Dancing with a ghost

Exploring Indian Reality

Rupert Ross, 1992

I want to do a little bit of a book review of a book my mother turned me on to.  My mom seldom reads non-fiction books.  So when she told me she was really enjoying reading this particular book I was intrigued.  The way she was explaining the book to me this summer, it sounded like the kinds of ideas I had been thinking about a lot lately.  I kind of blew my mind.  The book is an attempt to explain to the non-native, Canadian majority, the fundamentals of the workings of aboriginal culture.  It’s an attempt to bridge the apparent gap between two cultures.  Written from the point of view of a white lawyer from Ontario, it’s a personal account in dealing with aboriginal culture in the justice system.  Rupert Ross tries to deal with disconnections in the cultural intercourse that ends up leaving both parties in confusion.  This book was written more than 20 years ago, but I feel this is still a relevant book with a topic essential to be understood by all people wishing to understand aboriginal issues

Right off the bat I would like to acknowledge my clear ignorance of the issue at hand.  In fact I feel slightly uncomfortable talking about this issue because I feel like I am stumbling around in the dark.  I am blind to know what should be obvious to me, what sensitive issues I may want to avoid.  I hope in admitting my humble amount of knowledge, I can hopefully be forgiven for any sensitive trespasses I may cause in my writing.   I’m ignorant to even what words I should be using to refer to aboriginal culture groups.  Indian? Aboriginal? Native?  The book is titled “exploring INDIAN reality”, but this is now a small world we live in.  This is a multicultural community.  We deal with the country of India and people who are Indian who hail from said country.  For the sake of clarity, it would be just be effective not to use that word.  I heard it through the grapevine, the word “Natives” is a little rude.  So Aboriginal sounds like the current politically correct word to be using.  So that’s the one I will stick to for now.   Also, I must mention that I don’t feel entirely comfortable referring to myself as “white”, but I cant find a replicable word for it at the moment.

Culture is your operating system

This is the one thing that jumped out at me when I was reading the opening few chapters.  The way that culture acts as the basis of your social blueprint is fascinating to me.  One of my favorite pet theories these days is that culture acts like an operating system of a computer.  Now, this book was written before the general public had incorporated the concepts involving computers into their lexicon.  But this idea is vivid in this book at least in my own eyes.  The operating system is the blueprint that a computer uses to interpret and filter the code world into a uniform system so that people can move around the digital world effectively.  Likewise, culture is the way our own mind takes the raw data of experience and human interaction and processes it in order for the human being be able to move around the social world effectively.  Computers must all be running the same operating system in order to effectively share information properly.  Because like humans, computers operate using different languages of code.  Macintosh computers can interact somewhat with Windows computers, but it is sometimes difficult to share certain files.  Perhaps similarly the way someone speaking Newfoundland English might have trouble trying to talk to someone who is from South Africa.

Different models of the universe

I think what Ross is trying to point out, is that the cultural operating system of aboriginal culture is very different in fundamental ways to that of white North American culture.  Things we take for granted as first premises of existence are not as concrete as we would like to think.  The structure of Aboriginal metaphysics is based on a different view of the universe.  The place that human beings occupy in nature is nearly polar opposite in White and Aboriginal culture.  This has huge implications on the purposes of life and has a ripple effect all the way to the shores of mundane interaction with other people.   

A culture that is still relatively near in time to its hunter-gatherer roots is going to have a different purpose than that of an agricultural people.  A hunter gatherer operating system will be focused on the fundamentals of survival.  In a land so harsh as Canada, the day to day activities are going to be a matter of life and death.  The cultural operating system is going to create a lens for the human being that will make the decisions for life and death of the group as first premise assumptions.  Whereas in agricultural society, the lens focus is elsewhere.   

One of my favorite thinkers, Alan Watts described that the agricultural, Judeo-Christian society has the idea of the “ceramic model of the Universe”.  Or the “universe as an artifact”.  Mankind’s place in the universe is that of an alien.  In our view, humans are foreigners in a static and dead world and we are in some fundamental way, separate from nature.  Because the world is an inanimate object, the world can be owned, taken apart and controlled.  We feel we have the right to make the world as we see fit.  I have the feeling that since we developed agriculture, we had to develop a cultural framework to deal with food surpluses, sedentary life and ownership.  Because of these new problems, to effectively move around the agricultural world, human beings need a fundamentally different set of metaphysical first premises than that of nomadic, hunter gatherers.                

So then, the aboriginal people of modern day Canada are the inheritors of culture that is operating under a set of cultural assumptions that developed in a nomadic, hunter-gatherer context.  This may be why there is such a huge disconnect with white culture.  This may be why there are so many problems in aboriginal communities.  There is a malfunction in the way people are relating to the sedentary reality of the 21^st century. 

When the Canadian government and justice system pushes solutions to problems onto aboriginal communities, there is a misunderstanding of the very cultural context specific conditions that these solutions work under.  The notions of crime and punishment that white culture operates under, do not necessarily compute with aboriginal culture.  We take it for granted that the natural reaction for wrong doing is punishment, yet this does not seem to be the case in aboriginal culture, according to Ross.  If there is an incidence of violence, instead of focusing on punishing the perpetrator, there is a focus on discovering the root problem that caused this act to happen in the first place.  There is a more focus on healing and forgiveness, instead of punishment and removal from the community as in white justice systems.  Things that come off rude to one culture may be just attempts at being polite and cordial for another.  In the white Canadian culture, it is commonly polite to maintain eye contact and be complimentary about other’s achievements.  Whereas showing respect in the aboriginal social landscape is to be modest in talking about others directly and not make too much eye contact.

Rupert Ross emphasizes that Aboriginal culture operates under a strict rule of non-intervention.  This may be why there is perceived attitude of apathy in these communities.  This includes child rearing.  Instead of the commonly used authoritarian way of setting rules and boundaries for young Canadian white children, aboriginal culture uses a lead-by-example way of guiding young people.  Unfortunately due to the advancement of mass media technology in these remote communities, young people are beginning to emulate different social norms than their parents.  Yet their parents have a different framework and keep a more traditional way of socializing.  This is causing a widening gap between generations and causing a harmful alienation of young people.  These are just a few examples Ross gets into in this short book.        

Seeing through the rules

What I learned from this book was not how to solve all the problems in the aboriginal communities.  I learned that even to begin trying to solve the problems, we have to stop talking past each other.  Our cultural systems do not fit well with each other to create a healthy discourse for problem solving.  Both sides have to break down our own cultural norms and deeply question our first premises of reality.  We cannot assume what brings us happiness and well being will be the solution in an environment and a culture much different than we are used to When we rise above the cultural planes we live in, we can objectively judge where our cultures will be able to fit together well for co-operation.        

It looks like I’m late to the party.  I assume that the movement of “Idle no More” was much to do with this very topic.  But I suppose I choose not to pay attention and hoped that aboriginals would be able to deal with their problems themselves.  But I now realize it’s the responsibility to understand fundamental culture difference on both sides.  That way we can try to progress to a time where there are no “sides” to be on.

"I"-deology, The ego centered proof of existence

I have been thinking a lot lately about how an individual defines oneself.  How much do words, symbols and ideologies form the identity of the individual human being? I talked a little bit about language and words forming identities in a previous blog post.  But now I wish to address cultural and ideological identities more specifically.  Its interesting to see that as I wrote this blog entry, it seemingly turned into some sort of life manifesto by the end.  It may be a little rambling and disorganized, so read on if you dare.

A few months ago I had come to an important intellectual conclusion which could be summed up in a Facebook status update.

“It is very bad idea to build an identity on the ideas of other people”

I had come to this while writing about how important language is and how it can be misused.  One of the worst ways people can misuse language is to use it to define their existence.  Our language is by its very nature, cold and logical.  The language of logic is all about assertions and contradictions.  And so I have the inclining that we get very insecure when our existential bedrock is nothing but abstract logical dictions.  A perfect example of this is fundamentalist religion.

The western forms of religion are essentially absolutist in their interpretations of existence.  They are very logical in regards to interpreting scripture as the final truth of the universe.  Everything else must follow that (holy book x) is true.  Just like in any logic equation, you must have at least one given truth(or faith) to figure anything out.  In scripture based religion, the entire universe then must fit into perfect order because the ultimate truth behind everything is assumed.  Followers of fundamentalist religions will tell you, things which don’t appear to make any sense actually do make sense but we just aren't able to totally understand God's plan.  But rest assured everything is for the best.

I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on religion exclusively.  I want to demolish all forms of ideology. Fundamentalist religion seems to be the most obviously flawed ideological system that sticks out like a sore thumb.  But I believe that all ideological definitions of the self are illusions at their very core.  Political ideologies are also very weak and function with these kinds of faith based belief systems.  They usually begin with an assumption of the nature of humanity.  For example, socialism begins with the belief that humans left to their own devices are naturally bad and therefore need to be controlled.  Libertarianism assumes that humans left to their own devices will behave naturally good and therefore need no government to control them.

I want to show you that you don’t need to prove your own existence.  For some reason, we are very insecure about our own existence if we don’t have anything that appears external to define it.  Here is the most critical flaw of the modern idea of existence.  The idea that the self is something different than the world.  We feel like the “I” is something that sits behind the eyes that makes decisions and controls the body.  Nonetheless “I” is a foreigner in a strange world. For example, look at the various linguistic ways we make this distinction.  When we are born we say we are brought into this world.  When we refer to the human body, we say we “have” a body.  As if the body were something of an object that the “I” can posses.  This is an idea that is so totally ingrained into our language and culture that we take it for granted.  It appears in religious rhetoric as the “soul”.  Even in secular society the idea as the self as something separate from the world, greatly informs the worldview of the modern person.

I think ideologies are phenomena that occur when our ego centered sense of self feels insecure and attempts to prove that it exists

Huh?.  

Before I continue, I want to say that these ideas of the self are heavily influenced by a man named Alan Watts.  I have been listening to a lot of his lectures regarding the nature of consciousness and what the modern conception of the self is.  He was an utterly captivating orator and he has introduced me to whole new ways to think about life.  Its amazing to me that some people’s personalities like Watts’ can be so alive in my mind yet they have been dead for decades.  

The Ego

The idea of the self is what we should be focused on here.  What am I?  What are you?  The harder you look into this question, the more vague the self appears to be.  If you strip away all constructed ideas of identity such as gender, race and culture, the self appears to be nothing more than moment to moment experience.  You are nothing more than the continuation of consciousness of an individual human being.  You are not your past.  You have access to this person’s memories and you assume the responsibilities and consequences of their past actions, but you should not be defined by them.  Even your sense of agency and free will as an individual is illusory.  Your moment to moment thoughts you act upon arise seemingly unintentionally out of thin air.  Every thought originates at very rudimentary levels of neurochemistry.  Did you come up with those thoughts?   How could freewill be an actual concept if there is no intentional control of all the brain and body’s functions?  Are YOU responsible for the beating of your heart?  are YOU digesting the food in your gut?  Do you have the freewill not to feel hungry?  Where do you draw the line between “You” and your desires?

The funny thing is when you try to control something that comes naturally, it gets tripped up.  When you draw a line between “you” and the body’s behaviour it becomes an uncomfortable mess.  Just like a microphone held up to it’s own speaker creates a disturbing feedback sound.  For example, if you constantly think about your breathing, it becomes disordered.  Breathing only works properly if you don’t think about it.  In a social situation, If you are constantly reviewing and second guessing what you want to say, you come off as awkward.  People who stringently monitor and try to consciously control their social interactions with people, present themselves as unnatural.  There is some sort of act going on and they don’t appear to be expressing themselves properly.  If they would just let go of the controls and say what comes naturally, their genuine person shines through better.     

The idea of the ego seems to be an illusion created by a pattern in the stream of consciousness.  We have been constantly reminded since birth, that there is a thinker behind our thoughts.  We are unintentionally taught that there is a separate entity of the self that “Thinks our thoughts” and “feels our feelings”.  When those are perfectly obvious to be absurd statements.  Our language and culture has created a rhythm of thought that creates an image of a separate self.  This image is created by our patterned stream of consciousness that goes something like: Thought thought thought THINKER, thought, thought, THINKER.  We constantly acknowledge the presence of a being that thinks our thoughts.  But I am starting to believe that the default human stream of conscious thought does not require the perceived presence of a thinker to function normally.  Altered forms of consciousness achieved through means such as sleep, practices of meditation or psychoactive substances offer windows into a state of being free of an ego.  It shows that a reality with a self-other dichotomy is not the default state of being.    

We know that any pattern when repeated enough, fades into the background and taken for granted.  This happens in everything we sense.  We don’t feel our clothes on our body we wear all day.  We only notice it when we take our clothes off.  We don’t notice how bad our house smells if we live in it all day. We will notice the smell only if we leave the house for a while and come back.  We only notice a difference when the pattern is interrupted.  So in this way, our fundamental first premise of reality is based on the simple and constantly repeated thought pattern of self and other.         

Hey Scott, what the hell does this philosophical bullshit have to do with ideology?

What I’m trying to say is that the “I”, the “self”, the “me” or the “ego” is an illusion plain and simple.  I’m also trying to say that ideological labels such as: Christian, Atheist, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, American, Canadian, Vegan or Feminist are expressions of the ego trying to define it’s existence.  Since our culture is so insistent on the concept of the ego as the thing that is YOU.  We try to find our true existential identities in ideologies and culture.  We think of ideologies as fundamental truths that exist outside of ourselves.  If I use an ideological label such as “I am a child of God”.  On some level, I am saying “my ego exists”.  “I exist because of a relation to the other”.    

I’m not saying that we should now strive to destroy our current egocentric thought pattern paradigm, but we should just begin to acknowledge this as just one of many possible states of existence.  It’s not the default state of humanity, but just one possible way that we can exist.  This way we can take one step back and look at the definitions of ourselves, once thought to be taken for granted.    

Our conformist behaviour inside our culture are also attempts for ego expression.  The universal goal to be “successful” in our culture is one of these cultural ideals taken for granted.  But success is only a relative term in our culture.  You can only be measurably successful in relation to others.

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I want to make a small example of this with a experience I had.  Not too long ago I encountered a man at a friend’s BBQ in Medicine Hat.  He seemed like a nearly middle age guy, recently married and with a very time demanding oil field job   We got to talking about positives and negatives of the cities we both live in. He remarked that he would like Lethbridge as a city if not for “the certain ethnic group that refuses to work for a living and begs for money. Get a job.”   

What is very interesting to me is to compare his own apparent position in the culture and his attitude toward outsiders. I didn't know the man at all, but we had barely been talking for more than 5 minutes and he already made a very negative racist remark about people who haven’t conformed to the racial majority culture.  You really couldn't find a better example of an expression of insecurity in culture.  From what I gathered from our brief meeting, this guy has really bought into the cultural game. And he takes the game very seriously.  This is why he hates those who do not pursue the same cultural goals as he does.  It shows him a possibility that there are meaningful ways of existence that are different than his own.  Maybe he has spent all the best years of his life trying for a state of illusory happiness without substance. He spent his years trying for what culture has told him what he should want instead of trying for what he truly wants.  

I believe that a culture that is hostile to outsiders shows an insecurity in the cultural ideal.  From my experience growing up in a small town, the cultural ideal in Alberta is to find a high paying job in a booming labour industry like the oilpatch.  You are defined in this culture by how much money you can make and how many big toys you can collect.  The actual work involved in the career is very time consuming and labour intensive.  But ultimately the work done doesn't mean all that much to the person doing it.  So you spent two weeks straight, welding pieces of a big-ass pipeline together, great.  What matters is the amount of money made doing all that work.  You did all that work so you could add another vertical foot to your pickup truck. yeah budday.

Those who decide to opt out from the local culture game are hated because of the insecurity of the culture norms.  Granted, my culture is much more lenient towards outsiders than lets say Saudi Arabia, but you get the picture.   

Your Life

I believe that in order to have a healthy and open understanding of the universe, you can’t be attached to any form of limiting ideology.  Ideologies are only stepping stones to higher understandings of the universe.  Take the good ideas from an ideology and move on.  Use them as intellectual scaffolding on which to build better ideas.  If you find a better idea, discard the old one.  Instead of using ideas to create an identity, use them as a blueprint of reality.  That blueprint can help you move around the social, spiritual, scientific and physical world more easily.  

Neo: “I have these memories from my entire life, but… none of them really happened. What does that mean?”

Trinity: “That the Matrix cannot tell you who you are.”

The Matrix, 1999

No one can tell you who you are.  No group of people can tell you who you are.  No amount of old scripture can be the ultimate truth of your universe.  Don’t attach yourself to a culture that wants to turn you into an anonymous consumer.  Don’t give your intellect up to religions that only degrade and dehumanize you.  Don’t wrap yourself in cultural sentimentality because it is comfortable and familiar.  I believe life should be about constantly pursuing new experiences.  I believe it is our mission as apertures of the conscious universe to write what has never been written. To draw what has never been drawn. To invent what has never been conceived of.  Meet new people and form unique relationships with them.  Try not to mold those relationships into pre-determined roles.  Experience new things.  Travel to new and strange places.  Use those experiences to create your own personality. Make that personality unashamedly weird and unique.  Don’t define yourself as a caste that culture has laid down before.  You’re not doing the human enterprise much good by plunking yourself down into the most typically average role .  Don’t take the safe route and buy a mortgage with your perfect green lawn and picket fence like its the 1950s.  Where is the creativity in climbing the corporate ladder to buy the new mercedes and a cookie cutter suburban house?  What kind of interesting story will your life be, if you don’t try to pave a brand new path?  Culture, religion, sentimentality and ideology will only hold you back from the true human experience.