All over the world, increased connection by Internet and modern transport has connected people from vastly different traditions to share cultural values. In the “New Age”, peoples world-wide have been both honored and exploited, often by westerners, for the value of their close to the earth traditions. The misrepresentation of the ancient Mayan calendar completion cycle is one just example.
A million years of co-evolution has existed among scattered human groups and their ways in the world. Up until recently most ancient traditions they hold were considered “primitive” and “uncivilized.” Many of those traditions, and even languages, are now lost or nearly extinct. The peoples themselves have been influenced too, by a world of progress that they did not necessarily ask for, but they have to participate in, nevertheless.
Concurrently, a consumer culture has consumed much of earth, emptying out souls in the process. People seek healing, for humanity and for a new earth, and they search for wisdom of shamanic ways. The disillusioned and believers alike want answers, solace, healing and belonging.
This is both a wonderful, yet an incomplete, transaction. For New Age people, there is often a strange amalgamation of rites, chants and purification quests that blend bits of ancient and sacred beliefs into a new fabric of modern views.
Sometimes that fabric seems thin, fuzzy, insubstantial and somewhat psychedelic. There is less science and more craving for positive energy among many new age searchers. Before agriculture, monotheism and the industrial revolution, nearly all human beings lived closer to earth and with wisdom of the ages. The focus of most religion was based on pagan, and animistic beliefs, not exclusive “truth” ownership or salvation. Now shreds of both sides; western and animistic traditions are woven, melded and glued over one another in a kind of blanket collage of ecological awareness that is difficult to assess for the skeptical, often cynical mind.
Today, depending on location and often transcending it, people participate in activities like vision quests, chanting, drum circles, psychotropic drug use, yoga, meditation, wilderness immersion and many other nature connecting efforts. The purpose is to reconnect to life source and mutual belonging among all other organisms and systems that restore and honor the creation.
Our many ways of interacting began with animism and mythological beliefs systems, but diverged into theology and civilization. Then, much later, they veered toward biology, evolution, psychology and global Eco systems and climatology. Human relations with the biosphere have maze meandered all over the map. Scrutiny of both enlightening and distorting “earth connection” vary, according to the motivation of who is doing the research.
All over the world, it is generally recognized that indigenous people such as Amerindians, Australian Aboriginals and far north Arctic people were often mistreated and their folk ways dismissed as heathen superstition. Can humanity re-discover the path to the Garden while still on such a rocky path toward it?
Christian missionaries and industrial developers have often sought to annihilate native culture. That modern people now garner a new respect for “the old ways.” is a good thing. However, that some rites are lifted and more or less layered over profligate western ways distorts the traditions into new, unsatisfactory forms. Some of the biology and scientific wisdom of “old ways” has been carefully studied in anthropology and ethnology. Yet, even when science based, investigation has nearly always been done with a western bias.
Here is just one example: the idea of spirit, soul, psyche, wind, breathe, inhalation, inspiration and exhalation, all center on the sacred breathe. An active and living understanding of how living plants, trees and animals (including humans) exchange life giving air is universally present in both ancient western traditions, and in indigenous cultures world wide. But now humans pollute air for consumer lifestyles, new age people among them. This does not mean the spirit concept is not healthy, but it is not entirely scientific either. To have people realize plants create and purify air is a welcome awareness.
When western colonizers found that Amerindians spoke of the exchange of “spirit” they assumed they were speaking about the same ever-lasting soul that transcends earth bound people to dwell in an afterlife. But the “Great Spirit” is a concept that Amerindians (and others) accept in the present and in specific sacred locations they revere and wish to protect. The European idea of “owning “such locations and competing for resources and property does not translate well.
Now there is a confusing situation where both science and tradition clash. Also clashing are ancient belief systems and modernity. Can human beings whose entire culture is centered around ownership, progress, development of resources and exploitation, readily adopt the ancient wisdom that says that which sustains life should matter?
Modern science says yes. The concept of Biophilia recognizes our ancient attachment to the vital living systems that sustain life. Climatologists say yes too. They report that when we value clean air, water and soil humans choose lifestyles to conserve and appreciate both the resources and their origins. Evolutionary Psychology, physiology and ecology all indicate that people indeed need sustainable lifestyles to thrive. Human beings, like all organisms, need the external health of the planet to be internally mentally, emotionally, and physically healthy themselves. They also are more mentally happy and stable when they are appreciated and inter active with life, rather than destructive toward it.
It may take some time for cross cultural assimilation of varied traditions to sort out both the sacred and the scientific. Separating the weird and flaky from the sound and sensible, is, like continuing life on earth, forever an ongoing, dynamic process.
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