Back to the future
By: Angel Ontiveros Cabrera
“You must teach your children that the ground under your feet is the ashes of your grandparents. To respect the land, tell your children that she was enriched with the lives of our people. Teach your children what we teach our own, that the earth is our mother. Anything that happens to the earth will happen to the children of the earth. If men spit on the ground, they’re spitting on themselves. This is what we know: the earth does not belong to man; it is the man who belongs to the earth. Here’s what we know: all things are related like the blood that unites a family. There is a union in everything.” [1] Chief Seattle
We read it and see it every day, the world is under threat, and the world is on fire, the abyss is close, that’s how we live postmodernity. It’s about the climate, the increasing global warming, and something must happen, but what? … we present a way of thinking that can be good to know as we enter the enigmatic postmodern mirror with its economic programs, its development and its strong apocalyptic tendencies. The human is a multidimensional energetic being, and its reality on the other side of the veil is unlimited in its divine projection. Human beings reveal the Veil of Maya, [2] seeking the truth that is hidden in the divine atom of their eternal being. The darkness that do the human being has made of modernity with its negative thoughts and feelings of hatred, anxiety, fear, discord, revenge, racism, selfishness, envy and materialism, which invade the world and prevent man from developing his divinity.
It’s about man’s relationship with nature. Something that turned out terribly wrong in this relationship, but that can still be corrected. It´s about to listen to those who, even before modern civilization, seems to have read the stellar signs in the sky. Because there is something forbidden to do for men. Something that shamans and spiritualists have always known, if we do the forbidden, we will succumb, so they warned us. Will this be a challenge that technology and global collaboration can solve, or are we moving slowly towards an unstoppable decline?
Whatever happens to the earth will fall upon the children of the earth. Man did not wove the tissue of life; he’s just one of his threads. Anything he does to the wove will do to himself.[3]
To find an answer, we look back in the mirror of history. The past gravitates over the present in an inevitable way. History is not just a thing of the past; is present and operates today much more than we tend to imagine. The historical past has always been the repository of where indigenous people (them without history) have drawn the models, examples, lessons for their understanding of the moral and political order. The feeling of being custodians of an inheritance, of being a link in a long chain that comes from the ancestors and that the generations to come will continue it, of having to be judged by future history, is an essential part of the mentality of these peoples.
To aspire to the future, we must rediscover our forgotten past. Somewhere in the history of science, in our lives, in our cultural history, a secret is hidden, which here we will invite you to find it. It is sometimes said that the evolution of our time, with its enormous technological and social changes, cannot be overlooked, even understood. But it’s all about the look you see in the world. In the Hindu vision the world changes continuously, for the universe is a rhythmic and dynamic work, where we are all united in a great cosmic dance. As long as our worldview is fragmented, as long as we are under the veil of Maya, we think that we are separated from the immense Cosmos. The veil of Maya is the illusion of the rational creations of our thoughts that structure, things and events, which form realities in our human nature, are concepts created by our minds determined to measure, categorizing and separating. Maya’s veil is the illusion of taking these concepts for realities, of confusing the map with the country. Another example of appearance is found in Satori, name that the Rinzai school of Japanese Zen gives to a twinkle of enlightenment that can be defined as an intuitive view of the real nature of things, as opposed to the analytical or logical understanding of reality. [4] The story in the mirror is a reading of the modernity reflected in the mirror, tries to feel the echo of the heart of nature that penetrates and touches the heart of postmodernity. Maybe that way we can see the world and understand reality in a whole new way. Every story is a quote of texts, and every man is a quote from his ancestors.
Descartes, Newton and the Death of the Old World
Two men that in the sixteenth century totally changed our way of seeing the world and the human being, thinkers that influenced on us in such a deep plane that, many of us have so much trouble orienting ourselves in the world without consciously or unconsciously embracing the ideas that emerged from this scientists and philosophers.. With them died the organic paradigm that was part of almost all civilizations in the world until then. They created a new cosmovision that was articulated and expressed through a machinic metaphor, hence known as the mechanistic paradigm of modernity. Descartes created a boundary between two independent fields, and separated: res cogitans, thought, and extensive res, matter. Hence his famous statement” the concept of body does not include anything that belongs to the mind and mind, nothing belonging to the body”. The outside world functions as a completely mechanical machine, the inner world must follow the rational world of thought. This division he made has had far-reaching consequences and was also key to the emergence and development of the industrial revolution. [5] It could say that the modern society in which we live is a physical realization of this dualism. Why was it so significant for him to make this dualism so important? Maybe this thought was the one that had the most fatal consequences. According to Descartes, matter had neither life, nor goals, nor spirituality. Nature functioned according to mechanical laws and all things in the material world could be explained in terms of the disposition and movement of its parts.
How does it translate philosophically speaking to the meaning of the Cartesian cogito? We could say that modern science was born there, in the mechanical image of nature that remains the paradigm that dominates modern science, from physics to agriculture; scientifically authorized the manipulation and exploitation of natural resources. In some ways modern science brings to fulfilment the religious myth expressed in the mission given to man by God to dominate the nature. J. Medina states that: In the same logic there is economic and monetary formulation, the “most concrete abstract”, is the most practical and effective instrument for reducing everything to measurable quantities, therefore homogeneous. [6] Which is just the scientific method of modernity. Developmentalism is therefore a direct result of modern scientific cosmology. And well, a modernity that doesn’t work anymore.
The initial Cartesian idea of liberating men from religion and his problems was reinforced by Newton later in the same sixteenth century, with the publication of Principia Mathematica, which lays the foundations of the law of universal gravitation, arguably Newton was the culmination of Descartes. At this same time emerged the anthropocentrism, a doctrine that at the level of epistemology places the human being as the measure and center of all things, and in that of ethics defends that the interests of man must receive moral attention above anything else. Anthropocentrism coincides with the rise of modernity and is seen as an alternative that replaces theocentric view. Descartes as founder of the base of knowledge and Newton as the one that gives the solution to the problem of planetary movements. Principia is considered by many to be the most important work in scientific history. These two theories together became an incredibly powerful combination to prove that it doesn’t need the religion to understand the world. We have to understand that Descartes’ dualism was conceived at the time as an anti-esoteric philosophy, an anti-occult philosophy, an anti-hermetic philosophy, for at that time it was hermetic philosophy that was the main driver of what later becomes the natural sciences. In this way it is like,” the last magician”, Isaac Newton gave rise to the mechanistic worldview: the idea of a mechanical universe that men could explore, measure and, by extension, dominate it. But, Isaac Newton himself was not a simple mechanist, on the contrary, he was inspired by a completely different source, he sought his inspiration in hidden teachings, alchemy, hermetic tradition and what is often called natural magic. On the other hand, without the Cartesian distinction between the internal and the external, we would not have had modern science. What is often forgotten is that there is a specific path of knowledge that should not exclude other paths of knowledge that may have other purposes, different consequences, and other meanings. It is a pity that the process of modernization as a whole meant the totalitarization of this particular path of knowledge, as the right one, true, and all the others became peripheral, superstitious, or nothing to be taken seriously, and so it is still in today’s society, something that is unfortunate for human beings and nature, since these have always had more alternatives than just the Cartesian or Newtonian way.
Now if we reflect, when do we begin to see nature and, in extension, us and life as machines? The decisive beginning was in the sixteenth century, with the theory of gravity, and the mechanics of Newton. It means, after Newton began to see the universe, and the cosmos itself, as a great unique machinery, and the metaphor used at the time was the universal clock, we could say that this was applied up to Darwin, that is to say that the cosmos is a machine, on which we, with the help of knowledge and mechanics, should have more control. After Darwin, especially after the discovery of the structure of DNA and the way the genetic code works, it could thinks of life, including our life, as a regular expression based on mechanic processes, basically very automatic, with very complex unpredictable consequences, but the primordial functionality of what really happened and beneath the surface, is very similar to a machine, so now it is not only the external world that is something mechanic, but also the inner world is based on an mechanistic way, all our thoughts, feelings, behaviors and aspirations, etc. are basically analyzable or reducible to any kind of automatic process, resuming it extremely, the modern evolutionary theory of life and men. In 1976, a book by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins was published: The Selfish Gene, a Classic Work, which becomes like a resume of the end of the mechanistic process of modern science. At the beginning of that book Dawkins writes about something he calls replicators: They did not die, because they are masters in the art of survival. But they should not be sought by floating freely at sea; they gave up that unwrapped freedom a long time ago. Now they abound in large colonies, safe within gigantic and deaf robots, locked up and protected from the outside world, communicating with him by means of indirect and tortuous routes, manipulating him by remote control. They are in you and in me, they created us, body and mind; and its preservation is the ultimate reason for our existence. Those replicators have come a long way. Now they are known with the term genes, and we are their survival machines. [7] It is then the genes, genes as replicators, genes as a type of machines, in which our function as humans, that is, that the function of all organisms from the point of view of genes is only to ensure that these are transmitted in time to a new generation. Genes work colossally mechanically so, according to this quote from Dawkins, we are filled with a species of machines that determines what we are.
Today there are many criticisms against this mechanistic vision and well-justified criticisms even within the same science. Since this tends to distort the image of reality if we observe its behavior throughout historical development from the origin of this paradigm. Galeano puts it this way: The civilization that confuses clocks with time, growth with development and the big with greatness, also confuses nature with the landscape, while the world, maze without center, is dedicated to breaking its own sky. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and its history can be read in the mountains. Modern civilization has developed only in 10,000 years ago, but we have pushed the planet’s system beyond natural limits. We’re all involved in it, some a lot more than others. But the effort that helped us to flourish can help us make systems safe for all forms of life on earth. Recognizing and transforming our dominant signal or footprint is the beginning of change.
Therefore, let’s ponder the offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will impose a condition: the white man must treat the animals of this earth as his brethren.[8]
In this context, the idea of the rights of nature challenges Cartesian dualism, or rather the dichotomy between man and nature. That man is one thing and nature is another, that man can use nature at his own discretion, regardless of whether nature has some value, a pattern-slave relationship, this purely empirical fact, we know that it occurred in that sense. This empirical fact, in turn, has been made possible by a well-founded idea that there is a great difference between man and nature, and that in any case, man has the right to exploit nature. This anthropocentric way of living hade characterized the modernity, and that is one of the grave mistakes of our civilization. The Indians, the shamans claim that man and nature coexist in a reciprocity, they knew from the beginning that such differentiation could not be done. Now is when we see that they were right, that anything negative we can do against nature, is like doing it against ourselves, since man and his environment are two sides of the same coin, so to speak. We know that the white man does not understand our customs. For him a portion of the land has the same meaning as any other, for it is an outsider who arrives at night and draws from the earth what he needs. The earth is not her sister but her enemy, and when she has already conquered her, she continues her path. He leaves behind the graves of his ancestors and doesn’t care. He steals from the earth what would become of his children and does no care[9]. Unsurprisingly, climate activists like Greta Thunberg ask dignitaries at climate summits to listen to the indigenous people. It is no coincidence that one refers to these peoples or cultures in this context, since the whole way of thinking about the rights of nature, philosophically speaking, has more or less to do with the way these peoples look to their environment, without any distinction between people and nature. They simply don’t work with these concepts at all. On the contrary, what they do is consider almost everything as human beings, everything that modernity calls nature, for them all that exists in nature, are also people like us. therefore, when in our modern world we talk about the rights of nature, it means that nature in another form can be represented legally as a person, so the symbol for indigenous peoples is not a strange idea at all, on the contrary, it is absolutely evident, hence that view is relevant when we talk about the rights of nature.
How can you buy or sell the sky or the heat of the earth? That’s a strange idea for us. If no one can possess the freshness of the wind or the glare of water, how is it possible for you to intend to buy them?[10]
The concept or terminology of nature’s rights is not new, but the common people do not know or understand it. The academic world shows its skepticism. For myself, it took me a long time to realize the metaphysical and philosophical basis of the approach. In an interesting way, I realized that, in addition to having a pragmatic side that is quite important, it has a philosophical basis, a completely different conception of reality as a basis, compared to that which normally governs the law of modern societies. If I mention something brief about the pragmatic, we will soon understand how or why it is interesting as an idea as well. If we think about the concept of legal rights in general, these apply to individuals and companies, both individuals and companies can be legally represented in the courts as individuals and are therefore treated as if they have rights (a company can be a legal entity). To speak from a legal point of view about the rights of nature, means that nature in the comprise of animals, plants, rivers, mountains, forests, has the same legal status as a company, or in the case of a person. In other words, a river, for example, could be represented in court and assert their rights against those who want to blow up the river and then maybe pollute it and destroy it in some way. This is interesting if this is to be incorporated into real legislation. It opens an opportunity to protect the rights of nature on an extremely powerful basis.
The proposal is also an interesting difference from the usual environmental legislation: one thinks that traditional environmental legislation is to protect nature, but in fact it is to regulate the exploitation of nature. Environmental legislation does not talk about why something should be protected, it only talks about why something should not be destroyed, which are actually two different starting points. So the starting point for environmental legislation is that the normal state is that humans, or various economic interests, can exploit nature. Nature is the domain of using resources simply, and this is how we are accustomed to understanding it, coal, hydropower, oil, forest, everything is there for any economic interest, so nature is “a property”. Environmental legislation then regulates the shape, setting certain limits on how to use this property, sometimes stronger protection is done in the form of national parks. And what is understood is that there cannot be an economic exploitation, that in principle, the natural resources that exist within those limits are protected, but that it is well exploited beyond these limits. In this way, the border of the national park does not establish so much protection for what happens outside, and this type of legal thinking has a philosophical basis, which has to do with the relationship of ownership, that is, take the right to do something to claim it for itself, and this also implies an even deeper division, between man and nature.
Nature back and forth, is the headline in an ad from one of the world’s leading automobile fabric on an entire newspaper page, and the TV image shows a blue car next to a river and the mountains in the background. The car has a lot of amenities so your “may safely travel to your experiences in nature and then come back”. The formulation, among many others, is an example of an anthropocentric view of nature that has dominated for more than two hundred years, the perception that nature, the river, the mountains, etc. It is something that is separated from us humans, who can travel to it in our new car, something we can enjoy, or something from which we can extract a resource. Nature is simply a resource.
Rivers are our brothers; they wield our thirst. Rivers load our canoes and feed our children. If we sell our lands to you, you must remember and teach your children that rivers are our brethren, and so are yours. Therefore, you must give the rivers the kindness you would dedicate to any brother.[11]
But there is a completely different view of nature, that of indigenous peoples, where a more holistic vision prevails. “I am the river and the river is me” – (so reason the Maoris) referring to the Whanganui River in New Zealand that, inspired by his holistic view of this indigenous people, received legal rights in a new legislation. Maybe it needs a similar approach of different natives’ groups; that man is part of nature rather than his owner and rapist? A way to achieve a more sustainable view of nature can be precisely reside on conferring legal rights on nature. The laws of Western civilization have so far regarded nature as property or resource, and in their legal texts all another life shines with their absence. A river is seen as water that can be drunk or used for hydropower, can be a transport route, can provide mud masses, maybe a place to swim or a boat ride. But a river are also the larvae of insects, algae, birds that nest on its banks, the forest that grows on its slopes. For Maori, the river is also the people who live next to it. With the idea of granting rights to nature, the Maori people found a way to enroll all this also in the outdated and square legal text of the Western world. But what does it need for someone or something to obtain legal rights, and what is the qualitative difference between that type of legislation and common environmental laws?
“The vision of the other reality rests upon the ruins of this reality”[12]
The people of Koyukon in Alaska, who on the one hand see humans and animals as very similar beings, and this is not because man is also an animal but, because animals are also humans,? so animals have feelings like us, they have different personalities, they communicate with each other and their spirits are aware of what we humans are doing, they are easily offending if we do not behave respectfully. Not only animals, but also plants, trees, rivers and winds have personal characteristics, so everything has spirit or rather is animated. However, the people of Koyukon believe that there is a difference between man and other beings, because only man has consciousness, and this consciousness is different from the spirits of other beings. More other indigenous peoples make a similar distinction, do some sort of classification, such as the Chewong people in Malaysia, who see that there are degrees of personal intensity in different beings, this personality they call it Ruway, all animals and plants have a ruway in the sense that they are alive, then there is a ruway that is conscious, has language and awareness, and such a ruway can take the form of several animals besides humans, then there is a third intensity, and it is the ruway spirit of teaching, as in the case of shamans who have him as a guide and teacher. So we could say that here there are three different degrees of intensity of personal existence, all living beings, everything that lives has a spirit, some entities of all the living have a more intense ruway or that, we could say as the people of Koyukon, who have a soul that makes them more aware, more able to understand things, or contexts, etc. So, a third category that has an intensity of presence even greater that is not firmly rooted in material reality but that exists equally in another dimension, as demonstrated by the shaman Don Juan in the work of Carlos Castaneda. Thus the different indigenous peoples describe and categorize with their own nuances, no matter where in the world they are, as the examples we have given, far geographically separated, and ecologic faraway however, with the same basic idea. It is interesting to mention that the same categorizations are also found in ancient Egypt and hermetic tradition. Here it is not worth mentioning that most of the so-called “scientific discoveries” of the West including Newton, Copernicus and others only refined those theories that had already been elaborated in ancient Egypt. In fact, the true origin of modern scientificism can be found in the hermetic tradition[13]. This century (XVI) known in Spain as the century of colonies, are characterized by the expansion and conquest of the “New World”, while the history of that century looking in the mirror, returned to the future that was Egypt, with its hermetic tradition, and thus who the modern science emerges.
The rights of nature seen Legally has a broader meaning than the protection of individual animals or creatures, rather to protect nature or the ecosystem, something that was initially a philosophical idea of the original peoples, and which Has acquired expressions Legal real and concrete at this point. The first state in the world to incorporate the rights of nature into its constitution was Ecuador, and when something is written in the constitution it has suddenly strength, not because something happens automatically at that time, but there is always the possibility that , for example, if any natural area in Ecuador would be seriously threatened, a representative of that area can be appointed, since in fact, literally, legally, that area is a legal entity in a process. Philosophical reflection in this regard should be the one with the property: The fact that if a person, company or organization can own land? The immediate response from the perspective of Western civilization it’s clear that it is! But this assumes that the land is one thing and the owner is something else, that is, there is no relationship of reciprocity between nature and man, but, a relationship like that of master-slave. As in a system where slavery is allowed, the owner decides everything, he does not have to ask the slave before hi is used or mistreated. And that Was the origin of the struggle for human rights, to say that all human beings have the same rights, and that no human being has the right to own another human being, and the same applies here to the rights of nature. So, nature has the same rights as us, because no human being as part of nature has the right to own the nature in which we are included. If we do a comparison of this idea of the rights of nature, with ancient Greece, put that any philosopher in Plato’s academy would have thought of talking about human rights at the time. Something that would sound unusual or absurd in that Time… ¿That slaves can be represented in some kind of trial?… they don´t have any right. And They are a possession they would say and laugh. Maybe one of them, the most visionary, hi would take it a little more seriously, but hi would murmur to its interiors… that could be true in hundreds of more years. It’s a pretty real analogy. What is revealed here when the rights of nature are seriously claimed, and when further more so, is written in the legislation of more and more countries at different levels, this serves as a kind of proof of the philosophy that actually becomes the basis of the rest of the legislation that has never been challenged in that regard before, so it not only adds another component to the Legal Practice in general, it is a kind of thinking that has gained legal power. An idea that represents a New philosophy, a basic conception of reality that goes into essence against almost all other laws that somehow address this problem, and therefore, viewed in a pragmatic way, this becomes a species for example to attack a principled system with those who Is against. An example of this is of the Whanganui River in New Zealand that we mentioned above, that in 2017 became the first river in the world to obtain legal status as a person or as a company. The indigenous peoples of that country, The Maori, have fought for decades for their worldview so that nature sea a respected being. Another example is what happened in an Ohio court that came to a formal decision stating that nature can’t have rights! Which is expressed by those who work for the rights of nature as a victory, which may seem something paradoxical at first, But it’s understood their position, because what it’s all about is that, when a legal device feels it needs to say it, it’s because it take something serious, as a threat to the established system. It wouldn’t be the same if the system pretends to ignore something it don’t care about, then it feels as “that something” has no power or real capacity to affect to the system. Now they are beginning to feel in Ohio that this is a little threatening to established financial interests, therefore it is very interesting, purely pragmatic, but the most interesting thing in this context is the vision of the underlying reality.
What does it mean then to look at the other beings and natural phenomena as people? If we think in a purely pragmatic way, what is the meaning of thinking this way?… Well, the original peoples are cultures that have been living or surviving in conditions that modern people, verbatim could not be put up with it for a single day, but they do it year after year, decade after decade, they are artists of extreme survival, they know exactly how everything is related, and they are not surprised in bed by any of the north winds, or other things, if not, have full control of everything, at the same time we think that it sounds magical, mystical, or mythical and we believe that their myths do not have a practical meaning. But what we must realize little by little is that the way of thinking of them is the most ecological, most economical, and most rational way of seeing the environment, if you want to react properly when it is really required. If we study in detail all these notions in detail and in concrete ways, as different anthropologists and other scholars have done, and we compare with the way these people actually live and act in different situations, it is obvious, that it is a very ecological, economical way to relate to the environment. However, somehow, we distance ourselves from the possibility that there may be some truth in all of this. But it is not necessary to make that estrangement, it is also so obvious if we return to ourselves even in modern contexts, that if we look at each other in these terms, if we relate to each other as deeply knowledgeable people, then we make a completely different relationship between us than if we related each other as objects; employers- employees, master- slave, non-owner owner.. There are much that is integrated into our system of civilization that is based on not relating to each other as people. We already have the built-in sensitivity to recognize the aggression or kindness of others without even knowing them, it is precisely a question of transferring this sensitivity to other beings, but the lack of that sensitivity already shows that modern urban people teach how disturbed we are in our perception. Therefore, it is not only a cognitive, economic or pragmatic function, when indigenous peoples relate to their environment as if they were doing so with subjectivities. It perceives the energies directly bodily in this way, not only the radiations or human energies, but also of all other creatures or phenomena, which have this type of glow immediately perceptible in themselves. Now, retrieving the thread of this long reasoning about the rights of nature, where do we end up? We conclude with a simple finding that if we take the concept or idea of the rights of nature in the most philosophical and real-world terms, and at the same time make it a legal practice and introduce it into legislation, this becomes a direct, implicit and philosophical critique of the systems that obviously interfere with our relationship with nature. It is also a practical endorsement with the legal machinery that until now is built on a completely different concept of reality, a concept of a false reality. It is therefore, in other words, one of the most interesting movements when it comes to accessing what more and more people perceive as a serious global crisis to which we are exposing ourselves, is not the only means, but an unusually clear means, since it has a pragmatic effect, but it is also philosophically clear in its implications.
Should it not be that on a level deeper of subconscious, that one assumes that there is some kind of intuition nowadays quite hidden, hidden in our inners more intimate as people, that somehow we consider that the indigenous mythology expresses something true.. Not in the modern meaning of science, but that remains true, nonetheless. So when we are facing negative changes that concern us in the atmosphere, something on the deepest plane that we do not understand, we do not know, we cannot express it, we probably deny it, but that we do not stop reacting, which could be a factor of what is happening now on earth is not only what was said before, that the beliefs of progress no longer work if they collide with walls, perhaps the deeper dimension of this can be read in Chief Seattle’s letter? A common way to talk about this is to see that the potential threat to our current way of life, our current world order, is a challenge for us, which means that something can still be done about it. But if what is happening in the atmosphere is no longer possible to do anything, or just a little? Then we are in the face of a real crisis, and that crisis is not at all on earth, in the atmosphere, the biosphere or nature, cause nature always manages, it can change catastrophically but it recovers, maybe it takes a few million years, it has done it before, so you don’t need to worry about nature, but on the contrary, human beings?? If we are not able to face a supposed challenge, then we are fried… I know that all the attention that really drives the concern for climate change not only has to do with scientific understanding and possible technical and economic reactions, but the energy itself comes from the anxiety that arises when we realize, without, wanting to recognize it, conscious that we in reality don’t really have power! And this is something that we are not accustomed in modern society,” we believe and we are accustomed to being very powerful and capable of everything.””.
“Life was the pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure was proportional to the destruction of life.”
George Battle
Thus, as Schopenhauer would say in his work; The world as a will and representation: the view of the individual is clouded, as the Indians say, by the veil of Maya; he sees not the things itself, but a phenomenon in time and space. Given this way of knowing, the individual does not discover the unity of the essence of things; he sees nothing but phenomena in his multiple variety, in his isolation, in his inexhaustible number and in his opposition… For Javier Medina,, “the postmodernity is faced with the challenge that aims to awaken in man, the awareness that has no other way out than to live with the Earth; redesign another model of symbiosis and homeostasis biosphere: build a Common House, get rise of economic reductionism of globalization. There is no organized system that can be closed with the help of the interior elements to the system, it needs an exteriority, of a third party included, that provides the meaning. That sense we no longer need to think of it and feel it monotheistical: nothing of the human is alien to a human being.” At the time, what is about in the context of The Story in the Mirror is, to step aside when talking about ecology, economics and politics, leaving the standards in question. To look at history in the mirror is to move away from the conventions, to expose the things we talk about in other types of conceptual devices, other types of thinking, such as speak in metaphysical terms, theological terms, or in magical terms, and why not, only in philosophical- reflective terms?
What happens if we focused on modern history in the mirror? Modern history with its brilliant scientificism has failed to formulate in rational terms what happens to climate change, with a dying ecosystem and, therefore, an agonizing nature on earth. There is a kind of latent cynicism in general to which the vast majority were quite receptive, as stupid, uncritical consumers who appreciated the potential cynical system. We thought it was all nonsense machinery, that’s good! And we did what we wanted, there was no higher moral or ethical order that was perceived as positive, although many did not share the philosophical and metaphysical vision that this implied. But, as Galeano would say: the story is a prophet looking back: for what it was, and against what it was, it announces what it will be. The story in the mirror creates the inflection, the mirror is the space where the point of modern history changes direction its curvature, and returns to the future, understood as in the Aymara[14] worldview. It gives a Kutti: return, action to return.
And what does the question matter: what about indigenous knowledge is philosophy or mythology? If it is philosophy, it is the “revenge of the object of philosophical study”, a shaman-indigenous- knowledge that turns the philosopher into a witch: it is anti-philosophy. If it is mythology, its theme is the defeat of science and the victory of magic.
The story in the mirror is that
of a conversion, to paraphrase O. Paz. “Change of position: the
“object” of the study – the Indian, the shaman – becomes the subject
who studies and the subject – modernity and its science – becomes the object of
study and experimentation. Not only does it change the position of the elements
in the relationship, but it also changes. The duality: subject/object – the
subject he knows and the object to be known – fades and instead appears that of
the Indian or shaman/modernity. The relationship of scientific order is
transformed into one of magic-shamanic order. In the initial relationship, the
story wants to meet the other; in the second, modernity becomes antiquity. The
story in the mirror makes a double conversion: that of modernity in antiquity
and that of the indigenous worldview into another knowledge. As an account of
this conversion, the story in the mirror adjoins at one end with ethnography and at another with phenomenology,
rather than the worldview, of the experience that Octavio Paz has called of
otherness. This experience, expressed in magic, spirituality and poetry but not
only in them, is a constitutive experience of man, such as work and language.
It is a detachment from the self that we are (or believe we are) to the other
that we are also and that is always different from us. Detachment: appearance:
Experience of strangeness that is to be men. As a deconstruction critical of
science, history in the mirror borders the opposite frontiers of modern science
and indigenous philosophy. Of science as something dual, rigid, rational,
logical; Those of the indigenous worldview because it proposes us, a radical
critique of modernity, another knowledge, non-scientific and alogical; because
this knowledge requires a change of nature in us: a conversion. Indigenous
philosophy opens the doors of the other reality provided that the neophyte
becomes another. The story in the mirror is the chronicle of
conversion, the account of a look to the past and, at the same time, the rediscovery
and defense of a knowledge despised by the West and contemporary science. The
theme of knowledge is linked to that of power and both to that of
metamorphosis: the shaman who knows (the sorcerer) is the man of power (the
warrior) and both, knowledge and power, are the keys of change. The sorcerer
can see the other reality because he sees it with other eyes – with the other’s
eyes.”.
[1] This and much more is very well suited in the letter-response to U.S. President Franklin Pierce, on the part of Chief Seattle, of the Suwamish, when the president wants to buy them the northwest territories of the United States that now make up Washington State. Chief Seattle responds in 1855. This letter is a brilliant summary of indigenous philosophy around the world, and whose spirit will guide this whole story. https://ciudadseva.com/texto/carta-del-jefe-seattle-al-presidente-de-los-estados-unidos/
[2] Maya. Maya is a Sanskrit term that can be translated as “illusion”, “mirrors” or “unreality”. … Specifically, it is in the system of Advaita Vedanta where Maya is considered an illusion. In the Upanishads Hindus, the world is considered an emanation of divine or Mayan energy.
[3] Letter from Seattle. https://ciudadseva.com/texto/carta-del-jefe-seattle-al-presidente-de-los-estados-unidos/
[4] Antoni Prevosti i Monclús, Antonio Jesé Doménech del Río, Ramon N. Prats, Thought and Religion in East Asia. 2005
[5] Javier Medina, Qué Bolivia is posible y deseable? 2006
[6] Ibid
[7] Richard Dawkins, The Gene Selfish Andxtendido 2017. 3, to edition. Page 21
[8] Chief Seattle. https://ciudadseva.com/texto/carta-del-jefe-seattle-al-presidente-de-los-estados-unidos/
[9] Ibid
[10] Paper of the Chief Seattle. https://ciudadseva.com/texto/carta-del-jefe-seattle-al-presidente-de-los-estados-unidos/
[11] Ibid
[12] Octavio Paz. With this phrase Octavio Paz is right to express that the remnants of cultures and knowledge cornered by modernity, science and Christianity, survive on the margins of modern society. Carlos Castaneda calls this other reality “a realm of separate reality, another world, which I have called “reality of consensus special”… that other world was as usable as the world of everyday life.” Peace is also right to underline the link between David Hume and Carlos Castaneda: the critique of the reality of this world by the empirical philosopher David Hume, emphasizes that nothing true we can affirm of the objective world, that the world is imaginary even if they are not the perceptions and that it’s all perceptions.
[13] It is known as “Texts Hermetic” a series of writings containing religious and philosophical teachings attributed to Hermes Trismegisto, including the Corpus Hermeticum y el Asclepius. These and other apocryphal texts are found in the work. Corpus Hermeticum, 15th edition 2019
[14] The Aymara have a concept of time opposite all other cultures on the planet; for them, the past is seen ahead, and the future awaits behind. Each language reflects and forms a particular view of the world. In the language Aymara it is very important to mark whether or not the speaker saw how the action happened. As long as it’s out of sight, nothing is given by the way. Therefore, the future would be behind one, as it is not yet visible; and the past, in front, seen or visible. http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1870-57662014000100002
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