Relearning to Recognize Life, Vitality, and Wholeness
I leave it to you to recognize this within yourself, but for many of us, we have lost the reliable ability to see Life.
In discourse concerning the recent victims of civilization’s march, such as First Nations and Native north Americans, you’ll hear a phrase that describes a particular state-of-being that really embodies what it means to live and work in modern civilization.
Internal Colonization.
For those who can look at the ruins of their indigenous culture, at photos of magnificent grandparents and great grandparents, or if fortunate enough they see their culture still struggling to renew itself even today - for these people they surely must feel this “internal colonization” keenly.
For others, like myself, much of our rewilding journey runs through the territory of the sleeping grief-giant of our own stolen, hidden indigineity. How do you miss something that you never knew you had? When spiritual enslavement, when colonization, both external towards one’s “enemies”, and internal towards oneself, has continued through so many countless generation of ancestry, that even as you squint and peer back, you can summon no more than a vague and unpleasant sense of animal skin clothing, knapped stone tools, huddling around campfires. Each one of these a “thing”, an artifact viewed through prejudice, not a people, not the dreams they dreamt, the stories they told, or their fierce, shining, diverse beauty.
For those of us with no clear trail back to ancestral memory, we too must make the difficult journey of the “internally colonized” towards “decolonization”. But for us, we go blindfolded, groping in the dark.
On top of that, we bear the suffocating burden of a legion of clutching, rapacious, ancestral ghosts, like spectral monkeys on our back, the tsars, caesars, kaisers, and kings, the pharaohs and emperors, the slave masters and salesmen of empire and civilization.
With these slathering imperial ghost-voices echoing in our ears, as we grasp after indigenous art and people, for the sake of reconnecting to our own indigeneity, and our own rewilding, we destroy what we seek to love; we appropriate what we seek to celebrate; we condemn that which we seek to honor.
We attempt to destroy the emperor in ourselves and others, by imperial decree. We judge the judge, and execute the executioner. Through this hapless trap, this catch-22, we further buttress our own sociopathic urge towards destruction of all wildness.
We must admit to this fundamental problem before we can move forward. We must admit defeat. We must surrender our crown, scepter, and orb.
To learn once again, as our rewilding ancestors knew well, how to recognize Life.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Hear hear.
I hereby surrender my scalpel, too. And begin to trace the bloody trail back to collect and cherish the thousands of years of lopped off bits of my ancestral soul.
Again, I relight the little flame by which I can see what still lives, ancient, sacred & wild, within myself. And all around me, behind me, beside me, ahead of me. . .
October 13th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
I don’t know that I understand the idea of an imperial voice in my own consciousness, but this entry stirs something.
I’ve been thinking about that as I look at consumerism. It’s a culture I was born with that I can’t opt out of until I reorder everything in my life. I hate it the most in environmental blogs, that are always touting eco-friendly alternatives, as though one could solve the problem of a poisoned and impoverished world by buying different things. Where do you start unmaking yourself when there’s so much accretion of garbage culture that you’ve no idea what’s underneath?
Anyway, that’s probably tangential or unrelated to your point.
October 13th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Jana-
Drake-
Your search for “the underneath” absolutely relates - not tangential at all.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Life is precisely what I am seeking to connect to in every acupuncture treatment. It’s funny because I’ve used the term decolonization of the mind in the past, but really we need decolonization of the body-mind-self-family-community-globe.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:18 am
And also, seeing the ghosts is such an important part of the picture.
October 17th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Abdallah-
Wow! That really gives me a richer view on your healing practice. Thanks.
And as far as the ghosts, I feel glad you see that as a critical perception too. What, “the greatest trick the devil every made was convincing the world he didn’t exist”, right? We used to belong to cultures that knew the physics of ghosts, and what to do, but in the modern world we’ve lost that, and despair, depression, and the devouring of the world spirals out of control. Those connect to each other.
October 19th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
I’ve been reflecting alot about how Martin Prechtel talked about ghosts in an interview with Derrick Jensen, and of course that reminded me of our recent conversation and then your post really brought it home (so to speak) to me. Especially when we think about our own ghosts going all the way back to Central Asia in our distant past, and that incessant searching, searching.
October 30th, 2009 at 6:00 am
You can try to use the methods of destruction against itself, but that still leaves you with a destroyer; yourself! The only method that gives the prince nowhere to live is one that immediate reflects back into you, so it must be healthy to absorb: Immune boosting rather than disinfectant, identity reinforcement rather than nullification, and generosity rather than “taking the power back”.
Generosity? But those with the power already have so much? Imagine it like stopping up a black hole, once it’s full, it draws in nothing else.
October 30th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Josh-
Yes, I think along these lines too - generosity, and courtship of what we want, rather than the eradication and control of what we don’t want. An appreciative inquiry, a journey towards what we want to create.
Author Martín Prechtel calls this process “metabolizing”; taking what deadens life and transforming into food for generating life.
In a certain sense, our goal may involve creating more life than that black hole can consume; if we make that our project, however impossible it sounds, perhaps the inward flow eventually reverses and turns that black hole into a cornucopia.
vs.
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
The conclusions you draw at the end of this post trouble me deeply. I think this is why: you frame the journey in warlike terms. The process of decolonization of the self cannot be conducted via destroying (for that merely propagates a new destroyer, one more volatile and ego-driven), therefore it must be conducted via surrender.
The idea of surrender as a necessary step in any process (especially one of detox) is upsetting to me. I don’t think this should be the case. And indeed, I don’t think it *is* the case, here. Surrendering to the Imperial Ghosts seems more akin to the problem (ie, what we already do, every day) than the solution.
Here’s how you get rid of a ghost: you resolve the reason that it won’t leave you alone. Here’s how you get rid of a boogeyman: you stop giving it power over you.
I think that’s how you get rid of the Imperial Ghosts, too. You resolve the core problems that lead to their existence (a concern over food storage, fear of difference, a false belief in utility, the idealization of invention, etc) and they are undone, or you stop giving them power over you (refusing to make decisions based on financial concerns, refusing to buy pre-packaged food, walking barefoot despite “health warnings”).
In other words, you don’t surrender. You stop participating in the war. Those are two incredibly different things.
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:48 pm
That comment I just made doesn’t seem very “ask a question, tell a story, read charitably” in retrospect, does it?
I want to stress that I’m approaching your post with nods and appreciation, but this one particular term (surrender) makes me uneasy, and that little diatribe is the closest I have to a story about those feelings.
It’s worded strongly, but understand that I’m looking to explore deeper, not draw sides.
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Joe-
Thanks for your story; I did notice that it stepped a bit on mine, but since I know you, I know you meant it respectfully. Again, thanks.
Since I don’t see any questions in your comment, I don’t quite know where to go from there. I sense you wanted a response to your story, but don’t feel sure. Did you have a question for me, or just a story you wanted to share?
November 24th, 2009 at 2:36 am
Yeah, let me try again, with an eye to starting a conversation with you (rather than carrying one on with myself):
I understand surrender to be a mechanism of war. To me, the word implies that there are two opposing forces, and that one has made a tactical choice to stop fighting. Surrender also equates to accepting losses.
I interpret that you’re using surrender differently than I would. I’m going to paraphrase your story, to make sure that I’m understanding it correctly (and please! share with me if I’m not!): Reversing internal colonization is a difficult process, missing some very important scaffolding. And at every turn, the Imperial Ghosts are telling you that you need the system, with manifold petty threats. Fighting them will only make them stronger. To move on, you must surrender to them.
But I’m having a hard time hearing that story in the spirit it’s intended, because of how I’ve learned to hear the word “surrender”. To me, surrender in that context means “you accept the losses that the ghosts threaten you with,” but I’m not sure that’s what you were seeking to communicate.
So, my question: What does surrender mean to you, in this context? How do we quiet these imperial ghosts, in order to go about the business of leaving them?
Now, I also want to share a story.
I’ve carried on a similar conversation in my head for some time, about how we might remove ourselves from the clutches of these imperial ghosts (I lacked the great, visual terminology like “imperial ghosts” though, so it was a rather less interesting conversation). What crossed my mind wasn’t “you accept the losses that the ghosts threaten you with”, but “you fail to see the losses that they threaten you with”. To use this great image of the imperial ghosts, I can treat them like any other ghost - resolve the true reason for their hauntings, or cease letting them rule you via fear. In other words, I will be most successful if I stop thinking in terms of risk and loss, and start thinking in terms of values and intent.
I wanted to share that story because I feel like it was born from a similar place, it resonates with yours, but perhaps it offers a different conclusion that can compliment and contrast yours. Or perhaps the conclusions are the same, but the words are different? I don’t know. My question on your use of the word surrender might reveal that!
November 24th, 2009 at 8:09 am
“Surrender” to me, in this context, means a couple things.
First, I mean it in the sense of “surrender your badge and gun”, “surrender your crown”, that idea of returning your emblems of status into the arms from which they came. I see this as a fairly innocuous use of the term, and probably not the one that troubles you.
In a very deep way though, I *do* mean “surrender” in its other sense; in the movie Jacob’s Ladder, a dear friend of the main character says “when people don’t want to die, they see demons dogging their steps, but when they feel ready to die, they see angels come to take a friend home”.
I believe we wage war with the wrong “enemy”. And the wrong “we”! We have pitted our imperial self, against our imperial self. We have pitted the ‘us’ who wants “freedom” against the ‘us’ who wants “control”. Both concepts belong to the master-slave relationship; all masters have enslaved themselves, all slaves, in the end, have enslaved their masters.
By surrendering, and turning in our tools of war, we finally achieve full aliveness; we neither win nor lose; because we fought against ties that we ourselves bound ourselves with.
As far as ghosts, they seek to compel us to continue the never-ending cycle of ghost generation. My understanding of ghost metaphysics come from my work with Martín Prechtel; in this view, one can neither fix them, nor abstain from a relationship with ghosts. One must do the long hard work of understanding, transforming, and redigesting the trauma and history of these ghosts.
In these sense, peace doesn’t denote a lack of war; it signifies then ongoing difficult work for harmony and the generation of life.
I hope this answers your question; thanks so much for asking me to open my story up a bit more. I’ve really enjoyed hearing yours fleshed out - I do think we see things a bit differently, in terms of our options in dealing with “ghosts”.
Who ya gonna call?
November 24th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Cool.
I think the differences between our stories were mostly in how we classified and coined them. I get the impression that in practice, talking about concrete action, I’d never have the reaction that I had to the more abstracted, “manifesto” version of the story.
The devil’s in the abstract, or something like that?
December 29th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
[…] while back I wrote about my strong feeling that modern people have lost the ability to recognize life, and therefore cannot reliably act in ways or make decisions that foster life, vitality, and […]