Learning How To Dance
By Robert C. Koehler
September 24, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
“Native Americans have to concede that rain
dances don’t work.” Yeah, snort. How funny can you get? It’s the New
Rules segment of “Real Time with Bill Maher” and the host has just
tossed his gag tomahawk at the First People. A picture fills the
screen: Indians in full regalia, dancing. The caption below it says
“Tribal Thumpers.” He pauses, straight-faced, eyeballs rolling in
sarcasm. There’s a trickle of laughter amid the awkward silence,
then Maher turns away from the camera, presumably toward the crew
back stage, and calls out in his fake shame-on-me voice, “Are you
making fun of Indians, Bill?”
The moment lasts about 20 seconds, then he’s on to
the next putdown joke.
So why am I still thinking about it a week later?
Indeed, it has ahold of me like an insane car alarm that won’t shut
up. What’s reverberating in my head isn’t some moral offense at a
politically incorrect joke, which I could, I think, shrug off. What
I can’t let go of is the arrogant American ignorance fueling this
gag. It wasn’t funny. It was just stupid — but stupid in a way that
celebrates and perpetuates pretty much everything that’s wrong with
who we are.
The humor in the joke was, of course, that it
brought a “civilized,” technologically advanced perspective — our
perspective, as smart-phone wielding American spectator-consumers —
to bear on the delusional rituals of savages. Snort, snort. They
think some dumb dance is going to make it rain. Not only is this
cheap, bully humor, perpetrating a sense of feel-good superiority,
it’s cluelessly Newtonian in a quantum world. The losers here are
the ones trapped in linear thinking, who assume they understand a
viewpoint about which they, in fact, know nothing.
“Regular Americans” have to concede that using up
the planet’s resources doesn’t work. Perpetuating an economy based
on war and environmental destruction doesn’t work. Invading Third
World countries doesn’t work. Filling the ocean with plastic trash
doesn’t work. Destroying everything we value doesn’t work.
“Humanity has entered a time of profound change,”
proclaims a website called Great Transition Stories. “We are pushed
by necessity and pulled by opportunity. The push is a growing
systems crisis, evident in the breakdown of financial institutions,
climate disruption, resource depletion, unsustainable populations,
and more. . . . The pull is the opportunity to rise to a new level
of human maturity, partnership and freedom. . . .
“It is vital that the human community come
together. . . .”
This coming together is not a simplistic sort of
acceptance or tolerance of other worldviews, e.g., the
technologically advanced West benignly welcoming the primitives
among us into the community of nations. The West — the planet’s
colonizers and bullies — has to do something far more profound. It
has to arrest its sense of superiority and let go of what it thinks
it knows, in particular that we live in a linear, mechanical,
cause-and-effect universe, full of separate objects — “facts” — that
are disconnected, inert and awaiting our exploitation. We have to
start relearning the nature of things.
Quantum physics, the cutting edge of Western
science, has known for a while now that we don’t live in a
mechanical universe. The universe is energy — spirit.
As physicist David Peat writes in his book
Blackfoot Physics: “. . . scientists who have been struggling at the
leading edge of their topics have created ideas that resonate with
those of Indigenous science. For example: Quantum theory stresses
the irreducible link between observer and observed and the basic
holism of all phenomena. So too, Native Science holds that there is
no separation between individual and society, between matter and
spirit, between each one of us and the whole of nature.”
Such words start to deconstruct the joke. Maybe a
rain dance isn’t meant to be an action as linear as turning on a
faucet, but rather a joyous, intense means of participation with the
universe. Perhaps there is no dividing line between human beings and
the rest of the universe, and what they do, if that action emerges
from their depths, has a quality as natural as thunder or rain.
I say this not with any sort of expertise in
indigenous knowledge, but simply as someone who is trying to push
himself — within the limits of my language and culture — to the edge
of what I think I know. The universe is a living organism. What does
this mean?
“The assumption of the laws (of science) is that
we’re a non-living universe,” biophysicist Beverly Rubik said at an
event called the Language of Spirit Conference, in Albuquerque, that
I attended a few years ago. “We ought to start over. We have a
science that starts with deadness. It’s time to re-envision science
— in a living universe.”
Perhaps we have to break open language itself in
order to begin to become, again, knowingly part of a living
universe. Rupert Ross, in Returning to the Teachings, at one point
discusses the differences between noun-focused Western languages and
verb-driven indigenous tongues.
“It has to do,” Ross writes, “with the difference
between standing behind the triple-pane window of your cliffside
mansion and watching the sun go down over a quieting ocean — and
watching instead the first beginnings of a sunrise over that same
ocean, but from flat on your belly on a wet surfboard three hundred
miles out from shore, as the ocean beneath you awakens.
“In the cliffside mansion, there is a conviction
of separation, stability and control. On the surfboard, there is the
conviction of intimate and inescapable exposure to unfathomable
powers which, while they might let you ride them, will never let you
gain control over them.”
We’ve forgotten how to live with helpless awe, how
to subordinate our knowing to our awareness of the unfathomable.
Most of all, we’ve forgotten how to dance with it.
Robert Koehler, a Chicago reporter and editor
for over 30 years, proudly calls himself a peace journalist. He has
won numerous awards for his writing and, since 1999, has written a
nationally syndicated column on politics and current events for
Tribune Media Services. His new book,
Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, has
recently been published by Xenos Press.
http://commonwonders.com/