The modern world is a violent place. Millions of humans have been murdered in the name of nationalism, idealism, religion, and greed. Vast amounts of resources and energy have been devoted to weaponry. The power to kill is the measure of political power. It seems the world has lost it way. In Primal Way and the Pathology of Civilization, Dr. Walter Robinson presents a cross-cultural exploration of these deepest issues facing mankind. He investigates the supposition that life was better during past times, and he asks if we can recreate a healthy, viable existence by following the path of indigenous peoples who knew a way of life full of meaning and well-being. Using the foundation of philosophical Taosim, a normative system of understanding, Robinson evaluates society's state of health. Primal Way and the Pathology of Civilization shows that society must heal and it can be accomplished through the primal Way.
PRIMAL WAY and THE PATHOLOGY of CIVILIZATION
By Walter RobinsoniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Walter Robinson, PhD.
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-2913-3Contents
Introduction to the Way........................................viiThe Way of the East: Giving Birth..............................1The Way of the South: Sacred Hoop..............................14The Way of the West: Coming of Age.............................30The Way of the North: Wisdom of the Elders.....................50The Way of the Center: Being Whole.............................75Bibliography...................................................87
Chapter One
THE WAY OF THE EAST: GIVING BIRTH
Patriarchal civilization has been in existence for about six thousand years—this against a backdrop of more than a hundred thousand years of human existence. As such, patriarchal civilization is relatively recent. Moreover, it is a radical divergence from previous social conditions. It is my contention that this divergence is pathological.
Prior to the advent of patriarchal civilization, patterns of culture tended to be gynocentric. By this I mean that femaleness was (and for many tribal people still is) of central religious concern. In the primal worldview of gynocentric cultures, the Universe is seen as a living being. So `being' implies birth, and birthing is a female function. Thus, it is understood that insofar as life comes from the female, the Universe as a living being is of female origin. This femaleness is equivalent to Nature. Nature comes from herself to herself though the act of creation. She is, as such, the creator. Life gives life to herself though this act of self-creation, which is the act of birthing. In this way of understanding, femaleness is prior to maleness and is the all-inclusive origin of the web of existence. She is, as known in the Navajo mythos, Spider Woman who weaves the world from her own body. In the old mythos, the mother is first, and then she creates out of her body a male consort. Maleness exists within the context of what is given by the Great Mother.
This primal worldview—the prevailing mythos for most of human existence—was militantly overthrown and displaced by a different way of understanding. About six thousand years ago the Indo-Europeans began a massive military migration. They were a people who worshipped sky gods. Their social structure was hierarchical and required obedience and loyalty to the power structure. For them the Earth was not sacred, but reduced to a thing of property. In a similar manner, women were reduced to the status of human cattle. Femaleness was thus reduced to an inferior and subservient position under the power and authoritarianism of the sky gods, who were, by and large, male.
With the aid of the war chariot the Indo-European sociopolitical pattern spread like cancer. Often non-Indo-European people, like the Semites, Egyptians, and others, took on the Indo-European pattern, thus contributing to its spread. About four thousand years ago the Chinese learned the use of the war chariot, and with it the sociopolitics of patriarchy.
Prior to the Ch'in dynasty (221 B.C.), village life in China remained more or less gynocentric. Patriarchy was a social pattern of the imperial courts and the military. After the Ch'in dynasty, patriarchal Confucianism became the official state philosophy, and was culturally superimposed on village life, thus eroding gynocentric values. On the other hand, Taoism became the philosophy that preserved these older values. Gary Snyder in The Old Way, writes: "Taoism being, following dr. Joseph Needham's assessment of it in Science and Civilization in China, the largest single coherent chuck of the matrilineal descent, mother consciousness-oriented, Neolithic culture that went through the so to speak, sound barrier of civilization in the Iron Age and came out the other side halfway intact. Thus, through its whole political history it has been anti-feudal and anti-patriarchal ..."
The Chinese word "tao" translates into English as "way," and as a philosophical notion it means the Way of Nature. The Chinese notion of Nature is that which "happens of itself" or "self so." The aim of Taoism is harmony with Nature. This harmony is entered into by way of going with the self-happening of Nature without effort, or effortless action. What is entailed in this teaching is that Nature being that which is so of herself, to be in harmony with her is to be as she is, thus without effort. Harmony is like self-generative homeostasis. All one needs to do is center oneself on the Way, and without effort harmony comes about of itself.
The Taoist philosophy of harmony is expressed in the metaphysics of yin and yang. Yin is darkness. Yang is light. Together they form the T'ai Chi, or Great Ultimate. Yin and yang stand in bipolar relationship with one another, each one requiring the other for definition: without down, no up; without left, no right; without darkness, no light; without female, no male; without primary, no secondary, and so forth. This however does not entail duality, because the bipolar dynamic operates within a holistic context in which everything is inseparably interconnected with everything else. In Taoist metaphysics this insight is expressed as that the T'ai Chi originates from and is one with Wu Chi, whereas the Wu Chi is the Non-being ultimate, which is prior to and the source of all being, but which is in itself Non-being. Non-being does not mean nothingness in the literal sense, but no-thing-ness as in not anything in particular.
A misconception of yin/yang metaphysics is that yin and yang stand in relationship to one another as two sides of a balanced algebraic formula. It is not the case that yin and yang are of equal value. Yin is of greater value, for which yang is a secondary and augmentive value. Yin exists at two levels: first it is the Non-being that is prior and gives birth to being; and second is the relative non-being that stands alongside being in interdependent interaction with it. In the first sense, Non-being is absolute and prior to manifested existence. In the second sense, non-being exists within manifested relativity and is interdependent upon it. The two conditions of such are still related insofar as absolute Non-being enters into manifested relativity in order to produce being. Tao as Mother is that mode of Non-being producing the relative universe of being. Being as such has no existence apart from Non-being.
In biology there is what is known as parthenogenesis. Life comes from the female, and it is possible for life to self-generate from the female without the male. That is to say, all the bio-chemical components and mechanisms for regeneration of life exist within the female. The male acts as a stimulus to put the process in motion, and to contribute to genetic diversity. A male may be, in a manner of speaking, thought of as an incomplete female. In yin/ yang metaphysics, yin is parthenogenic, but acts through yang (which she creates out of herself) to create diversity. From Lao-tzu we read:
"The way that can be talked about is not the constant Way.
The name that can be named is not the constant Name.
Non-being is the name of the origin of Heaven and Earth;
Being is the name of the mother of all things.
Therefore:
Constantly in Non-being, one wishes to
Contemplate its (the Way's) subtlety.
Constantly in Being, one wishes to
Contemplate its path.
These two come from the same source, but are different
in name.
The same source is called Mystery.
Mystery and more mystery,
It is the gateway to myriad subtleties."
Mother is mother by way of having children—no children, no motherhood. Being expressed as T'ai-chi is the Mother of all things, but Non-being expressed as Wu-chi is the origin of Heaven and Earth. Both come from the same source, which is the mysterious Way, and the function of the Way is female. The function of the Way as female becomes Mother by way of the manifested Being. The Way is beyond naming. Things in manifested existence can be named, but the source of being—Non-being—is beyond names, and it is of the essence-less essence of the Way. More from Lao-tzu:
"The spirit of the valley never dies;
It is called the mysterious female.
The gate of the mysterious female
Is called the roots of Heaven and Earth.
Continuously it seems to exist.
There is no labor in its use."
The first line refers to Non-being. The valley is an allegory to emptiness, whereas spirit is the function of emptiness. Such is the Mysterious Female, which is the root of the universe. Again, the Way functions as the Mysterious Female. When she gives birth to Being, she becomes the Mother. The Chinese words that are translated as "metaphysics" can be more literally translated as "dark study." The word for "dark" is also used for "mystery." In Philosophical Taoism, truth is dark and mysterious. It may be said that there is wisdom in darkness that no light can see. This darkness is an attribute of the female. In contradiction to the monotheistic idea that god is a white male, in may be suggested by Taoism that God is a black women. In the mythological motifs of primal humanity the Great Goddess is dark like the night sky and the ground of fertile earth, and she encompasses a primal chaos, which is the dark watery womb, giving forth the abundance of life. The Lao-tzu again:
"There was something formed in chaos;
It existed before heaven and earth.
Still and solitary,
It alone stands without change.
It is all-pervasive without being exhausted.
It may be the mother of the world.
I do not know its name, but name it the Way ...
The world has a beginning;
It is the mother of the world.
One can know the son,
Having known the son
One should stay with the mother."
According to Yi Wu, professor of Chinese philosophy at the California Institute of Integral Studies, the mother/son relationship entails: root/end; substance/function; one/many; simplicity/ complexity; spirit/[material]; non-action/action; wisdom/ knowledge. He goes on to write, "To return to the mother is to return to theWay—to roots, substance, oneness, simplicity, non-action, and wisdom."
The Chinese word for virtue is "te," which can also be translated as "power." When translated as power, it means something akin to the vitality of life, like that of a healthy organism or the healing properties of herbal medicine. An underlying notion here is that there is a fundamental relationship between morality and health. Indeed one may speak of immorality as a kind of sickness. Western ethical philosophy is often dichotomized in a duality of good versus evil. Much of the historical backdrop of this mode of thinking is Zoroastrianism, which influenced Jewish religion just prior to the emergence of Christianity. In the mythology of Zoroastrianism, and consequently in Christianity and Islam, evil became personified as the devil. In the mythological motifs of these religions we have a cosmic war in which one side must win, the good side, and evil must be destroyed at the end of history. Entailed in this mythos is a linear notion of time with an absolute beginning and an end.
Among indigenous people there is no devil, and time is associated with place in a pattern of eternal return in which life renews itself, and mythic beginnings are ever—present in each moment. The Taoist concept of virtue is derivative of indigenous philosophy, such that it is not a matter of good versus evil, but of the condition of health in contrast to the conditions of sickness. A healthy human being is not intentionally good, nor is a sick human intentionally bad. A person with a "good heart" who is whole and at one with his deeper nature in harmony with the Way is naturally good. In Chinese the word for "heart" is the same as for "mind," for that which thinks is also that which feels and the heart/mind is one and the same. The ethno-psychology implied in this concept differs greatly from that promulgated by the West, whereas in the West the mind is a function of the brain, in China the mind is a function of the vital life energy of the whole body, and is centered in the heart. Virtue as such is the condition of having a healthy heart/mind and body, whereas the body itself must be in accords with the Way of Great Harmony with Nature as a whole. In the words of Lao-tzu:
"To keep the spirit and body embracing Oneness,
can you let them not be separate?
To concentrate the breath for attaining softness, can you
be like an infant?
Primal Way and the Pathology of Civilization
To wash and clear the mysterious vision, can you eliminate
all flaws?
To love the people and govern the state, can you be without
knowledge?
To open and close the Heavenly gates, can you be the female?
To understand all things in the four directions, can you be
in non-action?
To produce them and nourish them,
To produce without possessing,
To act without taking credit,
To [encourage] growth without controlling,
This is called mysterious virtue."
In the first line is the issue of spirit and body. Virtue is the oneness of these two. Separation or fragmentation of these is contrary to virtue. In the second line the key term is "breath," which is a translation of "ch'i" which is a term for omni-present life energy. It is viewed that this bio-energy is the very stuff of the Universe. As one harmonizes with ch'i and becomes one in heart/mind, one becomes one with Nature, and this yields virtue. This relates to the state of the infant insofar as one is born with virtue whole and complete. Separation and fragmentation come later when one learns to behave contrary to the Way. Knowledge is that which yields disharmony. By "knowledge" what is meant is a mode of being in which psychic differentiates into subject/object as to fragment them into a separation of ego from the self as deep Ecology, thus dividing the whole into artificial parts negating the depth of wisdom of the Way. In Chapter Forty-eight of Lao-tzu we read, "to pursue learning is to increase daily," whereas "to practice the Way is to decrease daily," and this unto effortless action. The nonaction of effortless action is to be, allegorically speaking, like the female. The Lao-tzu:
"Knowing the male and keeping the female,
One will be the streambed of the world.
To be the streambed of the world,
One will not depart from the constant virtue
But will return again to infancy.
Knowing the white and keeping to the black,
One will be the pattern of the world.
To be the pattern of the world,
One will not deviate from the constant virtue
But will return to the non-ultimate.
Knowing the honor and keeping to the mean,
One will be the valley of the world.
Being the valley of the world,
One's constant virtue is complete;
One returns to simplicity.
When the uncarved block is divided, it becomes vessels.
The sage uses it to become a leader.
Therefore, the great system will not cut apart."
Virtue is innate. All that is required for it to manifest is the harmony of yin and yang—and this also is innate to life when nonaction is the norm. With nonaction one resides in the Great Ultimate (T'ai Chi), which is Non-Ultimate (Wu Chi). It is the Great Ultimate that is Non-Ultimate in that there is nothing beyond it. It is the uncarved block insofar that it is prior to things. It is the Great Harmony that exists within Nature. This Great Harmony is not made—it is discovered pre-existing within the groundless ground of being. Lao-tzu teaches that if one tries to take control over the world in an effort to improve it, one will only ruin it. The more one acts on the world, the more problems one creates. There is evidence of this in the techno-industrial age. From the paradigms of Francis Bacon and John Locke, the West is exerting an effort to subdue and improve the world. The result is the most destructive force in human history, threatening much of the life of our planet. The ecologists are now telling us that if we are to survive we must harmonize human activity with the norms of Nature. Philosophical Taoism agrees and goes on to assert that harmony comes out of the virtue of nonaction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PRIMAL WAY and THE PATHOLOGY of CIVILIZATIONby Walter Robinson Copyright © 2012 by Walter Robinson, PhD.. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
