Aboriginal tirade

I defy every professor on the face of this spinning globe. Gentlemen, ladies, don’t feel threatened. You have chosen the gowns and the tenure, the books, the students, the research facilities and the world’s respect. What more do you want? You may think you define truth too, but this is what I don’t allow. No, your professorships are just another profession, wanting its share of everything that’s going in a jostling world.

Rattled slightly by my defiance in the middle of your lecture, you hesitate in reading from your notes to look over your half-moon glasses at this unruly student: “And who might you be?”

I’m a peasant, a paysan, one who lives on the land, though I don’t own any personally. I am a primitive, proud of an ancestry which I can trace back to a time before books and seats of learning. I don’t need dietetics to tell me what to eat. I don’t need theology to tell me what to believe and how to worship. In short, I am just like everyone else.

I don’t need psychology and medical sciences to tell me how to survive the generations and produce offspring like you, dear professor. “Ah, how ignorant!” you say, pointing to evidence that my ancestors lived short, brutish lives. Yes, I know that. I’m grateful for knowledge and don’t mean to be ungracious. Like all my ancestors, I have received and passed on accumulated knowledge and expertise. But I remind you that professors blind to the realities around them continued to teach Aristotle and Hippocrates when every medical student through his own eyes could see these authors were wrong.

I equally reject the undergrowth of learning, in which ancient notions as “body, mind and spirit” are passed down as meaning something more than the merely conversational. When I read books about angels I don’t want little professors to tell me stuff they have got third-hand from the Kabbalah, I want their immediate experience. (I’ve stopped reading books about angels. I have my own immediate experience.)

Whatever I am is not split into body, mind and spirit. I am all body. Obviously not a corpse. Life is my essential attribute. Life is not mind or spirit. The notion that something leaves the body when I die, wafting into space like an essence, is merely traditional and poetic. I am an animal, not differentiated from the other animals by any eternal soul which a beneficent God vouchsafed to me at a particular point in evolution. Oh the trouble which man has encountered by devising the notion of a God who’s all-powerful, all-wise and all-knowing! The theology professors don’t complain. It keeps them in business. They are as grateful as dentists are grateful for tooth decay.

Most of the trouble is caused by “mind”, because the academics at the top of the pyramid have proclaimed it as top-value attribute of man. That most recent most flashy component of the human organism, the bit which can think abstractly, talk in language and handle logic to almost infinite levels of complexity, dazzles them till they think it is the definer of reality. I’m not really blaming professors for this. They are merely convenient symbols, being at the top of the intellectual pyramid.

Thought has been set up as higher and truer than feeling. Discipline has been hailed as superior to unruly emotion. Those revolutionary stirrings in every human breast which hint at Oneness and Universal Love have been condemned to the grim fortresses of organised religion, where they can “do no harm”. (Oh see how easy it is for me to use words to embroider an exaggerated myth! My education taught me these perversions of the mind, which permeate law and politics and medicine and all the rest.)

I discover that in my body is a higher wisdom than thought. My instincts, my emotions, all the parts of brain function which regulate my waking, sleeping, metabolism, homeostasis, immune function, endocrine system, it is to these I owe my day-to-day living. Our intellects are the source of so much fiction, craziness, will, power, ways to be greedy, cunning, the over-riding of Nature. We all but supersede and make redundant our body-wisdom.

In illness, the body-wisdom bites back. Just as the Earth, that Gaia-Goddess, bites back when it’s tortured and abused and plundered, the same thing happens in our own bodies. The pharmaceutical companies will not know what I am talking about. I don’t suppose medical students will study it for more than a day in their lengthy degree courses.

It’s perfectly possible to revert to peasant wisdom, to primitive mastery of oneself and environment, in defiance of professors. The New Age movement has corrupted itself with the same disease as the intellect-driven world which it opposes. For it has just as many books and courses and beliefs and careers.

Never fight your enemy, because you have to use the same weapons, and you will soon become indistinguishable from one another. In order to bring sanity back to this world, I’m not going to join any movement, establish any Foundation, lobby any politicians. I’m going to continue in the direction I’m going, where intellect is integrated with body-wisdom, in a subordinate rule as fits the youngest member of the brain faculty. My role is not to write—that’s just an expression of overflowing energy—but to live, from the deepest and least corrupted part of a human being.

See also Becoming Animal, which takes a lengthy book to say the same thing.I’ve another essay to write about this famous book by David Abram.