by Bill Pfeiffer
Our times, the Age of Separation could also be called the Age of Forgetting. Modern humans have severe amnesia; we have forgotten who we are in relation to everything else. Martin Prechtel, the maverick cultural historian and artist, calls it “the amnesia of modernity” and says our task is a “Holy Remembrance [which has been] forced to survive homeless under bridges.”
In truth, each one of us is vertically connected to everything through the present moment, and horizontally connected through time to all of our ancestors (and descendants). And what a lineage that is! Not only are we a pedigree in the world of mammals but our nonhuman ancestors go back to the first blue-green algae appearing on Earth 2.5 billion years ago. Moreover, only abstract thinking makes a distinction between animate and inanimate forms. In the words of John Seed, deep ecologist and rainforest defender, “We are the rocks dancing.”
The late Carl Sagan, author and highly successful popularizer of astronomy in the 1960s and 1970s, goes even further back in time and reminds us that “we are star stuff.” The rocks, and our bodies, are literally made from the stars. Nearly every atom from which we are made was once inside our star, the sun, which was, itself, synthesized from the interstellar medium of past stars. Fortunately, there have been cultures that understood this not as an exciting intellectual truth, but as a deeply felt experience— an all encompassing reality, which the Lakota Indians express in the phrase Mitakuye Oyasin, or “All My Relations.” That is why a big part of forging a sustainable culture requires that we go back, to go forward. Why not rediscover what was at the core of successful cultures for many thousands of years and retrieve it for our time? David Kyle, who has written extensively on this subject, says: We must go back to reclaim a fundamental connection that we as modern individuals have lost. This means going back to Paleolithic times. In those ancient times, some 15,000 years ago, our ancestors were physically and intellectually like us today, but they were still deeply connected with the Sacred Other as it was mediated through nature. Paleolithic human experience still exists today on planet Earth in some indigenous, native, and aboriginal peoples. I am not urging that we “go native” but rather that we listen to, learn from, and understand the messages and teachings native peoples are willing to give to us.
In doing so, we will remember we are good to the core, in the same way plants, animals, clouds, and stars are good to the core. This is not just a philosophical concept but a felt experience of the well-being of the universe, no matter how difficult the worldly circumstances we encounter. We can also remember that the lasting joy of life is not found in acquisition or in achievement but in relationship with others, human and nonhuman. Whenever I have witnessed this remembering firsthand, I have been incredibly moved, whether it happened on an Indian reservation, or in the wilds of Siberia. Often, as if by grace, the remembering spontaneously manifested in the form of a long-forgotten song, chant, dance, or dream— the old medicine ways revealing themselves in new conditions. They are the healing waters from the past re-emerging into the present. Terence McKenna, the late consciousness explorer, scholar, and ethnobotanist, termed this remembering, on a collective level, the “Archaic Revival.”
The Archaic Revival is marked by a tremendous resurgence of ancient ways of knowing that is underway in most of the industrialized countries. It manifests in various ways, such as a keen interest in indigenous culture; a relearning of shamanism, including those traditions with roots in Europe; a renewal in the art of animal tracking and primitive wilderness-survival skills; and the exploration of herbs and ethno-pharmaceuticals. McKenna says the Archaic Revival is about “shedding the dominant cultural operating system and getting in touch with something much older and more vitalistic.”
Pfeiffer, Bill (2013-06-28). Wild Earth, Wild Soul (pp. 32-33). Moon Books. Kindle Edition.