Mythic Cartography Explained, Part Five
The Empathic Way cont’d: The Ways of Needs and Feelings
Everything that Lives, has Needs. Everything that has Needs, has Feelings that signal those Needs.
To meet its Needs, every living thing has chosen a Way.
You can also call this Way, a “strategy”. For example, cougars live solitary lives, and hunt mostly through sight and the dance of the stalk and pounce. Wolves live social lives, and hunt mostly through their noses and ears, using the dance of the chase and wearing down.
Both animals eat other animals, but do it in different ways, according to their needs. Their Needs, Feelings and Ways influence each other as they evolve and adapt to a changing world.
Sometimes a living creature will follow a Way that doesn’t meet its Needs. Sooner or later, this being will die from its Way.
Wild animals role model for us a rigorous commitment to living in elegant Ways that work to meet their Needs. Their lives keep them close to instant and powerful feedback when a Way does not serve them.
A being’s Needs, Feelings, and Way, taken together, you can call its spirit bundle, the totality of its true nature.
For countless generations humans have looked to these spirit bundles in the community of life, all around them, and learned from them.
March 5th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Okay, this one is a toughy for me. I don’t neccesarily disagree with you but I am going to need some more examples if I am to believe that physical and sexual abuse is owed souly to a surpluss of free time [or is it the worldview that makes its living through unsustainable/toxic etc. methods that encourages the abuse? I don’t get it.] Also [if I’m Joe Shmoe] I am going to feel pretty conflicted about the whole “Hunter-gatherer cultures had all the free time in the world” bit next to the narrow food margin/surplus energy feeds harmfull patterns of behavior, bit. Mainly because most of us extrapolate our truth of the world from our own experience [or other individual experience [ie. What do you mean we have a food surplus??? People are starving in India!!!] basicaly it is tough to go back to square one when youve built such a rich worldview [and in such stark contrast to mother-culture’s] and make the whole thing make sense to a civilian. I think the points you’re making here [eloquently by the by] could have a chapterto themselves.
March 5th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Hey Lisa. I see it as straightening a bent bar - to make it straight again, you actually have to bend it past straight.
In this sense, I don’t claim any sole causes for anything. I agree if you consider that foolhardy. I do think though, that once again it comes down to the Grave of Right and Wrong. One of the things implicit in a worldview that “works” invovles the idea that the sum total of your behaviors foster life: life for you, life for your habitat and nonhuman family. Abuse can happen in any context. But a mahine that runs on abuse, like our culture, cannot sustain itself. It does not foster life. Indigenously, abusive cultures could not survive. How could they? To waste energy on behaviors that do not directly contribute to the life of the family means throwing energy away. You can only do that if you have surplus energy to spare. This may mean that in indigenous contexts where a surplus of energy existed, and something trigged an abusive cultural cycle, that the community could indeed sustain it. I welcome any further thoughts you have on this - I consider it part of my job to say the crazy thing, and generalize shamelessly, when it has a use.
March 6th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Lisa, I’ve modified the section about cycles of abuse connection to a supply of energy to power them. I agree that if I want to bring that up, I should dedicate building a foundation that makes it understandable. Too much ambition for this little section on “Ways”.