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Our "Primitive" ancestors
seemed to have had no problem coexisting with their technology and
religiosity -- that is, with their external and internal environments. For
instance, after they had successfully invented the wheel, the dugout and the
plough, they used them rigorously and routinely all the time and as much as
they could. At the same time, they were perfectly comfortable in venerating
their various earth, water and atmospheric gods and participating in
hundreds of codified rituals and rites that formed the basis of faith. In
other words, their tools were not at variance with their tenets.
The reason for this was simply the absence of any
sharp boundary between the spiritual and the natural world, and thus between
the human mind or ego and the surrounding world. It was a kind of mystical
participation, denoting a sense of fusion between the human organism and
its environment. To them religion was neither a higher objective truth
beyond the natural world that we measure using the scientific method, nor
the masses. As far as they were concerned the divine was in fact the natural
world because the natural world with all its material appurtenances was in
fact the divine too.
It's only in the more
"advanced forms" of these ancestors of ours that we see the apparent need to
artificially bifurcate the human experience into two distinct modes of
existence --- spiritual versus material, fact against faith, science opposed
to art and the widespread notion of the so-called romantic-classic divide.
This divide has now given rise to whole groups of people who have thus
become increasingly beholden to think and feel exclusively in one mode or
the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the
other mode is all about. And then, of course, having done that, they go at
each other's throats.
But, actually speaking, the
belief that only a spiritual or scientific outlook can exclusively give rise
to harmony, contentment and the cultivation of higher values may well be
just a terribly convenient way to promote an ism. Instead, like the modern
grasp we're learning to develop of our interrelationship with nature in the
study of ecology, we perhaps need to become a little primitive too again. So
that, as in the Shinto creed, we could once again learn to express wonder,
respect and awe for everything that exists. |
