The Condor and The Eagle: A Prophecy for our Time

Nearly every culture I know prophesies that in the late 1990s we entered a period of remarkable transition. At monasteries in the Himalayas, ceremonial sites in Indonesia, and indigenous reservations in North America, from the depths of the Amazon to the peaks of the Andes and into the ancient Mayan cities of Central America, I have heard that ours is a special moment in human history, and that each of us was born at this time because we have a mission to accomplish.

The titles and words of the prophecies differ slightly. They tell variously of a New Age, the Third Millennium, the Age of Aquarius, the Beginning of the Fifth Sun, or the end of old calendars and the commencement of new ones. Despite the varying terminologies, however, they have a great deal in common, and “The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” is typical. It states that back in the mists of history, human societies divided and took two different paths: that of the condor (representing the heart, intuitive mystical) and that of the eagle (representing the brain, rational and material). In the 1490s, the prophecy said, the two paths would converge and the eagle would drive the condor to the verge of extinction. Then, five hundred years later, in the 1990s, a new epoch would begin, one in which the condor and eagle will have the opportunity to reunite and fly together in the same sky, along the same path. If the condor and eagle accept this opportunity, they will create a most remarkable offspring, unlike any ever seen before.

“The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” can be taken at many levels – the standard interpretation is that it foretells the sharing of indigenous knowledge with the technologies of science, the balancing of yin and yang, and the bridging of northern and southern cultures. However, most powerful is the message it offers about consciousness; it says that we have entered a time when we can benefit from the many diverse ways of seeing ourselves and the world, and that we can use these as a springboard to higher levels of awareness. As human beings, we can truly wake up and evolve into a more conscious species.

from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins.

We live in what we would call the age of reason and by what many would call the triumph of science. The demons, the mystical, all have been pushed aside where it belongs. Humanity is no longer misdirected by such immature pursuits. We live in the most successful civilization ever created. Or do we?

By many measures we do not. We have higher suicide and depression. People rate themselves as less happy. We have more chronic disease. Are these inevitable consequences of success? Or are they consequences of a system that has gone off kilter.

One of the things that always strikes me is how our system provides ever higher standards of living as it continues to erode quality of life. Almost everything about our society is designed towards isolation, to the point where it becomes a little ridiculous for the average person to fight against it.

But money cannot buy community. It cannot buy more friends. It cannot put real, fresh produce on your plate when your grocer has decided only to carry produce based on size and transportability. It also cannot buy you more free time. And it cannot make your neighborhood more civically engaged. The costs of our system are certainly high, and the rationales flimsy when held up to scrutiny.

The thing is, there is nothing inherently wrong with “The Eagle”. I liken the prophecy to the teachings on compassion and wisdom in Buddhism. Compassion without wisdom is aimless and ineffectual. Wisdom without compassion is cold, sterile, and also ineffectual.

No one person wants to be island. And no one person (or at least very few) admit to being against communities. And yet we all seem to promote policies which are leading to the destruction of languages and culture on a global scale. And we do so without even taking a step back to analyze our premises.

But real change is going to require a sort of shift most people are not accustomed to. In reality, most people are not even accustomed to the critical thinking and analytic skills that truly underlie “The Eagle”. But understanding “The Condor” is about being in touch with something much deeper. It’s about understanding life at an intuitive level. It is from which art and beauty manifest.

There is a place for the mind and mind knowledge. It is in the practical realm of day-to-day living. However, when it takes over all aspects of your life, including your relationships with other human beings and with nature, it becomes a monstrous parasite that, unchecked, may well end up killing all life on the planet and finally itself by killing its host.

from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions. The reason is that the people who create those things cannot – even for a moment – free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness.

also from The Power of Now.

Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically concerned to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization. Freud, by the way, also recognized the existence of this undercurrent of unease and wrote about it in his book Civilization and it Discontents, but he did not recognize the true root of the unease and failed to realize that freedom from it is possible. This collective dysfunction has created a very unhappy and extraordinarily violent civilization that has become a threat not only to itself but to all life on this planet.

once again from The Power of Now.

Slow Money

So I just got back from the SFA conference, and the number one take-away message I got from Woody Tasch is that slow money is about relationships. Traditional economic theory is entirely about transactions, and in no way speaks to relationships. Yes: every person is a transaction, and I am a human resource.

But traditional economics cannot preserve wealth, nor can it enrich lives. It can only measure value, which itself is a meaningless concept. Only communities preserve wealth.

John Perkins made the distinction between actual wealth and purchasing power. And he made the clarification that it is those with the purchasing power that control the wealth, whether they own it or not.

Another aspect of our financial system, which previously had not occurred to me, but which became abundantly clear in conversation, is that our current monetary system is very poorly situated to help the aims of those in the slow money movement. We have the most evolved, efficient financial system in history, and yet it is utterly deficient when it comes to tying together monetary capital with social capital.

Banks and financial institutions may often say they are about community, or that they help build community, but the fact is, you can’t easily put a face to your money at a bank. The bank is necessarily an abstraction. You are a step removed from the investments your money promotes. You are also removed from the rules governing those investments or how they are enforced.

This does not just concern money in the bank. It is our insurance premiums, our retirement funds, and our credit cards. Slow money is about investment in real people. It is about investing with a conscious, often in small farms and other enterprises that provide the cornerstones of real wealth and health of communities.

Most of our investments serve to promote the extraction of wealth and the destruction of communities. Moving out of this system is not simple but it needs to happen. That does not mean we drop everything and isolate ourselves from society. Our infrastructure is already in place. Our job now is to do what we can while creating new systems for the oncoming generations.

The Death of Culture: Part 4

Partial redaction. Of course, any person with half a wit could play devil’s advocate and rip a lot of my arguments in the previous three sections apart. And that’s partly the point as John Perkins points out in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The new order is covert, not overt. It co-opts aspects of real cultures and human relationships and perverts them rather than replacing them. And aspects of real culture and real economic transactions will be intermixed with all the junk, as they will have to be. Thus the current order will always appear defensible.

That does not change my position however. I judge partially based on how mass culture makes me feel, and partly based on everything I’ve read. It is an amalgamation of all my knowledge and experiences, guided by my deep desire to understand human nature and the prevailing order, as well as the numerous problems faced by our world.

I’ve always had a visceral aversion to a lot of our mass culture. To me it is vapid and insipid. But then there are some aspects which I readily consume. The critical role that mass culture (or perhaps we should call it negative culture) plays in the preservation of the prevailing order is a piece that has only recently slid into place for me. And it is anaesthetica’s reivew of The Dark Knight on Kuro5hin which hammered these thoughts home.

The Death of Culture: Part 3

So now that we have laid some groundwork for understanding mass culture, we need to understand the role of complacency. This is where I get back to John Perkins and Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Few of us have much choice what we do. In a literal sense, we have a lot of choice, but in a real sense, there is very little choice. It is pretty straightforward, for example, to get a degree in computers, or biotech, or literature. It is not so clear how we turn this into meaningful work: work that is truly benefiting us and those around us.

The economic system of the first world has a very hierarchical order and the vast majority of us are drones. We have very little voice in how our society is organized or run. There are always opportunities to apply ourselves to meaningful pursuits, but the economic order uses our fear of the loss of security, and our need for survival, to keep us bound to jobs that serve no real purpose.

This is something I’ve had to think long and hard about, but what it really comes down to is that only a select few in the first world have any control over real wealth. Most of the rest of us, instead of actually discussing and organizing the society we’d like to live in, are busy promoting the interests of the monied few in order to earn our own purchasing power.

And the real job of your average drone in the first world is not the creation of wealth. Most economic activity is either superfluous or destroys wealth. It is simply to consume. By consuming you perpetuate the interests of the prevailing order. And by owning possessions you mortgage your own interests for a very limited sense of security (not even comparable to what is provided by real communities and real cultures).

And thus we expose the real purpose of mass culture: consumption. It is not about spontaneity, or creation, or celebration. Mass culture will pay lip-service to these things, but it will not embrace them.

The Death of Culture: Part 2

After reading the quotes from Bill Holm and Chris Hedges, we have to understand what role mass culture is playing in our society. Hedges took this to the extreme, devoting a chapter to explaining how the subjegation of culture is necessary to precipitate war, but its everyday purpose is much more subversive and sinister than that. It serves to make us complacent.

Without something to fill the loss of real culture and real human interactions, life would be pretty empty. People have fewer connections and the connections we do have have to bear more stress. Often these connections are more facile than we would like. But to rectify that requires two things, both of which are discouraged by mass culture: the creation and sharing of real culture, and the sharing of our hopes, fears, and expectations with those that are close to us.

Real friendships:
• See the beauty in others.
• Foster human growth.
• Are compassionate.
• Have the desire for others to be happy.
• Make others feel safe.
• Are thankful for what others provide.

These are what create real connections and prevent us from feeling alone. Mass culture often has more insidious goals:
• Develop complacency and lack of initiative in the consumer
• Foster a low image of society and human nature
• Foster a low image of oneself
• Celebrate itself
• Guilt the consumer into feeling fortunate for his/her conditions

Obviously not all mass culture pursues these aims but on the whole it does, and it is as a whole that counts.

The Death of Culture: Part 1

The Death of Culture and the Subservience of the General Public

Wow… I have so many different ideas roiling around in my head sometimes. I recently reread my favorite review of The Dark Knight. I can’t tell whether it’s amazingly astute or simply tongue in cheek. Nonetheless, it prompted an idea for a blog post. That idea is already a day old, so I may have lost some of the themes that were swirling around with it.

The rewiew of The Dark Knight ties together with some of the themes I’m picking up from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which I’m currently reading, and personal thoughts about healthy cultures which I’ve accumulated over the past few years.

My thoughts are basically this: that we (the US, and most of the first world) have no culture. That statement warrants some qualification because obviously anybody that looks for it is going to find art and music and literature. That’s not what the statement is referring to. What I save “have no culture” I’m referring to our mass culture. The shows, TV, news, etc., that most all of us have in common. And what I mean distinctly is the focus on negative culture as opposed to positive culture.

What does negative culture mean? It could mean a few different things. It could simply refer to celebration of the anti-hero or a focus on the dark, messy side of human nature. Or it could be vapid, mass-produced shlock that makes no real contribution to the average person’s quality of life.

However, negative culture seems to have a few key elements:
• It is non-participatory on the part of the general public
• It presents a dim or low view of human nature
• It is almost never a work of devotion, inspiration, or gratitude.
• When it does celebrate something, it is almost always destruction, avarice, apathy, or some other negative trait.
• It is more likely to provide the sense of a lack of meaning or purpose rather than the presence of it.

This characteristic of mass culture is a reflection of the society in which it resides, not of the normal state of culture or human nature. And the reason for this present state of society is the destruction of real culture that was to make way for the commoditization of things normally shared openly within the society.

Culture is not just some small part of the human experience, it is a very central part of human nature. To lack direct experience and participation in this process is to lack part of your humanity. My favorite quote on this comes from Chris Hedges in War is a Force That Gives us Meaning: “…reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peaces possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or a myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narritives – truth.” To understand how exactly any art form beyond literature could lead to truth, I turn to the eloquent words of Bill Holm:
I sink into the music of a particular composer as if I were a sleepwalker. For six months, nothing but Brahms, for another six, nothing but fugues of Hindemith. Then six on “Carolina Shout” and others by James P. Johnson, then another six on the old-man music of Liszt. I never “perform” these composers. I play them only in a room alone. After a while some little stone from the unconscious rises to the surface of the brain. Whoever I’ve been playing delivers to me some insight about my interior life formerly a complete mystery to my consciousness. Brahms became the composer of mourning I had neglected to accomplish. Hindemith puts me in order when some exterior chaos threatens me. Haydn calms my fear of death. Beethoven gives me courage to stand up to foolishness. Johnson, Morton, and Joplin remind me I have a body. Liszt reminds me not to talk too much or to practice too much charm lest silence and loneliness extract their final revenge. Now I have been playing Gabriel Faure for six months, the “Theme and Variations,” the late nocturnes and bar-caroles. His music writes me letters full of wisdom. A few words are already clear. Faure is stingy with his musical materials, but profligate with surface beauty. The beauty hides (from all but those who play him or who listen with the passionate attention of a Daoist mystic) the precise, even steely, mathematical logic and order inside his music. Those who do not like his music call it gray. It eschews climax, and , when others might thunder or whisper, his pieces generally end in a calm moderate voice. I think Faure’s letter to me says, “Be a little gray outside, it’s all right. Pay more attention to the currents running under the sea, less to the noise of big surf pounding rocks.” Bach, whom I play all the time, brings me God, or the gods, or something I have no idea how to describe. Neither did the poet Robert Bly.

Listening to Bach
There is someone inside this music
who is not well described by the names
Of Jesus, or Jehovah, or the Lord of Hosts!

Bach may be what the universe has in mind next.