The Others and the Interwovenness of Earth and Soul

The Others and the Interwovenness of Earth and Soul

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends, and koinos Hermes.

Last time we started to consider something stranger and more dangerous than we might at first realize.

In fact, I’d like to pause and try to appreciate the wildness of what we have suggested in the last contemplation and in many others like it. And I’d like to do that in anticipation of a guest who will join us a few episodes from now, a long lost soul brother of mine named Jeff Kripal.

Jeff is a scholar of comparative religion, and we will discuss his most recent book, called The Superhumanities. It’s about how all of us are, at least potentially, superhuman.

Jeff and I share a commitment to honoring the wondrous, the superness that is indigenous to our own soul and the soul of the world. We live in a magical Cosmos, but that’s not easy to recognize in the context of the dominant culture.

In our last contemplation, we tried to get in touch with the possibility that the style of consciousness the dominant culture bequeaths to us all might not be the most skillful and poised style of consciousness we’re capable of manifesting.

That’s a dangerous thing to suggest. If we look at the world and we sense the catastrophes rising and the catastrophes yet to come, we might wonder, “How did this happen? How did we get another war in Europe? How did we all get plastics, rocket fuel, and forever chemicals in our blood? How could we possibly have created this much inequality and injustice and put the conditions of life at risk?”

We could ask all manner of questions like that, and what if the answer to them all comes down to this: It’s the mind we’re using, the style of consciousness we manifest in this world—it’s just not a very skillful one, and the state of the world is the proof of that.

And we considered some fairly tame yet profound examples of how our habitual consciousness might be limiting us and contributing to our problems on a personal and planetary scale. We don’t sense how much we’re out of our minds, but enough time spent in Nature and in spiritual practice can help us begin to sense this.

And we repeatedly tried to remind ourselves that spending time in Nature could itself help us sense some of our insanity, but only by means of a holistic philosophy of life could we tap into the fullness of what our culture cuts us off from.

This cutting off amounts to creating a vast gap between the consciousness and experiences typical of the dominant culture on the one hand, and our fuller mysterious potentials on the other. Because of the pervasiveness of the dominant culture, and because its presence leads to the breakdown of more powerful forms of awareness and experience, we have little or no understanding of it in the dominant culture. We do not observe it, and we do not cultivate it, which requires holistic practices of philosophy.

Once we begin to question our very style of consciousness—our whole way of thought, speech, and activity—we put everything in question, even very basic things like identity, number, space, truth, individual, collective, and more. In general, we cannot conceive of these things in ways that transcend the developmental path of our own consciousness, and so we have a hard time perceiving things that don’t fit with our habitual life.

More profound forms of consciousness might be particularly vulnerable to states that our culture encourages or allows to proliferate. For instance, more profound forms of consciousness might be vulnerable to anger, deceit, distraction, greed, and aggression. And they may also be vulnerable to disconnection from Nature.

The dominant culture feeds on the activation of the very things that interfere with knowing ourselves, each other, and the world we share in better and more vitalizing ways. The patterns of insanity that characterize the dominant culture interfere with our own superness, our own magic, and our intimacy with the great mystery.

The philosophy of the dominant culture encourages the practice and realization of the very things that cut us off from our fuller potentials, and philosophers in the university do little to teach students how to transform. The cultivation of states of anger, greed, aggression, and deceit go altogether with conquest, and this leads to the total breakdown of more empowered and empowering forms of awareness.

We in the dominant culture live in a context that encourages the invisibility of these other forms of awareness, discourages their cultivation, and then encourages and even insists upon their dissolution if they were to somehow arise.

What are we not likely, or not able, to become conscious of, simply by living in the dominant culture?

What does the culture make likely as our experience?

What does it make likely as our world? The general answer to the latter question seems to be something degraded, limited, limiting.

Again, we are talking about a style of consciousness that affects our understanding of the most basic things, like our own identity, as well as the very nature of time and space.

Nietzsche has some interesting suggestions which he addressed to “scientists” and “scientific thinkers”:

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Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this—reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, [ladies and gentlemen], the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really mean, mechanistically?)—an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more—that is a crudity and naïveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy.

. . . A “scientific” interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning. This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. (GS 373, “Science” as a prejudice)

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Existence as “an indoor diversion” . . . an indoor diversion for mathematicians, philosophers, coders, gamers, binge-watchers, shoppers, gamblers, consumers of every kind . . . What a strange thought. What do we practice and realize?

What truths, what truthfulness, what knowing have we cut ourselves off from because we limit our ecologies of practice-and-realization—limit, fragment, domesticate, and weaken them? In our universities, the scientists do their work, the philosophers and others in the humanities do another work (at times trying to mimic the scientists), the artists do yet another (perhaps establishing their identity in contrast to science, or in countless other ways inviting unconscious limitations). Two scientists, even in the same general field (say, physics), may have difficulty truly understanding one another, to say nothing of two scientists in relatively differing fields (say, physics and biology).

Wendell Berry invites us to consider the necessary relationship between mind, body, soul—and soil. His emphasis on health aligns his with Jung’s reflections on health and healing above, though he first begins with the sense of a quest into wilderness before coming back to growing food, a movement linked by the notion of health.

k at a chapter from Berry’s: 2002

Berry begins with a feel for something like vision, close to the sense implied in the revisioning of philosophy we very much need right now:

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The question of human limits, of the proper definition and place of human beings within the order of Creation, finally rests upon our attitude toward our biological existence, the life of the body in this world. What value and respect do we give to our bodies? What uses do we have for them? What relation do we see, if any, between body and mind, or body and soul? What connections or responsibilities do we maintain between our bodies and the earth? These are religious questions, obviously, for our bodies are part of the Creation, and they involve us in all the issues of mystery. But the questions are also agricultural, for no matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in flesh. While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures. It is hardly surprising, then, that there should be some profound resemblances between our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth. . . .

Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon … rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy. . . .

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We’re going to think together a little more with Wendall Berry, but let’s first pause here to notice how his suggestions here resonate with others we have considered. The gold standard of knowledge in our culture is a vague ideal we call science. But the gold standard of knowledge in other cultures involved going into the wilderness. Buddha went into the wild forest, Jesus went into the wild desert, Milarepa went into the wild mountains. And so it went with countless saints, sages, shamans, and wise ones.

And we considered how contemporary scientists themselves go to wild places in order to accomplish science. This gives us an indication that we have something very backward in our thinking.

In his book, Berry then goes on to discuss health, beginning with our habitual notions of health that are both limited and limiting. We’re talking about how we view health in practice, and how we might otherwise think of it:

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. . . . By health . . . we mean merely the absence of disease. Our health professionals are interested almost exclusively in preventing disease (mainly by destroying germs) and in curing disease (mainly by surgery and by destroying germs).

But the concept of health is rooted in the concept of wholeness. To be healthy is to be whole. The word health belongs to a family of words, a listing of which will suggest how far the consideration of health must carry us: heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, holy. And so it is possible to give a definition to health that is positive and far more elaborate than that given to it by most medical doctors and the officers of public health.

If the body is healthy, then it is whole. But how can it be whole and yet be dependent, as it obviously is, upon other bodies and upon the earth, upon all the rest of Creation, in fact?

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Let’s pause here just to savor the wonder of such a question. How can we be whole if we depend totally and completely on the community of life? What does that say about the nature of Nature itself? What does it say about our own true nature?

We’re going to follow Wendall Berry a little further. This will be a longer passage, and I will let you know when we come to the end of it:

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It immediately becomes clear that the health or wholeness of the body is a vast subject, and that to preserve it calls for a vast enterprise . . . Our bodies are . . . not distinct from the bodies of other people, on which they depend in a complexity of ways from biological to spiritual. They are not distinct from the bodies of plants and animals, with which we are involved in the cycles of feeding and in the intricate companionships of ecological systems and of the spirit. They are not distinct from the earth, the sun and moon, and the other heavenly bodies.

It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil. Intellectually, we know that these patterns of interdependence exist; we understand them better now perhaps than we ever have before; yet modern social and cultural patterns contradict them and make it difficult or impossible to honor them in practice.

To try to heal the body alone is to collaborate in the destruction of the body. Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation. . . [Our] fatal sickness is despair, a wound that cannot be healed because it is encapsulated in loneliness, surrounded by speechlessness. Past the scale of the human, our works do not liberate us—they confine us. They cut off access to the wilderness of Creation where we must go to be reborn—to receive the awareness, at once humbling and exhilarating, grievous and joyful, that we are a part of Creation, one with all that we live from and all that, in turn, lives from us. They destroy the communal rites of passage that turn us toward the wilderness and bring us home again.

Perhaps the fundamental damage of the specialist system—the damage from which all other damages issue—has been the isolation of the body. At some point we began to assume that the life of the body would be the business of grocers and medical doctors, who need take no interest in the spirit, whereas the life of the spirit would be the business of churches, which would have at best only a negative interest in the body. In the same way we began to see nothing wrong with putting the body—most often somebody else’s body, but frequently our own—to a task that insulted the mind and demeaned the spirit. And we began to find it easier than ever to prefer our own bodies to the bodies of other creatures and to abuse, exploit, and otherwise hold in contempt those other bodies for the greater good or comfort of our own. . .

. . . . By dividing body and soul, we divide both from all else. We thus condemn ourselves to a loneliness for which the only compensation is violence—against other creatures, against the earth, against ourselves. For no matter the distinctions we draw between body and soul, body and earth, ourselves and others—the connections, the dependences, the identities remain. And so we fail to contain or control our violence. It gets loose. Though there are categories of violence, or so we think, there are no categories of victims. Violence against one is ultimately violence against all. The willingness to abuse other bodies is the willingness to abuse one’s own. To damage the earth is to damage your children. To despise the ground is to despise its fruit; to despise the fruit is to despise its eaters. The wholeness of health is broken by despite.

If competition is the correct relation of creatures to one another and to the earth, then we must ask why exploitation is not more successful than it is. Why, having lived so long at the expense of other creatures and the earth, are we not healthier and happier than we are? Why does modern society exist under constant threat of the same suffering, deprivation, spite, contempt, and obliteration that it has imposed on other people and other creatures? Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together? And why, in consideration of this decline of our worldly flesh and household, our “sinful earth,” are we not healthier in spirit? . . . .

. . . our spirits . . . seem more and more to comfort themselves by buying things. No longer in need of the exalted drama of grief and joy, they feed now on little shocks of greed, scandal, and violence. For many of the churchly, the life of the spirit is reduced to a dull preoccupation with getting to Heaven. At best, the world is no more than an embarrassment and a trial to the spirit, which is otherwise radically separated from it. The true lover of God must not be burdened with any care or respect for His works. While the body goes about its business of destroying the earth, the soul is supposed to lie back and wait for Sunday, keeping itself free of earthly contaminants. While the body exploits other bodies, the soul stands aloof, free from sin, crying to the gawking bystanders: “I am not enjoying it!” As far as this sort of “religion” is concerned, the body is no more than the lusterless container of the soul, a mere “package,” that will nevertheless light up in eternity, forever cool and shiny as a neon cross. This separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the fringe, no aberration, but a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geologic fault. And this rift in the mentality of religion continues to characterize the modern mind, no matter how secular or worldly it becomes.

But I have not stated my point exactly enough. This rift is not like a geologic fault; it is a geologic fault. It is a flaw in the mind that runs inevitably into the earth. . . .

I do not want to speak of unity misleadingly or too simply. Obvious distinctions can be made between body and soul, one body and other bodies, body and world, etc. But these things that appear to be distinct are nevertheless caught in a network of mutual dependence and influence that is the substantiation of their unity. Body, soul (or mind or spirit), community, and world are all susceptible to each other’s influence, and they are all conductors of each other’s influence. . . All that is certain is that an error introduced anywhere in the network ramifies beyond the scope of prediction; consequences occur all over the place, and each consequence breeds further consequences. But it seems unlikely that an error can ramify endlessly. It spreads by way of the connections in the network, but sooner or later it must also begin to break them. We are talking, obviously, about a circulatory system, and a disease of a circulatory system tends first to impair circulation and then to stop it altogether. Healing, on the other hand, complicates the system by opening and restoring connections among the various parts—in this way restoring the ultimate simplicity of their union. When all the parts of the body are working together, are under each other’s influence, we say that it is whole; it is healthy. The same is true of the world, of which our bodies are parts. The parts are healthy insofar as they are joined harmoniously to the whole. What the specialization of our age suggests, in one example after another, is not only that fragmentation is a disease, but that the diseases of the disconnected parts are similar or analogous to one another. Thus they memorialize their lost unity, their relation persisting in their disconnection. Any severance produces two wounds that are, among other things, the record of how the severed parts once fitted together. . . .

than we care for the earth. (: 2002

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Okay. That’s the end of the passage. I love that last line: It is impossible to care for each other more of differently than we care for Earth.

In our inquiry together, we seek connections that are indissoluble though obscured. These connections are obscured by our way of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world. And this way of knowing goes completely together with conscious human purposes in general. We seek an entrance into wholeness and the wonder of wholeness. Wonder in fact is the entrance into wholeness.

Wonder and wholeness then invite us into an expansiveness inconceivable to our habitual mind. If we cannot heal except in wholeness, if we cannot know better without knowing more holistically, then what is the wholeness of our being, what is the wholeness of our thinking, what is the wholeness of our activity that we must surely, in our present state, fail to touch, practice, realize?

Paul Shepard, among others, invites us to see that wild beings are indispensable to our wholeness, and thus to our healing, our thinking and creativity, and our meaning and purpose.

In his book, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, Shepard invites us to see how “the human species emerged enacting, dreaming, and thinking animals, and cannot be fully itself without them” (4).

Wild beings facilitated our individual and species self-knowing, and they provided metaphors for transformation. In other words they helped ground our spiritual/philosophical life, either out of their divine imperative or simply as part of the wonder, the mystery of the sacredness we all are (or both).

Wild beings of all kinds embodied our cosmologies—not in the sense that we merely projected onto them, but in the sense that we learned those cosmologies from the activity, the living thinking, of those beings . . . we touched cosmology directly in our relationships with them.

Thus they enriched our language, not only with these teachings, but with their own sounds, their styles of communication and communion, and in the ways we tried to speak with and listen to them, to live with them and allow them to live through us.

They constituted our being as they helped us practice and realize our place, our purpose in living ecologies. Domestication, as Shepard sees it, involved the disruption of this mature relationship with mature beings, mature presences and ways of life, ways of thinking and knowing.

Domesticated animals seem to Shepard like immature examples, constrained examples, and they began to displace the wild beings in our souls as well as in the landscape. This, in turn, resulted in an ontogenetic crippling of the human, thus degrading social bonds in the human community, which became increasingly isolated from wildness.

Shepard ends his book with a letter from The Others, delivered by Bear:

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Dear Primate P. Shepard and Interested Parties:

We nurtured the humans from a time before they were in the present form. When we first drew around them they were, like all animals, secure in a modest niche. Their evident peculiarities were clearly higher primate in their obsession, social status, and personal identity. In that respect they had grown smart, subtle, and devious, committed to a syndrome of tumultuous, aseasonal, erotic, hierarchic power. Like their nearest kin, they had elevated a certain kind of attention to a remarkable acuity which made them caring, protective, mean, and nasty in the peculiar combination of squinched facial feature and general pettiness of monkeys.

In ancient savannas we slowly teased them out of their chauvinism. In our plumage we gave them aesthetics. In our courtships we tutored them in dance. In the gestures of antlered heads we showed them ceremony and the power of the mask. In our running hooves we revealed the secret of grain. As meat we courted them from within.

As foragers, their glance shifted a little from corms and rootlets, from the incessant bickering and scuffling of their inherited social introversion. They began looking at the horizon, where some of us were both danger and greater substance.

At first it was just a nudge—food stolen from the residue of lion kills, contended for with jackals and vultures, the search for hidden newborn gazelles, slow turtles, and eggs. We gradually became for them objects of thought, of remembering, telling, planning, and puzzling us out as the mystery of energy itself.

We tutored them from the outside. Dancing us, they began to see in us performances of their ideas and feelings. We became the concreteness of their own secret selves. We ate them and were eaten by them and so taught them the first metaphor of their frantic sociality: the outerness of themselves, and ourselves as their inwardness.

As a bequest of protein we broke the incessant round of herbivorous munching, giving them leisure. This made possible the lithe repose of apprentice predation and a new meaning for rumination, freeing them from the drudgery of browsing and the grip of relentless interpersonal strife. Bringing them into omnivorousness, we transformed them forever and they entered the game as a different player.

Not that they abandoned their appetite for greens and fruits, but enlarged it to seeds and meat, and to the risky landscapes of the mind. The savanna or tundra was essential to this tutorial, as a spaciousness open to infinite strategies of pursuit and escape, stretching the senses to their most distant reference. Their thought was invited to a new kind of executorship, incorporating remembrance and planning, to parallels between themselves and the Others and to words—our names—that enabled them to share images and ideas.

Having been committed in this way, first as food and then as the imagery of a great variety of events and processes, from signs in dreams to symbols in metaphysics, we have accompanied humans ever since. Having made them human, we continue to do so individually, and now serve more and more in therapeutic ways, holding their hands, so to speak, as they kill our wildness.

As slaves we stay close. As something to “pet” and to speak to, someone to be there and need them, to be their first lesson in otherness, we have shared their homes for ten thousand years. They have made that tie a bond. From the private home we have gone out to the wounded and lonely, to those yearning for unqualified devotion—to hospitals, hospices, homes for the aged, wards of the sick, the enclaves of the [physically and mentally challenged]. We now elicit speech from the autistic and trust from those in prison.

All that is well enough, but it involves only our minimal, domesticated selves, not our wild and perfect forms. It smells of dependency.

They still do not realize that they need us, thinking that we are simply one more comfort or curiosity. We have not regained the central place in their thought or meaning at the heart of their ecology and philosophy. Too often we are merely physical reality, mindless passion and brutality, or abstract tropes and symbols.

Sometimes we have to be underhanded. We slip into their dreams, we hide in the language, disguised in allusion, we mask our philosophical role in “nature aesthetics,” we cavort to entertain. We wait in children’s books, in pretty pictures, as burlesques in cartoons, as toys, designs in the very wallpaper, as rudimentary companion or pets.

We are marginalized, trivialized. We have sunk to being objects, commodities, possessions. We remain meat and hides, but only as a due and not as sacred gifts. They have forgotten how to learn the future from us, to follow our example, to heal themselves with our tissues and organs, forgotten that just watching our wild selves can be healing. Once we were the bridges, exemplars of change, mediators with the future and the unseen.

Their own numbers leave little room for us, and in this is their great misunderstanding. They are wrong about our departure, thinking it to be a part of their progress instead of their emptying. When we have gone they will not know who they are.

Supposing themselves to be the purpose of it all, purpose will elude them. Their world will fade into an endless dusk with no whippoorwill to call the owl in the evening and no thrush to make a dawn.

–The Others

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Something in this letter from The Others resonates with various speeches and writings of Indigenous peoples, at least here on Turtle Island. For instance, in response to a missionary who sought to convert Indigenous peoples to Christianity, the great orator Red Jacket of the Seneca Nation said the following:

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. . . . your forefathers crossed the great waters, and landed on this island. Their numbers were small; they found friends, and not enemies; they told us they had fled from their own country for fear of wicked men, and come here to enjoy their religion. They asked for a small seat; we took pity on them, granted their request, and they sat down amongst us; we gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return. The white people had now found our country; tidings were carried back, and more came amongst us; yet we did not fear them, we took them to be friends; they called us brothers; we believed them, and gave them a larger seat. At length, their numbers had greatly increased; they wanted more land; they wanted our country. Our eyes were opened, and our minds became uneasy. Wars took place; Indians were hired to fight against Indians, and many of our people were destroyed. They also brought strong liquor among us; it was strong and powerful, and has slain thousands.

Brother, our seats were once large, and yours were very small; you have now become a great people, and we have scarcely a place left to spread our blankets; you have got our country, but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us. . . .

Brother, we are told that you have been preaching to the white people in this place. These people are our neighbors; we are acquainted with them; we will wait, a little while and see what effect your preaching has upon them. If we find it does them good, makes them honest and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again what you have said.

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Another artefact comes to mind here. Not long after becoming President of the U.S., Andrew Jackson wrote the following letter to the Muscogee Nation—actually, he seems to have stopped looking at the various tribes as Nations and lumped them all together, as others—and the rhetoric is in its own way frightening, all the more so given what followed when the Indigenous peoples naturally refused to obey such a condescending line of b.s.:

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Friends and Brothers — By permission of the Great Spirit above, and the voice of the people, I have been made President of the United States, and now speak to you as your Father and friend, and request you to listen. Your warriors have known me long You know 1 love my white and red children, and always speak with a straight, and not with a forked tongue; that I have always told you the truth. I now speak to you, as my children, in the language of truth—Listen.

Where you now are, you and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace. Your game is destroyed, and many of your people will not work and till the earth.

Beyond the great River Mississippi, where apart of your nation has gone, your Father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it.

There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever. For the improvements in the country where you now live, and for all the stock which you cannot take with you, your Father will pay you a fair price.

Where you now live, your white brothers have always claimed the land. The land beyond the Mississippi belongs to the President and to no one else; and he will give it to you for forever....

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Chief Speckled Snake gave this reply to the Muscogee Indians:

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Brothers! When the white man first came to these shores, the Muscogees gave him land, and kindled him a fire to make him comfortable. And when the pale faces of the south [the Spanish] made war on him, their young men drew the tomahawk and protected his head from the scalping knife.

But when the white man had warmed himself before the Indian’s fire, and filled himself with the Indian’s hominy, he became very large. He stopped not for the mountain tops, and his feet covered the plains and the valleys. His hands grasped the eastern and western sea.

Then he became our great father. He loved his red children; but said, ‘You must move a little farther, lest I should by accident tread on you.’ With one foot he pushed the red man over the Oconee, and with the other he trampled down the graves of his fathers.

But our great father still loved his red children, and he soon made them another talk He said much; but it all meant nothing, but ‘move a little farther; you are too near me.’

I have heard a great many talks from our great father, and they all began and ended the same.

Brothers! When he made us a talk on a former occasion, he said, ‘Get a little farther. Go beyond the Oconee and the Ocmulgee. There is a pleasant country.’ He also said, ‘It will be yours forever.’

Now he says, ‘The land you live on is not yours. Go beyond the Mississippi. There is game. There you may remain while the grass grows or the water runs.

Brothers! Will not our great father come there also? He loves his red children, and his tongue is not forked.

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When Jackson didn’t get what he wanted from his letter, he opened debate on the Indian Removal Act, and thus followed the incredible suffering of the Trail of Tears.

In his book, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Shepard writes:

When we grasp fully that the best expressions of our humanity were not invented by civilization but by cultures that preceded it, that the natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams, we will be on the way to a long overdue reconciliation between opposites which are of our own making. (5)

This reconciliation of opposites means a healing of the wound in the Earth, the geological fault farmer and poet Wendall Berry invites us to see. One sees it everywhere: Where we make dualities, we make a wound. It’s not that one needs to give up discernment, it’s that true discernment, true wisdom, liberates us from practicing and realizing dualities as if they were solid. Not only does the degradation of nature follow from this kind of duality—which we could refer to as the most fundamental fallacy—but we in the dominant culture are lived by it, and we perpetuate it.

Wendall Berry suggested that “it is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth.” What if it is impossible to presence wisdom, love, and beauty differently for each other than we do for Earth? What does that say about how education functions, how corporations function, how our families and friendships function, how government functions, how economies function?

How do we know ourselves and our world in a way that reflects these profound Cosmic facts, the facts of our interwovenness?

The wisdom traditions of the world offer us guidance, even though we must each find our own way. We must also join together to find a way forward on the basis of the common ground we share. We cannot help ourselves and the world by continuing to act like atomized individuals. Our strength lies precisely in our interwovenness. Nothing can ever overcome it.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the magical and sacred interwovenness of soul and soil, of cosmos and psyche, send them in through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.