Reawakening Indigenous Intelligence
It’s the nature of humans to want to feed the holy in nature. Martin Prechtel
As a child, I imagined I was a changeling, not quite belonging to my family or to the cultural circumstances in which I found myself. I discovered sanctuary in ideas and daydreams, and in the English countryside where I grew up. Later, it turned out that I was a ‘woman in a man’s body’ — to use the glib shorthand so often associated with the transsexual experience — and so, for the past twenty-five years I have lived my life as a woman. The issue of gender identity no longer holds my attention as it once did. My gender reflects something of the truth of who I am, but the reality that nourishes me most is the simple knowledge that I have learned, or a least, am in the process of learning, to stand outside the normative standards and dualistic thinking that modernity expects from us.
For most of my life, I have been a Buddhist teacher; but that never quite rang true to me either, as a singular, fixed, identity. When I first met my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, we spoke of “graduating from Buddhism” recognizing that simple labels were inadequate.
After years of stretching the boundaries of what a Buddhist teacher is supposed to teach, I continue to question the assumptions underlying the process of understanding and belief. I question the method of thinking that the Cartesian worldview presupposes. I question modernity.
Modernity has taught us that we are separate from the world and that everything in the world is separate from everything else. As though the world was nothing more than a reservoir of endless resources valuable only for what we can extract from them. Modernity has fed our hunger and greed, and turned us into ghosts who have forgotten what it is to be truly human. There are those who now reason that, having already catalyzed what we call the Sixth Great Extinction, the only possibility for our long-term survival is off-planet in a science-fiction vision of continuing extraction and destruction — a notion that reveals just how far we have come from any sense of actually belonging here on planet Earth.
Within the worldview of modernity, we have come to define ourselves through disembodied values, denial, quasi-rationalist abstractions, and a blind optimism that resembles collective psychosis.* In an attempt to stave off alienation and anxiety, we gobble up resources as if we were hungry ghosts, or the giant cannibalistic demon described in Iroquois cosmologies that consumes everything in its path — Windigo.** We gorge ourselves not only on material goods and resources, but on novelty, ideas, ideologies, and promises. We mistake accumulation for redemption, as though what we can possess and what we claim to know could fill the sorry void of our disconnection. Modernity’s obsession with certainty blinds us to nuance, leaving us unable to dwell in the actual living complexity of the world. It doesn’t give us a moment to pause and reconsider what we have been programmed to believe.
Even authentic spiritual traditions have been caught up in this machinery of modernity. Practices once rooted in Asian, Indigenous, African, and other lineages are too often uprooted, commodified, and sold as instruments for “personal growth,” to provide peak experiences and simplistic ontologies to be hawked in the marketplace, promising redemption while shoring up the narcissism that defines our age. What was once medicine is repackaged as excitement and spectacle.
Indigenous intelligence calls for another possibility. It is a way to grow into the innate, intact embodied humanity that is still alive in all of us. It is the memory of our intimacy with the world, which I believe can still inform and nourish us. I believe, for my own survival perhaps, that all of us, somehow, if only unconsciously, understand that all things are alive, interconnected, in some way conscious, valuable, beautiful and sacred. That stones and rivers, mountains and oceans, dragonfly larvae, mercenary soldiers, executive orders from on high, megacities, nuclear waste sites, newborn babies, subatomic particles, the deer who come to drink at the pond every evening, that everything participates in the living dance of becoming.
Indigenous intelligence experiences time not as a series of points in space but as a continually evolving spiral. It can effortlessly hold mutually contradictory ideas, does not insist on certainty, is at ease with the unresolved, the inexplicable, the beautiful, as well as the hideous cruelty and destruction we are witness to.
To draw on this intelligence is to return to reverence and reciprocity — to see the sacred not as elsewhere, but as shimmering within all things.
For several centuries, the mindset of Western culture has led us to understand the world as mechanical, to view everything except humans as inanimate and dumb, and to see humans as intrinsically unable to know the world directly; to know it only through the artifice of pure reason in an assumed abstract idealism long hidden from direct view. We have been persuaded to see both our bodies and our consciousness as machines. Scientific materialism has become like an unquestioned religious framework, dominating our experience and understanding, and placing us in a world of terminal separation. As a counterpoint to scientific materialism, Philosophical Idealism has persuaded us that we are incapable of truly knowing the world.
Extricating ourselves completely from modernity is, of course, impossible since modernity has become the all-pervasive framework of our collective values and beliefs, like the water in which we live out our existence. It is the ground of our experience that provides our fundamental understanding of life.
So, reawakening indigenous intelligence is not the dream of an impossible return, away from the avalanche of technology, abstract thinking, and the hierarchical social structures that reflect who we have now become. It is a metaphor, but a metaphor we can adopt to support our survival, to support us if we are to become fully human again. Not to reject current understanding, but rather to give it a new ontological and ethical framework.
What comes next for us is either a complete systems collapse or a revolution in thinking and becoming more complete than any we have hitherto experienced or imagined. Extractive economies based on the idea that the planet can provide unlimited resources for free; the centuries-long breakdown of the Commons as a fundamental principle of collaborative access and responsibility; the artifice of Capitalism in all its permutations; and the idea that technology can resolve the life-threatening challenges that technology itself has brought about — all have brought us to a point of no return. So, collapse or revolution? Our bluff has already been called. It’s not about to be called. Let us, each in our own way, wake up to that together.
* Iain McGilchrist. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World 2021
** Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass. 2015 “It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”
Image: Spirit of Water. Michele Benzamin-Miki. Ink and pencil.