Divergence: They Are Waiting - a Way Back to the Ancient Wisdom

By Michael Mish

We went our separate ways: Us and Them. We went on to civilize ourselves and they remained a nomadic and indigenous people. We used the bountiful resources of nature and they simply saw themselves as being nature. Now, we look back and see how they live and how we live.

DIVERGENCE offers an insightful look at how we came to be separated from our natural environment and even our own basic nature from an anthropological perspective. DIVERGENCE explores the basic disconnections in our lives that we’ve come to accept as normal.
With the roughly 500 indigenous societies on our planet today, we must ask ourselves: How have the First Peoples of our planet lived so sustainably and for so long, yet in a short time the civilized peoples seem to have put our species on the brink of extinction.
The native peoples. The animal and plant kingdoms have their eyes on us to make sure, at this propitious moment in our evolution, that we reconnect with nature.

Ever since this propitious Divergence some 75,000 years ago, still, They Are Waiting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Mish
• Release date: Sep 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463785942

Book preview

DIVERGENCE

They Are Waiting

A Way Back to the Ancient Wisdom

By

Michael Mish

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: The Emissary

CHAPTER 2: A Dream

CHAPTER 3: Separation

How Does the Perception of Separation Impact Us?

The Beginnings of Fear

Compartmentalization

Food

Medicine

Fitness

Education

Time-Saving Devices

Sex

Man and God

The Separation of Men and Women

Separation from our Enemies

CHAPTER 4: The Nature People

Australian Aboriginal People

The Motorcycle Tire and the Invitation

It’s all in the Eyes

Living the Dreaming

The Native American

Comparing Indigenous to Western Lifestyles

The Curse of More

Today

The Original Indigenous Divergence

The Ongoing Protection of Indigenous Rights

First_People_Progress

The Industrial Revolution

CHAPTER 5: The Marginalized: Artemis Meets Syria

A Little Like a Refugee

Massage Message

We Are All Refugees

Separate From Morality

The Most Unconscionable of all Behaviors

Tipping Point

Dadirri

The Longing to Belong

The Music of the Indigenous vs Western Music

Longevity

Ikaria

CHAPTER 6: Nature as Caretaker

Nature as Healer

Animals, Trees and Plants

Shinrin-Yoku

What We Can Do

Travel

Our Tribal Family

Listening to the Song

Gaia

EPILOGUE

ABOUT the Author

INTRODUCTION

Let me first say that I know nothing. I understand even less. I’m not a doctor, expert or anthropologist. There are no letters after my name. I do know, however, what inspires and excites me.

This is a book about a subject that ignites my passion: How did we get to where we are now as a species? What happened to us? Rather than a didactic litany about the world according to me, this is a sharing. I am sharing my perceptions with you so that we can feel more connected.

The moving experience described in the first chapter led me to write this book.

This experience prompted an exploration with one subject invariably leading to another. Down the rabbit hole I went. That’s the nature of inquiry. It is an endless, mysterious and always fascinating yarn-pull. The ball dances and skips across the floor with every excited eureka! pull of the balled yarn.

Looking at us as a species, we are a broad stroke of indigenous and modern people with lots of shadings in between. The closer I look at native peoples, the more apparent it becomes that their social ethos reflects more of a spirit of collectivism and that collective is held together by nature. Modern peoples, on the other hand, have stratified themselves economically resulting in a wealthy and a poor class—and socially, resulting in the ethnically advantaged and disadvantaged. In recent modern times, the natural world was simply made into a footnote or backdrop for the stage on which the theater of social classes would play out. These are two very different world views.

As I wrote Divergence, I found myself examining a native life way that celebrates the collective and another social system that lauds the individual. Both paint colorful portraits of our species. Socialism has sometimes succeeded and at other times failed. The dream of capitalism, baptized by the industrial revolution now exhibits worrying signs of a death rattle.

At a more fundamental level, I found we are shifting our focus further from nature as our species careens toward a world heavily dependent on technology. For no fewer than 70,000 years, the First Peoples of this planet have sustained an unswerving inseparability with the land, water and sky. Our relatively brief foray into modern living is showing us that our much prized standard of living comes with a price. The price is in the irreparable damage our planet has sustained, really, in the past few decades. The situation with our damaged biosphere and rapidly depleting resources is now asking us to investigate the sustainable living practices of native peoples. How have they done it so well and for so long? And why is it after a few thousand years living as modern societies, we find ourselves fumbling and feeling our way for a different template for living softly on the earth?

Clearly, the First Peoples have little interest in our polluted air, tainted water and contaminated food. To them, we must seem not only separated from nature, but separated from ourselves. As modernity encroaches on the land they’ve long held as sacred, their way of life is now threatened.

Will we listen to what they have to say? Or will we continue to be hypnotized by the drumbeat of progress?

Note: In the following material, I use the pronoun we loosely to mean: the influences of our culture.

1

THE EMISSARY

The sea pushes and pulls as it gently rocks my body to a song I can’t hear. A melody I can’t make out. A rhythm, only the ocean knows. With no schedule to keep, my muscles melt as I am softly massaged by the tidal motion of this sensuously warm tropical sea.

A delicate sea-fern drifts back and forth hypnotically with the current. It teases as it positions itself in and out of focus. I try to steady myself to avoid swiping the delicate coral with my fins. Tantalizingly, the sea fern’s golden color seems more vibrant when the ultra-fine hairs drop into focus as I try to steady my eye on the camera’s view-finder. Why am I taking a picture of a plant? A plant that blissfully lolls from side to side as it bends with the lullaby of the sea?

The truth is—I love plants particularly the underwater variety. There is an innocence and sensuality to them. And besides,—I rarely see divers with their underwater cameras trained on a plant other than one of the enormous sea fans. Videoing divers are often in pursuit of Napoleons, white-tipped reef sharks, sea-turtles, bump head parrot fish. Alternatively, they might try to get the perfect shot freezing a nudibranch as it hoists its fragile little body up onto a piece of coral or a pygmy seahorse as its color blends, with dizzying perfection, and disappears into the fan coral to which it clings. So. I love to take pictures of plants. It makes me feel. Oh, I don’t know. Different, maybe.

After days of restless turbid water, the ocean is calm. The stirred up silt has found its place on the sandy bottom and, now, blankets the spindly and bulbous bits of reef that fringe the craggy bay of North Eastern Bali. The wall bottom is not visible even from where I am at 14 meters below the surface. A small turtle darts away from the reef, flying like a bird through the water, only to be swallowed up by the darkness of the endless blue maw beyond the drop off.

Morays watching the water world go by from the protection of their hovel, look left and right with their toothy snouts and frightened-looking bug eyes. A yellow cubicus box fish shyly samples the many different corals occasionally casting an eye at me just to let me know We’re all okay.

I have the distinct impression, though, that I am being watched.

I patiently wait for the shot that will single out this fern from the rest of the sea ferns in Indonesia’s Lombok Straight. Looking slowly to my left, a cuttlefish hovers slightly more than an arm’s length from my face—its sleepy slanted eyes regarding me intently. Not knowing if I am a predator, the cuttlefish and master of camouflage flushes a dark mauve color as it withdraws slightly, when I turn to observe it. I must look like a curiosity to the fish. My dive mask gives my eyes an alien bulge. My regulator, which happens to be black, makes strange Darth Vader breathing noises as bubbles erupt out the sides and shimmy to the surface.

Clear that I am not going to grab it, the cuttlefish moves back toward me and reverts to its mottled sandy color. The cuttlefish finds me curious maybe because of my slowed breathing and measured slo-mo movements underwater. I wonder if it’s just enjoying its own reflection in my mask. Is it watching the way its skin changes color? Is it admiring its good looks?

We stare deeply into each other’s eyes. This curious sea creature hangs in the water. A translucent skirt encircles its body that it uses to hover or lunge in the manner of an exotic underwater flying saucer. Other smaller fish flit about in an aquatic staccato sampling coral and plants. This symphony of color and movement fades to a soft blur as we both focus on one another. We are motionless and transfixed, while life happens merrily around us.

Time stops as it stares at me without challenge or menace.

I search its eyes. Its color strobes as if I am looking at a digital fish whose designer is experimenting with different color and texture combinations. Then, the skin softens to a sand color. We watch one another. I feel the sweet cephalo-innocence of the cuttlefish caressing me. We watch each other solemnly, with interest… never moving from our spot. My breathing slows as I relax into the softness of its gaze. I wonder if he or she wonders what I am thinking. We just take each other in. Staring softly.

I experiment with emotion:

I think: I really like you... and it blushes.

I think: I would never eat a cuttlefish… and it blushes again.

I think: I'm really enjoying this… and waves of color sweep over its skin.

Looking ever more intently at this creature suspended near my face, I wonder: Do I know you from somewhere?

A velvety pink color ripples over its skin.

It's been said the octopus, squid and cuttlefish wear their emotions on their skin. Their chromatophores, or pigment sacks, keep them from hiding their feelings. Curiously, though, the male has been known to show colors and textures suggesting amorous courtship-like emotions on one side of their body to an interested female, while presenting hostile emotions in different colors and textures to a competing male on the other side. Clever animals these cuttlefish!

It's one of the things that makes cephalopods and some mollusks so lovable. They can cycle through myriads of emotion within minutes—like a human baby—and you know just where you stand with them.

What a tender moment! I remember similar experiences with dolphins in the wild, but that was while the dolphin was moving in and out of its pod. The experience was nearly always playful and creative, particularly during the days just before and after a full moon. But a cuttlefish? It’s so decidedly fish-like and non-mammalian. So peculiar and alien looking, yet today it’s so totally accessible.

Here we are, contemplating one another, motionless next to an orange Gorgonia coral, or sea fan. When I look at my dive computer, I notice that a surprising 20 minutes has gone by since we first began looking at each other. I am the first to pull away from this sublime, hypnotic connection. I snap out of this soft aquatic trance, deciding to swim away and slowly make my way to the surface. As I thoughtfully fin away from the cuttlefish, its image stays in my mind's eye. An extraterrestrial presence. Continuing away from the reef, I turn to see my cephalopod friend peacefully watching from the exact same spot in the water. Never moving.

Swimming further away, I think, No, it can’t be still... and sure enough the cuttlefish is still eyeing me.

Further still, it dissolves into the blue opaque of the sea. A pang in the center of my chest grows to bursting until I shock myself. Tears pour down my face. I am imprisoned by my own tears since I can’t wipe them away. As crazy as it may seem, I feel like I am leaving someone I know intimately.

And, what a strange feeling it is. My heart begins to feel like a huge weight in my chest and it pushes its way to my throat. Here I am, suspended just feet above the sandy bottom, feeling the weight of separation deep in my chest. It seems to call up all the separations and losses in my life, but this particular goodbye seems to sear at my heart with more intensity than all my previous losses combined. The sea environment, seen through my teary eyes, looks like I am swimming without a mask. I drag myself out of the water wondering what exactly has just happened.

For days afterward, the memory of the cuttlefish experience stays with me. Staring immutably at me, this curious creature seemed to be waiting for a response.

None of the impact of that encounter makes any sense.

That is, until several months later.

2

A DREAM

I am walking down a tropical jungle path. The sky shimmers blue above my head. The sun pours golden through the tree canopy and washes over the moist earth crackling and seething with life. Vegetation is bright green as the stalks and vines stretch out before my eyes. Leaves blissfully push out and upward as they reach toward the life-giving light and warmth of the sun. Colorful birds ring out with animated chatter and I understand every word, every nuance and every song. And, it doesn’t seem the slightest bit unusual. The plants and animals casually converse with each other, too, as they had always done. I listen and understand. The most natural thing, in a most natural environment.

And as I notice the exchanges, I too am included. Matter-of-fact, candid and pure, we all connect. A sense of I am never alone in nature wraps around me like a blanket. The connection is so right. So perfectly natural. So clean.

So ancient.

I have no cares. A softening in my belly. I feel harmonious and synchronous with the melody and rhythm of all things living.

I awaken to the crow of a rooster.

And, as I gently close my eyes again before the dream can zip away into that liebestraum netherworld, there is the cuttlefish behind my eyelids staring deeply into me.

With non-judgment, the cuttlefish asks:

Who are you—and what are you doing?

The tears, that day in Bali. I remember them in a flash. I have no idea who I am and what I am doing. What is more, I am not sure how my being even relates to my doing. How can my moral compass broker a peaceful coexistence between my being and doing?

As the dream slips away not at all unlike ultra-fine coral sand tumbling between fingers, questions arise:

What happened to me?

What happened to us?

At what point did I disassociate from the natural world?

The enormity of the question begs an even larger and considered response. This is the discussion I intend to open here. I think its beginning took root many thousands of years ago, but the process kicked into high gear with the Industrial Revolution. I think this loss of our connection to the natural world is so great—so ubiquitous, painful and trenchant—that most of us are ill-equipped if not downright petrified to look at it.

That is, if we are even remotely aware that we’d lost our connection to nature in the first place.

I am certain we used to communicate with animals—and they once communicated with us. There existed a mutual respect and mutual trust. We both earned our rightful place on this bountiful planet and neither was superior to the other. We’ve seen countless examples of a tender relationship between man and beast. It is compelling and heart-warming, because sharing intimacy across the human/animal divide has many rewards and has a magical quality to it. Along with many teachings, it makes more solid our flimsy connection to the natural world. Animals seem to be emissaries from the natural world coaxing us back to nature’s fold.

If there was a time when we had open dialogue with animals, how on earth do we explore and re-initiate this relationship?

Have we broken a trust never to be re-opened again?

There isn’t a child on this earth who can tear themselves away from a well-known scene early on in the movie Snow White:

Shy and unsure at first, the forest animals move in closely to Snow White, sensing her purity and innocence. They comfort her as they notice her alone and crying in a forest clearing. Beguiled, when she sings A Smile and a Song. The birds, a skunk, deer, raccoon and the rest gather round. She plays with them as they play with her. Sure, the scene—measured against contemporary animation and current, more acceptable, sentiment—is markedly dated. The universal sentiment, however, is timeless and every child the world over can relate to it. The natural world and the many animals in it are (for the most part) affectionate, accessible and communicative.

Children can readily imagine themselves as part of the animal kingdom.

Like Romulus and Remus nurtured by a wolf; like Tarzan, reared and cared for by apes; like Mowgli in The Jungle Book, integrated into the wild as a man-cub. Mythologies and stories, yes—but there is a reverberation of a distant longing inside these narratives. A longing to belong to and simply be included in nature’s family.

Nature sings to all of us in the stillness of our hearts. And that song is laced with yearning, intrigue and mystery. Why? Because nature is the unknown: the cycles of the moon, the tidal changes of the sea. Nature can be the deep, dark forest. Nature is a mountain lake sparkling under the sun. Nature is the shock of an animal eating another animal. Nature is the mystery of how a crystal knows how to grow itself with symmetrical perfection. Nature is truly the great unknowable just as we, finally, are a part of the great unknowable.

And this is vexing to us.

We, of the greater Western cultures, have a need to think that our environment is knowable, quantifiable and explainable even though the great mystery of nature and our role within it remains… unknowable. And like birth and death, we will never fully comprehend the uniqueness, complexity and simplicity within nature.

Jane