans.  All of them were tree dwellers.  Primates, who evolved whilst bounding from branch to branch in the forest, have highly developed senses of sight and touch.  On the other hand, mammals that evolved for life on the ground have highly developed senses of smell.

By and by, the climate cooled, the rainforest shrank, and grassland expanded.  The tree dwellers were not amused.  Living on the ground was dangerous, because there were many predators eager to invite them to lunch.  There came a time, some say between 4.2 and 3.5 million years ago, when the human ancestors became fed up with the hardships of life in the trees, and began walking on the ground.  Evolution had not fine-tuned them for surviving in the midst of large predators, and they were easy prey.  Unclever pioneers became cat food.

A bit later, between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, the human ancestors evolved into Homo erectus, a meat-eating, tool-using animal.  Around this time, many large carnivores in Africa went extinct.  Some believe that this was not a coincidence.  Later, when Homo sapiens emerged 250,000 years ago, we were tool-using hunters from day one.

Now, let’s fast forward to the twenty-first century.  The chimps, with whom we share 94 percent of our genes, have remained close to the trees, where they build nests.  They have both day nests and night nests.  The olive baboons have also remained in Africa, and they inhabit rainforests and deserts, but most of them live in grasslands near open woodland.  The humans abandoned tree dwelling, and have spread across the planet, spending much of their time in manufactured nests.

All three tribes eat meat.  All three use tools, but those used by chimps and baboons are still very simple and no-tech.  Chimps and baboons do not read or write.  They have not developed complex language or abstract thinking.  Neither have exploded in numbers or ravaged the global ecosystem.  Both do their hunting primarily with bare hands and teamwork, snatching small critters.  They have found no need to till the soil or enslave other species, because they live in accordance with natural law, and never had an urge to become unusual smarty-pants.

Both chimps and baboons have remained in tropical Africa, the ecosystem for which evolution had fine-tuned them, their home.  Thus, they have no need for clothing, fire, substantial shelters, cell phones, or psych meds.  They continue to enjoy a healthy, pleasant, and traditional wild life — in a genuinely sustainable manner that could not be more intelligent.  Their major challenge is the growing destruction caused by exploding numbers of you-know-who.

Baboons have lived on the savannahs for a very long time, without complex tools, in neighborhoods frequented by hungry large predators.  Hence, spears and javelins are not necessary for the survival of ground dwelling primates.  Thus, humans were not forced to choose between tool addiction and extinction.  Projectile weapons were a half-clever experiment that resulted in colossal unintended consequences that continue to multiply.

Evolution brilliantly encouraged a balance between predators and prey.  If the predators gradually became one percent faster, the prey gradually became one percent faster, not two.  Our development of complex tools blew this ancient balance out of the water, because tools gave us powers that far exceeded those provided by evolution.  They allowed us to kill megafauna.  As our hunting tools became more powerful, we killed more and more animals, while our own numbers grew.  Eventually, this expansion inspired humans to migrate out of Africa, in search of happy hunting grounds.

Leaping beyond our evolutionary boundaries was a risky move, and the unfortunate result is the world you see around you, and the growing storm that’s moving in on us.  At this point, a heretic who thinks outside the box must propose a core question.  Is it better to live simply and sustainably, or to have lots of amazing gizmos and live in a toxic, self-destructive manner that has no future?  The heretic is asking what does it mean to be human?

Imagine a world map that indicates where nonhuman primates live today.  They live in sub-Saharan Africa, southern Asia, Central America, and the warmer regions of South America — the tropics.  They do not inhabit Europe, most of North America, or most of Asia, because evolution has not prepared them for surviving in these cooler habitats.  The only reason that humans can inhabit non-tropical regions is because we developed complex technology — clothing, warm shelters, fire, food storage, stone-tipped spears, and so on.

I’ve been reading about shamans lately, old-fashioned healers who could communicate with the spirit world.  In the tribal mindset, all misfortune is caused by evil spirits sent by sorcerers via invisible projectiles, tiny darts.  This belief is common to many places, including Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Peru, Amazonia, and Australia.  In Ireland, the darts are fairy darts or bolts, and the victims are elf-shot.  The healer’s job was to locate the dart, and suck it out of the victim’s body. 

Is it possible that this widespread belief in evil projectiles reflects an archetypal truth?  Is there an understanding in the collective unconscious that our addiction to spears, javelins, and arrows threw us out of balance and put us on a bad path?  Many old cultures also perceived dark magic in reading, writing, and metal making.

It’s clear that there is an enormous gulf between the primitive mindset and the industrial mindset.  The shaman Martín Prechtel says that we all possess an original, natural, indigenous soul struggling to survive, but it has been largely suppressed by the modern mind, which we use to understand the world.  Healing requires us to rediscover our soul.

Carl Jung talked about the archaic or original mind, which thinks in images, like dreams.  It is the mind of young children.  The modern mind is very different, because it engages in directed thinking — thinking in words.  Jung believed that our minds had many layers, and the oldest layer was the unconscious.  Maybe at some level our minds are similar to those of chimps and baboons.

Our ancestors obviously perceived that humans were unique.  No other animals were killing mammoths with spears, or sitting around campfires in stylish fur coats.  Over the eons, we have been getting more and more clever, and more and more out of balance.  Somewhere in the process, humans developed consciousness, which greased the wheels of cleverness. 

We are very proud of the wonders of consciousness, but Jung thought that it was also our worst devil.  He saw the modern mind as unstable, infantile, and a dangerous loose cannon.  Near the end of his life, in 1963, he had a vision of global catastrophe, maybe 50 years away.

The domestication of plants and animals profoundly altered our relationship to the family of life.  We developed the ability to redesign and dominate entire ecosystems.  Chimps and baboons, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to remain wild, free, and simple.  It’s easy.

In his book, The Parable of the Tribes, Andrew Bard Schmookler discussed the problem of power.  It meant forcing your will against the will of another.  Power was a new form of energy on the planet, and it led to conquest and exploitation.  Once a belligerent bully arrives, the party is over.  Power can only be neutralized by greater power. 

Many, many tribal people around the world developed mindful ways of living in balance with their ecosystem.  The tribes of the Pacific Northwest lived in a relatively sustainable manner, and would still be living like that, if they hadn’t been overrun by bad craziness that metastasized in the Fertile Crescent — on the other side of the world!  Power trumps mindfulness.

As we move beyond peak energy, peak food, peak people, and a stable climate, much of our knowledgebase will become obsolete.  Our glowing screens will go dark, our world will shrink to the nearby locality, and survival will involve spending much of our time outdoors.  How badly will ecosystems be damaged?  Will gardening be possible?  Will humankind survive?

As we work to envision the path forward, it would be wise to be wary of the dangers of tool addiction.  A century or two down the road, we might return to a life of pure jungle simplicity, like Tarzancíto.  If we did, I suspect that our complex and chaotic modern minds will become much calmer and quieter.  If farming and herding become impossible, or if we abandon the habit, and outgrow our obsession with wealth and status, maybe bully power, like patriarchy, will go extinct, too. 

Importantly, we will no longer be able to live in a manmade world, in isolation from the family of life.  We will once again become acquainted with our relatives in the family of life, and learn to live with them.  I don’t think we’re genetically flawed; we just tried a new path, had a bad trip, and made a big mess.

My Name is Chellis...

Chellis Glendinning grew up in Cleveland.  Her father was a caring doctor and a brutal child abuser.  She and her brother were raped, beaten, and tortured.  Her pain was swept under the carpet by the magic of dissociation — a portion of her personality split off and became unconscious.  Memories of her traumatic childhood were forgotten for 40 years.  Amnesia allowed her to function in the world.  She earned a PhD and became a psychotherapist.

One day, in a therapy session, her childhood traumas suddenly began to return to consciousness.  Chellis was determined to fully understand them, resolve them, and recover a healthy state of wholeness.  She wanted to heal herself 100 percent. 

Understanding matters of great importance often requires the use of a powerful medicine called history.  To know who we are, we must know where we came from.  Trauma and pathology are almost the norm throughout today’s society.  A daunting number of people are in therapy, or taking medication, or hobbled by untreated mental imbalances.  These problems are frequently passed from generation to generation.

Chellis explored her family tree and discovered patterns of ancestors who were damaged by alcoholism or mental illness.  She strongly suspected that her father had also been abused.  She learned about her Puritan ancestors in colonial times.  Reverend Thomas Hooker lived in what was to become Connecticut.  On Sundays, he preached the sweet love of Jesus to the faithful, and then he spent the rest of the week as a bloody terrorist, determined to exterminate the diabolical Native American savages.

Looking even deeper into the past, the trail of trauma kept unfolding.  Prior to the invasion of America, Europe was also a realm of intense craziness.  For 300 years the skies were darkened by the smoke of burning witches.  Insane leaders routinely led their people into countless wars.  The written history of Europe was insane from page one.  By and by, Chellis came to comprehend that her father’s madness was just a wee speck of pathology in an enormous tsunami of pathology that spanned many centuries and regions.

Very importantly, she also came to comprehend that this torrent of pathology did not in any way represent the normal human condition.  It was obvious that nature-based societies, like the Native Americans, inhabited a fundamentally different spiritual universe.  They did not devour the land and leave wreckage in their wake.  She could see that nature-based societies more closely represented balance and normality.  They suffered little from mental illness.  Their reverent relationship with the Earth was rooted in a million-year tradition — 35,000 generations of low-impact living. 

It became clear that the madness of modern technological society could readily be traced back to a recent fork in the human journey that occurred about 10,000 years ago, just 300 generations back — the domestication of plants and animals.  “This was the purposeful separation of human existence from the rest of life,” and the fence was its symbol.  It divided the world into two new realms: wild and tamed.  This shattered the ancient wholeness, and replaced it with chronic traumatic stress.

The transition to domestication blindsided human societies.  It was completely out of balance with our traditional, time-proven way of life — living with respect and reverence for the natural world.  The new game was about owning and controlling nature.  Eventually, these unlucky people forgot what it meant to be human beings, and they ended up living like fish out of water — flippity-floppity-flappity.  Gasp!  Gasp!  Gasp!  It was a temporary way of life with no future. 

The last six generations have witnessed the horrific transition to industrial civilization.  The nightmare shifted into fast forward, and we are racing toward a future where nature has been erased by endless shopping enterprises, clear-cuts, crumbling pavement, rotting cities, eroded farms, toxic wastelands, and endless flocks of zombies entranced by glowing cell phones.  Billions of traumatized people perceive this living death as being the normal human existence.  It is no coincidence that our era of flourishing ecological annihilation is also an era of flourishing mental illness. 

“Well-being and wholeness depend on, and exist in constant and complex intimacy with, the well-being and wholeness of the Earth,” according to Chellis.  “It’s well past time for us to come home, to return to the matrix from which we came, to recover what we have lost, to remember again the wisdom and balance of the natural world.”  To explain this process, she sat down with a wooden pencil, and wrote a book called My Name Is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. 

Readers salivating to finally discover the simple, no sacrifice, silver bullet solution to the Earth Crisis will be reduced to sobs and sniffles once again.  Chellis describes a healing process that will likely take generations to complete.  It’s not about healing individuals, it’s about healing the entire society.  I must say that this book truly does provide readers with general guidelines for not only ending the Earth Crisis, but also restoring humankind to genuine sustainability, boundless joy, and complete wildness and freedom.  

There are seven-point-something billion people alive now, many of whom are victims of traumatic stress — paranoid, hyperactive, infantile, powerless, alienated, fearful, depressed, near-comatose beings whose mental wholeness has been shattered into many pieces.  Imagine for a moment repairing this mess — the individuals, the society, the ecosystem, and our history.  Imagine unlocking the shackles of technological society and walking away.  Imagine guiding humankind to a point where we are willing and able to abandon our exploitation of domesticated plants and animals.  Imagine returning home, to the family of life, to wholeness.

Many thinkers have concluded that the reason we got into this mess was a combination of excessive cleverness and inadequate foresight.  Chellis adds another chapter to the story — the immense, highly-contagious, psychological damage resulting from our terrible plunge from balance.  When we become aware of the corrosive presence of this madness, we can more fully comprehend the anatomy of our predicament.

Chellis has given humankind an important Big Vision, a potent idea to explore.  Obviously, the healing process will not be quick or simple.  Our challenge is simply to take a deep breath, roll up our sleeves, and take the first step.

Glendinning, Chellis, My Name Is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, Shambhala, Boston, 1994.

Civilization and Insanity

Are we living in an insanity epidemic?  Yes indeed, we certainly are, according to The Invisible Plague by Dr. Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller.  This book provides an illuminating history of insanity, focusing on the last three centuries in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and the United States.  “Insanity” here refers to two conditions, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (manic-depressive).  Today, “psychosis” is the proper term for describing insanity and lunacy, but the authors preferred to use history’s word, insanity.

The objective of this book was to convince us that an epidemic of insanity has been growing in Western society, based on a small mountain of circumstantial evidence.  Insanity seems to be one of the many unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution.  In the four regions studied, the last 300 years have been an era of turbulent change on a colossal scale.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire had spread to every corner of the world.  The news coming back from frontier outposts consistently reported that insanity was rare or unknown in “primitive” societies, where folks enjoyed a far slower way of life.  Long-term stability was the opposite of crazy.

In Britain, a number of observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were well aware of a growing insanity epidemic, and some actually linked it to civilization — it was simply an acceptable cost for the wonders of progress, wealth, and luxury.  Living in such amazing times over-excited the minds of those who were mentally fragile, and this was simply unavoidable.  Some even saw rising insanity as a badge of honor, indisputable proof that civilization was thriving.  Lunatic asylums were booming, praise the Lord!

By the end of the story, the authors concluded that insanity was growing at a much faster rate than the population.  In the 200 years between 1750 and 1950, the rate of insanity increased 700 percent, and even more in the US and Ireland.  There is an invisible plague all around us!  What can we do?

A specific cause for the insanity epidemic has not been discovered, but contributing factors might be associated with diet, alcohol, toxins, medical care, and/or infectious agents.  It’s more common in men and immigrants, especially when the immigrants are a small minority in the community.  There is a clear association with the rise of industrialization and urbanization. 

In the British Medical Journal, Marco Picchioni reported that schizophrenia “is more frequent in people born in cities — the larger the city, and the longer the person has lived there, the greater the risk.” 

An observer in 1877 commented that the rate of insanity was growing so quickly that it was only a matter of time before the majority of people were insane.  Hmmm…  Are we there yet, Mommy?

   

And now, I’d like to introduce you to Jack D. Forbes (1934-2011), the Native American writer, scholar, and activist who wrote Columbus and Other Cannibals.  Forbes also warned us of an epidemic of insanity, which he called wétiko psychosis, the cannibal disease.  It’s a spiritual illness, or soul disease, that causes people to become predators, and to relentlessly consume the lives of others.

When the white invaders washed up on the shores, the Native Americans were astonished by their bizarre behavior.  They were unbelievably destructive whirlwinds who tirelessly raped women, rivers, forests, animals, peoples, and lands.  “An Indian who was as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death,” said Black Hawk.  “I had not discovered one good trait in the character of the Americans that had come to the country!”  Sadly, no one could disagree with him.

Forbes came to understand that the wétiko psychosis began thousands of years ago, around the Fertile Crescent and Egypt.  Later, it also emerged in Mexico and Peru.  This soul sickness was extremely contagious.  It could be seen almost everywhere today, and it continually spreads from generation to generation.  He says, “We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.”

Wétiko was the essence of European culture, a nightmare world of bloodthirsty vampires and werewolves.  European heroes tended to be warriors, emperors, and a wide variety of assorted thugs, hustlers, and psychopaths.  Their “religion” was something isolated from everyday life, practiced indoors, away from the perfection of Creation.  Their God was indifferent to every form of barbarism, and often encouraged it.  No cannibal experienced the world as being a sacred place.  While they raced to consume others, they were also eating themselves up at the same time!  They had no spiritual connection to life.

The wétiko disease encouraged reckless living and overpopulation, and it flourished amidst consumer hordes.  Most often, males were possessed by the worst forms of the disease — they became monsters.  Obviously, a world dominated by men was not a place of health and balance.  But women were not immune.  The wétiko culture taught everyone to hunger for extravagance and excess, constantly cannibalizing other lands and other lives.  We could never have enough.  We could never find peace.

Is it possible to eliminate the cannibal disease?  Yes.  Will it be easy?  No.  We need to create a just and healthy society, and insane people cannot do this.  Healing must come first — spiritual regeneration.  We must redefine reality.  The goal is to “live a life that is worthwhile, one that is filled with precise acts, beautiful acts, meaningful acts… the path that only a wisdom-seeker can travel.” 

Material things have no significance.  “It is rather the quality of our acts, of our struggle, of our motives, of our love, of our perseverance which are truly significant.”  “The Creator has given all of us good paths to follow, based upon good speech, love, and sacred songs.” 

We must remember profound respect for all life, the ways of our ancestors.  We must remember how to accept responsibility for the decisions we make, and the acts we perform.  We must remember how to live like human beings.  We must return to the red road, the path of balance. 

Forbes generously provided readers with two chapters of guidance for the healing process.  Healing is the most important challenge for the generations now alive — and the generations yet-to-be-born.

 

Torrey, Edwin Fuller, M.D. and Miller, Judy, The Invisible Plague — The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2002.

Picchioni, Marco M. and Murray, Robin M., “Schizophrenia,” British Medical Journal, 2007 July 14; 335(7610): 91–95.

Forbes, Jack D., Columbus and other Cannibals, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2008 (much better than the 1992 edition).

A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy

The Industrial Revolution blew the lid off Pandora’s Box, releasing a poisonous whirlwind of evils into the world.  Millions of rural people were herded into vast, filthy, disease-ridden cities to live among hordes of strangers, perform miserable work, and die young.  It was pure hell, and many people snapped.  Insane asylums began popping up like mushrooms, and the psychotherapy industry was born. 

In Vienna, Freud kept busy treating hysterical Austrians, and Jung worked with “schizy” inmates at a Zürich asylum.  They launched an insurgency against European Puritanism, a mindset that drove many out of their minds — desire was bad, and punctual, robotic conformity to a system of pleasure-free maximum productivity was the compulsory objective.

So, the first wave of psychotherapy was radical and rebellious, but a second wave that emerged in the ‘50s has been regressive.  The new mode purported that newborns were pure, innocent, blank slates.  Once born, the beautiful, helpless “inner child” was vulnerable to abuse from others that could knock it off balance, sometimes permanently. 

In the therapy room, attention was focused on the patient’s past — a hunt for abuse that may have happened decades ago.  Mental illness was usually the result of a screwed up childhood, and it was believed to reside within the patient.  The endless bombardment of dark influences from the surrounding insane society was off the radar.  The goal of mainstream therapy was helping wounded patients adapt to living in an insane society.  Mainstream therapists now practice everywhere in America.

James Hillman (1926-2011) was a student of Jung, and once served as the director of the C. G. Jung Institute.  Over the years, he became a vocal critic of modern psychotherapy.  In his opinion, newborns were not blank slates, and they were not born whole and perfect — they were unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.  

He thought that mainstream therapy was turning the educated middle class into docile plebes, trained to “cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel) to… make it work for you (rather than refuse the unacceptable).”  He strongly believed that the therapy room should become a cell of revolution.  Patients needed to become involved in the insane world, and transform it into a healthier place for all life.  Aim at the core of the problem, not the side effects.

Michael Ventura (born 1945) was a popular journalist for the trendy L.A. Weekly.  He had abundant experience as a consumer of therapy.  Mental illness was a significant theme in his family history.  Most of the people he knew were either in therapy, practicing therapists, or both.  At the same time, he saw that most marriages and relationships around him were dysfunctional to varying degrees.  How could this be, at the zenith of human progress?

In 1990, he interviewed Hillman, and the article generated abundant buzz.  This inspired them to do a book: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse.  It’s a scrapbook of interviews, conversations, and written correspondence, an informal jam session of passionate ideas.  Their two minds soar and play, and the result is a stimulating duet.  The book was published prior to the Prozac Revolution.

According to Jung, “individuation” was the ideal destination — the lifelong process of becoming more and more who you are.  (He also said: “The most terrifying thing is to know yourself.”)  Individuation involved throwing overboard the stuff that was not who you are.  This shifted us from a realm of comfortable habits to unfamiliar territory, where growth was more likely to happen.  When we strayed onto a path where we didn’t belong, our inner life force sent us clear warning messages, “symptoms” (anxiety, depression, etc.).  Hillman said, “Only the unconscious can save us: in your pathology is your salvation.” 

It’s wacky to help people adjust to living in an insane society, to stifle their healthy resistance, and encourage their submission.  Hillman denounced “therapeutic Puritanism,” with its psychic numbing and sensual numbing.  America had been anaesthetized by the Puritan mindset.  “Just look at our land — this continent’s astonishing beauty — and then look at what we immigrants, Bibles in hand, priests and preachers in tow, have done to it.”

The authors linked the rise of mental illness to the rise of individualism and its shadows, alienation and oppression.  For them, the psyche did not live inside the individual, the individual dwelled within the vast timeless collective psyche, like a fish in the ocean.  In the good old days, life was tribal and communal.  Spirituality embraced all sacred beings, animate and inanimate.  Both feet were firmly planted in a stable sense of time and place.  Life was rich with meaning, power, and beauty.  Ventura suspected that “the quality of wholeness is not located in the individual but in a community that includes the environment.”

Christianism blindsided the ancient balance with its new concept of individual salvation.  Suddenly, the creator of the entire universe was paying around-the-clock attention to ME — watching everything I did, continuously reading my mind, and remembering all of my errors.

Following Columbus, the disintegration of ancient balance went into warp drive.  Europeans, their slaves, and the people they conquered were uprooted and scattered across the planet.  The social glue of ancient cultures dissolved.  “Nothing needed to be permanent anymore.”

In the last hundred years, life has gone totally crazy.  Our sense of time and place has vaporized.  Ventura called it “the avalanche.”  We lived in an era of “simultaneous, massive changes on every level of life everywhere, that have built up unstoppable momentum as they speed us toward God knows where.”  Obviously, we’re heading for disaster.  “You can’t negotiate with an avalanche.  Nothing, nothing, nothing is going to stop the shipwreck of this civilization.”

Understand that the world is not ending, just this pathological civilization.  We should not regret its passing, but honor its death with song.  The good news here is that “I” am not sick, my society is.  The good news is that the sick society is busy dying, setting the stage for rebirth and renewal.  Hillman: “Any major change requires a breakdown.”  The next century or two may be rough, but it won’t last forever.  “The only solution can come when the world is reanimated, when we recognize how alive everything is, and how desirable.”

What should we do?  In a nutshell, two things are essential.  (1) We cannot move toward healing without the power of imagination.  Imagination allows us to break out of ruts, overcome barriers, and see farther, with greater clarity.  It strengthens our ability to envision a healthier future.  (2) Individualism is a toxic ball and chain, and we need to leave it behind, in the rubble of the past.  We must remember community living and rejoin the family of life.

Ventura said it like this: “You don’t %@&# around.  You don’t waste your life trying to find a secure place in the avalanche, ‘cause there ain’t no such animal.  You do the work of the soul.”  He told his son, “If you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for — trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”

Hillman, James and Ventura, Michael, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse, Harper Collins, New York, 1992.  http://www.michaelventura.org/

Nature and Madness

Paul Shepard wrote Nature and Madness to explore a perplexing question: “Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?”  Shepard came to the conclusion that modern European-American culture was the damaged offspring of a long process of psychological deterioration.

Obviously, modern consumers live and think in a manner that is radically different from our wild ancestors who lived relatively sustainably.  This change wasn’t the result of freaky genetic mutations or the normal process of evolution.  We still have Pleistocene genes.  Newborns are still wild animals who are ready and anxious to enjoy a good life among a clan of buffalo hunters. 

It wasn’t genes that changed us, it was culture.  Culture is a tribe’s software, and cultural evolution can happen a million times faster than genetic evolution — and that’s exactly what happened.  Few, if any, newborns are now born into wild, free, salmon eating cultures.  Alas, most are condemned to spend their days in the most destructive culture yet devised.  Poor babies! 

The process that leads to the development of healthy, happy, well-adjusted wild humans is a spiral stairway, based on a calendar.  There are time windows in which certain steps in the process can be completed.  If you’ve ever read the story of Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of India, you know that they missed developmental windows for learning how to speak, and walking upright.  Missed windows lead to incomplete development. 

Shepard thought that modern consumers were the offspring of an incomplete developmental process.  We were immature, infantile, psychologically crippled.  By Paleolithic standards, we were childish adults, suffering from arrested development.  He discussed our downward spiral by presenting us with four snapshots.

First, the domestication of plants and animals blindsided the human journey.  We no longer lived in a wild land.  We lived in farm country, an artificial human-controlled ecosystem.  Regular contact with wild animals had been an essential part of our psychological development process.  But farmers erased our wild teachers and replaced them with what Shepard referred to as a horde of goofies — passive, submissive, dim-witted domesticated animals.  We ceased venerating the sacred totemic spirits of the land, and replaced them with a human-like Earth Mother, who sometimes fed us generously, and sometimes didn’t.  We abandoned the leisurely lifestyle of nomadic foraging, and replaced it with miserable backbreaking toil that destroyed the health of both the farmer and the land.

Next came the desert fathers, patriarchal nomadic herders who pushed Earth Mother out of the temple, and replaced her with a powerful, aggressive, authoritarian Sky Father.  He sired three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Monotheism was a fountain of world-rejecting asceticism which “tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots,” according to Shepard.  “The ‘cradle of civilization’ is also the cradle of fanatic ideology — witness the interminable desert wars…”

Next came the Reformation.  The Protestant fathers were fascinated, obsessed, and disgusted by sex, filth, corruption, sensuality, the natural world — life itself.  The puritan path led to estrangement from the body and the world.  It increased the attention paid to sin and evil.

Finally, he discussed the mechanists of industrial society.  They mostly spent their lives indoors in vast manmade urban environments that were densely populated by huge numbers of strangers.  Cities were breeding grounds for myriads of psychological problems.  The city was “the wilderness in disarray, a kind of pandemonium,” a realm of “menacing disintegration.”

Many of us are coming to comprehend that it is remarkably unclever to continue destroying our habitat.  Shepard spent years constructing his controversial explanation.  Whether or not you buy every argument, the primary thrust of the book is the rather obvious notion that our civilization has lost its marbles.  This realization is a mandatory step for any pilgrimage in search of healing, happiness, and sustainability.  We must abandon the belief that we are enjoying the zenith of the amazing human journey, because it locks us into a cage — there is no problem to fix, everything is always getting better.

Human beings thrived as salmon eaters and buffalo hunters.  We were healthy, whole, and happy when we lived in wild tribes in wild ecosystems.  Prince Charles wrote a line I will never forget: “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  It’s heartbreaking to watch insane zoo lions endlessly pacing back and forth in their concrete prison.  Long ago I read an article about condors.  It said that a wild and free condor soaring above the mountains was sacred, majestic, perfect.  But a condor held captive in a zoo was less — far less.  The essay concluded that condor-ness consisted of 10% condor and 90% place. 

After a thorough examination of the process of our decline, Shepard served us a solution that barely covers more than a page.  In terms of our human-ness, we still have the 10% human component — our genes.  What we’re missing is the 90% place.  Therefore, Shepard says, the solution is to raise our children in a manner similar to Neolithic society, in a wild ecosystem, so that they can fully experience a complete, normal, and healthy development process.  I was shocked when I first read this ridiculous and naïve idea.  But later, I realized that he was exactly correct.  It’s a perfect and brilliant solution, but it requires huge change.  Shepard pointed to the destination.  It’s up to us to find the route.

 

Shepard, Paul, Nature and Madness, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1998.  Nature and Madness was originally published in 1982 by Sierra Club Books, but they dropped it because it was controversial.

Warning!  This book is written for gray-haired professors, not a general audience.  Nature and Madness is the opposite of easy to read.  Two beautiful and easy-to-read books that explore psychological development are The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, and The Human Cycle by Colin Turnbull.

A Language Older Than Words

Derrick Jensen’s book, A Language Older Than Words, is a landmark in environmental writing.  A standard formula for eco-books is to describe the evolution of a problem, provide charts, tables, and illustrations to document the extent of the problem, and then present “solutions.”  Typically these are theoretical, politically impossible, pie-in-the-sky solutions based on the premise that humankind is fundamentally rational and reasonable — solutions that require minimal adjustments to the machinery of consumer society, will not significantly interfere with perpetual economic growth, and will let us keep our cell phones, lights, and cars.

Happily, Jensen is not stuck in these ruts.  Obviously, reason is not the guiding force in the journey of humankind.  Obviously, if a workable and intelligent win-win solution to the Earth Crisis existed, we would have already found it and implemented it.  Jung had a name for episodes of mass insanity, like Nazi Germany, or consumer society: psychic epidemics.  Psychic epidemics are far more devastating than natural catastrophes (earthquakes, hurricanes), and reason is powerless to resolve them, because reason does not communicate with the unconscious.

The “language older than words” refers the voice of the living planet — the wind, the burbling brook, the ravens, the howling wolves, the rattling leaves.  Everything is communicating, sharing, cooperating.  Unfortunately, civilized humans have isolated themselves from the rest of the family of life.  We no longer listen to the ancient language, which is always talking to us.  We have become space aliens in our own home.  Not coincidentally, we are racing toward catastrophe. 

Most eco-writers do not reveal a spiritual connection to life on Earth.  Jensen clearly does, and this adds much power to his work.  He is not a professional scholar who is systematically analyzing a sub-optimal process, he’s a man who radiates love for the wild natural world, and deeply cares about it.  This passion is a treasure, and it is slipping through our fingers as each generation lives in greater isolation from the sacred natural world.

Jensen’s father was a fundamentalist Christian and a wealthy businessman.  He was abused as a child, and he grew up to be a violent, controlling tyrant.  He physically and sexually abused his wife, sons, and daughters, including Derrick.  The family lived in fear of his rage, and all of them suffered permanent emotional damage.  Many years later, his father still refuses to acknowledge his violent past, and Derrick still has trouble sleeping.  Jensen says that if he had to do his childhood over again, he would kill his father.  He believes that it’s essentially impossible to rehabilitate an habitual abuser.

During the years of violent rage, the family members lived in a world of make believe, blocking out the fear and suffering.  In order to survive the terror, they had to shut down emotionally.  This family was not an unusual freak.  Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are commonplace in our society. 

In many ways, on a larger scale, our global civilization resembles Jensen’s family.  It’s beating and raping our planet.  Similarly, we feel powerless to stop the senseless savagery.  We shut down emotionally.  We pretend that everything is OK.  We ignore vast amounts of information, and what we can’t ignore, we forget or dismiss.  Living behind a wall of fear, we become isolated from life, from our bodies, from our spirits.  Isolation is poisonous.

Humans are not essentially bad, but we have had the misfortune of being born into a culture that is speeding down the path of self-destruction.  Jensen says: “Within any culture that destroys the salmon, that commits genocide, that demands wage slavery, most of the individuals — myself included — are probably to a greater or lesser degree insane.”  The central question of our time is this: “What are the sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?  In many ways, it is the only question of our time.”

One gift of Jensen’s traumatic childhood was that it knocked off his cultural blinders.  His father was a respected member of the community — and he was also an abusive monster.  Jensen came to the terrifying realization that our celebrated modern culture was as crazy and brutal as his dad.  The first step on the path to healing is to acknowledge the existence of problems, to recognize the truth.  Then, the process of awakening involves a series of deaths and rebirths, as useless things are tossed overboard, and replaced with healthier ones.  It’s about growth, and it’s not quick or easy.

This book is a dizzying non-linear tilt-a-whirl ride that zooms round and round in the insanity of our culture.  It’s a slideshow of stories, describing various outbreaks of the disease that’s destroying the world — the Sand Creek massacre, Peruvian dictatorships, the sadism of animal testing, devastating clear cuts, the destruction of the salmon, and on and on and on.  He also includes stories about indigenous people who are eager to promote healing.  He tirelessly explores many paths in search of coherence and understanding.  It’s a messy business.  The results are not neat, clean, or consistent.  Jensen explodes with pain, love, intelligence, and a burning hunger for a brighter tomorrow.  He is a man you will never forget.

Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, Context Books, New York, 2000.  Jensen has written a long series of books on our dysfunctional relationship with the living planet.  A number of essays and interviews are provided at: http://www.derrickjensen.org/.