We live in exciting times. Information
hams it up before us at every turn. This unparalleled info-glut brings
fascination, paralysis, agony, insight, change, renewal, and inspiration.
In some ways it looks like a renaissance — take the incredible proliferation
of technology, for example . . . the mind-boggling advances in computers.
But a renaissance of the "primitive," the "uncivilized" . . . a primal
renaissance? How can that possibly be?
For weeks I had been working on several articles,
my ardor suspending me above the landscape of a natural consciousness,
a hunter-gatherer one. Called "paleolithic consciousness" by one
contemporary theorist, this mindstyle is reputed to exist among our hunter-gatherer
progenitors and among some current "primal cultures." It is characterized
by greater attunement with body and nature, greater relaxation and well-beingness,
more loving child-caring, greater sensory and aesthetic appreciation, more
expanded psychic openness, fuller emotional and relational capacity, and
greater "with-it-ness" (Witness) with reality in general.
I was also focusing on how our civilization
came to lose that primal expansiveness of soul — a la "ejection
from the Garden of Eden." An increasing mistrust of nature — and
an inexplicable rebellion against an eternally old "if it ain't broke don't
fix it" philosophy — led to attempts to control Nature, and consequently
body as well. The supposed big "advance" of these earliest yuppies
was the domestication of plants and animals. In history, this first
major "upwardly mobile" turning is known as the "agrarian revolution,"
and it occurred variously between 10 and 30 thousand years ago.
All of a piece it came to me that what was
going on now, in Western culture, was exactly parallel to what had occurred
during the Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
At that time, you may recall, the Catholic Church's intellectual hegemony
was loosening, which allowed ancient Roman and Greek texts preserved in
the monasteries to be released into the collective culture. There,
our formerly repressed and forgotten "classical" heritage combined and
cross-fertilized with views prevailing at that time to create the incredible
flowering of culture and human potential that the word renaissance
now conveys.
It occurred to me that night how we, in the
consciousness and ecology movements, are becoming ever more aware, once
again, in diverse and various ways, of the vast legacy of feeling, perception,
human fulfillment, and spiritual awareness and viewpoint that current "child-rearing"
practices cause us "normally" to leave behind. Similarly we come
to realize how much our species lost in coming into its much-vaunted "civilization"
in its evolutionary history. The view from the doorstep of nuclear
and ecological annihilation allows such perspectives. Yet, through
our different ways of healing ourselves, and to extents greater and lesser,
we retrieve that lost and repressed legacy.
And we are, happily, not alone in that retrieval.
Increasingly it appears that our age is characterized, on a global scale,
by an unprecedented multiculturalism wrought of technological advances
in telecommunications and transportation. Consequently, we are pushed
to enjoying an ever growing awareness of the legacies of primal cultures,
both current and historical.
At the same time and not coincidentally we
observe our own religious, scientific, and Western-cultural hegemonies
collapsing under that same weight of contrary and both xenophobia- and
"ego"-eroding information. Moreover, this collapse is aided by momentous
and far-reaching occurrences as diverse as our mistaken engagements in
third-world countries — our misadventure in Vietnam, for example; the technological
crisis of credibility wrought of the global ecological crisis; and the
discoveries of the new physics with their concurrent death-blow to the
pretensions of common-sense materialism.
It became clear to me that just as centuries
ago we came out from under the thumb of a brand of cultural repression
that scapegoated and repressed former cultures — specifically, the Greek
and the Roman legacies, calling them "pagan" — we were now coming out from
under the thumb of a cultural repression and consequent scapegoating of
even longer duration — one extending back ten to thirty-thousand years!
Along with this we were seeing not only the limitations and inadequacies
of the Western civilization and technology which so many had sacrificed
for, and killed for; we were seeing also the re-integration of long-lost
knowledge and worldview — which formerly had been obscured and hidden beneath
such pejoratives as "primitive," "savage," and "uncivilized."
Some of us were learning this only too well,
as it seemed necessary to search out the earliest or least "civilized"
cultures possible for the only pertinent tips we could find on sane and
healthy child-caring techniques. But the rest of our culture is catching
on too, and in a big way! Shamanistic practices, rites of passage,
and indigenous rituals are enjoying great popularity. Workshops on
everything from vision quests, fire-walking, and Native American sweat
lodges . . . to nature treks, drumming, and "sacred arrow" ceremonies have
begun popping up. And currently we are even recognizing our Western
patriarchal culture's evil hand in the extermination of society upon society
of indigenous peoples; we are re-writing the history books on the legacy
of Columbus even as we passed the five-hundredth anniversary of his landing
here.
What's more, in a manner analogous to the cross-fertilization
of ideas that led to the medieval Renaissance, our culture is expanding
and becoming richer through the inclusion of these alternate perspectives.
Those of us on the healing edge are uniquely able to sense the potential
of this inclusion as we experience the effects that this kind of appreciation
of the feeling, the affectionate, the intuitive, the natural, the body,
and the senses has had upon our individual lives. Why would we not
think that this kind of cross-fertilization of repressed heritage would
lead to a flourishing of our culture in the same way that it is has led
to a blossoming in our lives?
Indeed, many of us do feel that a "primal
renaissance" is occurring on our planet. Furthermore, many of us
believe that this occurrence may be, in truth, the brightest hope on what
otherwise can appear globally to be a rather bleak social and cultural
horizon.
So let us not lose this opportunity to midwife
the emergence of this primal renaissance, and, germinal as it may appear
at this time, to nurture it to its fullest flowering. We cannot change
the past, of course. But our efforts will work — one small measure
at least — for righting the many wrongs of those who have come before us
toward those earlier primal societies, and the deeply felt ideas and cultural
ways they held dear.
THE END