Category Archives: New Attitude to Nature

Commonage Consciousness: An ecologically better way of being on the earth

Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Indigenous--Indian Act, New Attitude to Nature

 

There were some ways in which Europeans had a completely different attitude to things than the Indigenous people of North America they encountered when they first had contact with each other.  For one thing, as I have been saying, they had a completely different attitude to nature.  Closely associated with that, was that they had a completely different attitude to property—at least real property (land and buildings). Europeans believed in private ownership of land. That idea was foreign to Indigenous people. Indigenous people believed in tribes or first nations having rights to land. Not individuals. That has had a profound impact.  The idea of private property is part of capitalist society. At least it has always has been so until they encountered the Indigenous people and recently, with the rise of capitalism in Communist countries or formerly communist countries such as China.

The Indigenous idea of property held in common was blessed by the Parliament of Canada when it enacted the Indian Act in the late 19th century as it tried to assert jurisdiction over First Nations in Canada. That notion is still part of the federal law in Canada since then, even though it has been criticized by some.

Professor John Moriarty though considers the issue from the perspective of a poet. As he said:

“It is time now in western Europe to reinstitute Commonage consciousness. We have to reinstate it in a way that would reinstitute a new sacrament. Unless we reinstitute commonage consciousness, then we are going to continue to inflict appalling damage to the earth. That is a story that could take us into an ecologically better way of being on the earth.”

 

When Moriarty went to the hills in Connemara  Ireland and saw no fences, he was awe struck. Moriarty noted how people thought it was a big deal to take down the Berlin wall between 2 European political systems, communism and capitalism. Was that really such a big deal? John Moriarty did not think that was a big deal.

 

However, Moriarty thought “it was hugely important to take down the wall between us and blades of grass, between us and trees, between us and the stars, between us and everything that is.” That is an entirely new attitude to nature, at least for non-Indigenous people.

 Talking about an Indigenous nation in North America, Moriarty said

 “the Blackfeet did not see the difference between them and the buffalo. They saw what was common between them and the buffalo. And what is common is grace. What separates us in a way is trivial but what we have in common is grace and immense.

 

Moriarty wants to take us back from our “us and them consciousness” to a commonage consciousness and then we will be walking the earth in a more beautiful way.”

 

 

Moriarty says the world will not reveal itself to a scientist who confronts it only as a scientist, or to a theologian. The world will reveal itself to a Saint Francis of Assisi who will walk out naked into the world and says “Brother sun and sister moon.” Some Christians had a similar point of view.

We must recognize that we are all kin with all creatures on the earth. As he said, “What else is this Blackfoot Indian story but an amplification of the story of Saint Francis of Assisi?”

We must learn that the sun is our brother. The moon is our sister. The fire is our kin. We must consider what we have in common. Consciousness is common. Moriarty liked the idea of the English novelist and writer D. H. Lawrence who said we should “take a great arc back into the past and come forward.”

As Moriarty said, “It is only to someone who walks beautifully on the earth that the earth will reveal itself.”

 

Inuit: The Eucharist—eating God

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

In my day in University, starting in 1967, most European or Canadian professors assumed we had nothing to learn from Indigenous people. I did not realize it at the time, but Professor Moriarty was different. He was an Irishman teaching English literature. Somewhere somehow he learned better. He learned we could learn a lot from indigenous people. it took me many years to learn better as well.

Professor John Moriarty tells a story about Inuit [though he calls them Eskimos as they were once referred to]. They stand at a breathing hole in the ice waiting for a seal to arise. Once they saw the water rippling, they knew there was a seal and they would launch their harpoon.

 

When the seal was captured and killed they would cut out the liver and eat it “Eucharistically.”  It was a religious ceremony to eat that seal’s liver together. Each hunter took a part. The indigenous people believe that the animal had offered itself up to the hunters. An animal that did not want to be caught would not be caught. While eating the liver raw they would talk to the spirit of the seal and thank it for offering itself as food to the hunters. They believed that after that the animal would take upon a new body. What a beautiful way to relate to prey. Is this pure fancy? Indigenous people believe it. Are they wrong?

The eucharist meant that God was being eaten.  Is this barbaric? Or is it sublime? In the Christian tradition you can only sin against God or man. You cannot sin against a blade of grass. You cannot sin against a cow about to be slaughtered. That is barbarism. That is a barbaric attitude to nature. That is why we need a new attitude to nature.

Christians should admit, says Moriarty, that

“you can sin against a blade of grass. You can sin against the Aids Virus. To look at a tree and see only cubic feet of timber that is to sin against the tree. When you see anything as smaller than it is, you are sinning against it. When you see something only with an economic eye you are sinning against it.”

 

This brought Moriarty back to the buffalo dance or buffalo song. The Blackfoot say that death is not final. You can go back and the spirit is left intact. The. Spirit is not wounded by the spear [that wounded the buffalo]. It can take on a new body of its choosing.

So too the buffalo did not damage the land.  The land learned to live with the millions of hoofprints and poop. You could say the land was blessed. And so are we.

Indigenous Stories: The Song of the Universe

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Moriarty started with a Navajo story that told about the 2nd or 3rd day of the world. He called it the Great Creative Beginning. It is the story of the first man and first woman.

Moriarty told the story of the Buffalo Dance and the Buffalo song of the Blackfoot people of North America. It was the story of a buffalo and a beautiful young Blackfoot girl coming together and separating again. The Buffalo danced without damaging the grass. It seemed that the mountains were dancing with them as were the constellations dancing with them.  They actually did that. Hundreds of thousands of bison (not really buffalo) would converge on the land the hooves cut the soil and the excrement fertilized it and the land was reborn. Moriarty said this dance was this was the song of the universe. It was the song of which the earth and the stars are manifestations.

This story came to Moriarty in Connemara Ireland where all the land was in commonage. All the farmers sent their cattle to that land. All used it together in common.  As Professor Moriarty said about this Buffalo story,

“Unlike the Christian creation story where you feel a Berlin Wall between each day of creation, what this story speaks to me of is commonage consciousness. That there is one consciousness, one universal consciousness and it is there in buffalo, it is there in rocks, it is there in trees and there really are no fences between us.”

Moriarty says this story though it came from Indigenous people of North America, it  could have been told anywhere. It was told in Europe and then went to Eurasia where it went to Asia and then it went down across the Bering Straits and ended up in Blackfoot territory and it could be our creation story. This story has survived in this old consciousness and the only way to save the world and make something new as D. H. Lawrence said is to go back into that consciousness. These old levels of consciousness are still alive in us.  As Moriarty said,

“It is only in commonage consciousness that the earth can be saved. We have to take down the fences between us and animals. We have to take down the fences between us and stars. We have to acknowledge the oneness of consciousness that is in the universe.”

 

These are beautiful thoughts and they show how indigenous learning can teach us to walk beautifully in the world, which, of course, was Moriarty’s goal. He wanted to help us do that. I think he succeeded. Brilliantly. With the help of indigenous people.

Once Upon a Time Time

New Attitude to Nature, Travel

 

Moriarty reminded us in his YouTube lecture that all time is “once upon a time” time. Once we get into that time, we must let go of the common-sense world, the practical time. We must let go of Aristotle’s world of “A is A” and of non-contradictions. Then we can have a ginger bread house. These stories grow from the once upon a time time. He says “when we enter once upon a time time we are nearer the creative centre of the universe.’ According to the Aborigines of Australia we begin then walking in the creative dream time that is in the beginning.  Bruce Chatwin, a man who made a religion of traveling, in a wonderful book Songlines  talked about his time in Australia wandering with the aborigines. Bruce Chatwin said in his book Songlines, “yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”  I would put it this way, travel, particularly meandering travel,  helps us to understand that we are one with the universe. And that is magical time.

 

Once upon a time time is like Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Angus” where he wanders into a hazel wood because there was a fire inside his head and he caught a little silver trout with a berry on a string and it became a glimmering girl with an apple blossom on her head and faded through the brightening air and, he said, “I will find her again as she plucks the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun. The hazel wood is part of your own mind. As Moriarty himself said, he wanted to become aboriginal, or as my granddaughter once put, “aboreligional.” She made up that term but our family has adopted it.

 

As Professor Moriarty said, “It may be that the fairy stories of the world bring us closer to reality than Newton’s law of gravity.” Once we understand those stories we will be able to walk beautifully on the earth. Like Chatwin did and like the aborigines did.That is what the good professor sought.

Becoming Aboriginal

Bog Guy, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Ireland, New Attitude to Nature

 

What surprised me most when I listened to Professor John Moriarty decades after he left the University of Manitoba was that he  had engaged some of the same thoughts as I did.  Specifically, he like I, had encountered Indigenous thought and spirituality, something frankly in 1967 this  was not something I ever considered. What could we possibly learn from indigenous people I thought. I never heard anything of my professors suggest otherwise either.  We all missed out on a lot in other words. Thankfully, for Professor Moriarty and I we both encountered indigenous thought later. We smartened up.

Like D.H. Lawrence, Moriarty says he has learned a lot about coming down to earth from Native Americans.  Lawrence had challenged himself to “follow the trail of vanished Native Americans at the foot of the crucifix and take upon the primordial Indian obstinacy.”  Lawrence wanted to make a new day with them. Lawrence did that in Taos New Mexico.  Even though he had lots of fine contact with Native North Americans he eventually realized he was just another Pale Face.  This is what Lawrence wrote:

 

“I was born of no virgin of no Holy Ghost. I know these old men telling the tribal tales were my fathers. I have a dark-faced, bronze-voiced, father far back in the resinous ages, but he like many old fathers with a changeling son, he would like to deny me, but I stand on the edge of their finite now, and they neither deny nor accept me. My way is my own of Great Father. I can’t cluster at the drum anymore.”

 

Moriarty says that like Lawrence he can’t deny he is a pale face and can’t cluster at the drum any more but he said when he came back to Connemara Ireland from Canada he couldn’t use Aristotle or Plato or other European thinkers to help him on that journey because he found Connemara to be cold and savage and the only way he could do that was to become aboriginal.

Now I must interject that I have been to Connemara and did not find it cold and savage, but admittedly I was there in summer. There was nothing cold and savage about it. One thing Moriarty learned from Canada was to face into the blizzard. That is what the buffalo do. They don’t run from the blizzard: they face it. They have the hairy face to do it too.

Moriarty said one day he was travelling among one the bogs of Connemara and he was in distress. So he fell down and asked the bog to heal him. He wanted the bog to suck out his “expensive European education”. It was not helping him there he thought. He realized his European head hurt the earth. His European head was doing damage to the earth. He did not want to continue like that. All of this also astonished me. After all I consider myself a bog guy. I don’t think I have blogged about that yet, but intend to. As well, I believe that the attitude to nature of Europeans and their descendants has been harmful to the earth, and we can learn a lot from indigenous people about learning a new attitude to nature.  I also believe bogs can do a lot to improve that.

Like me, Professor Moriarty wanted to start again in the bog. Shakespeare, whom he loved, as do I,  would not take him up but he found some old Native North American stories that helped him to get up again. He says some of those stories he learned from Indigenous people in Canada who took him back to the earth. He wanted to tell some of those stories. Some of those stories have helped me as well.

I will blog about them next.

Coming Down to the Bestial Floor

New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor Moriarty compares coming down to the earth to God coming down on Christmas night to the bestial floor. He adds that on Ascension Thursday he was released from gravity. We can do that too he says. Then we have ascension grace. Moriarty says the best way to experience grace is to give in to gravity.  That is why he says he gives “thanks to gravity”.  That is why he wants to take “a space journey to the earth.” He had no interetw in going to outer space. He wanted to “come home to the earth.”  He really embodied a search for a new attitude to nature.  In that way, we might learn to walking beautifully on the earth

 

Into the Mystic

Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

I am meandering back to that Irish professor of English literature I encountered at the University of Manitoba in 1967, John Moriarty . But first I want to consider another Irish poet. Van Morrison is one of my favourite singer/song writers. Here is part of a song of his that I greatly love:

 

Into the Mystic

 

We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic

And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don’t have to fear it

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will flow into the mystic

…

 

Professor John Moriarty in his wonderful lecture that I heard on You Tube after he died, admitted that paradise is lost, but it is only lost in our minds and our senses. In the 17th century we did enter this ‘nothing but universe,” as he called it, “but the day we take our shoes off our feet and walk on the ground of the world, and our eyes are open again, then we are back in our home in this stupendous earth… And if we could only open up to that again then we would never again misbehave on the earth.” Moriarty says we must take off our shoes and walk the earth knowing it is a great and sacred earth. This is what he meant by walking beautifully on the earth. That is what he wanted to do.

John Moriarty enlisted the help of 3 mystics to his cause. He said these are 3 people on whom we can rely absolutely and totally.

The first of these is a Rhineland mystic called Heinrich Suso, (Suso also spelled Seuse). He joined the Dominicans with whom he had a re-awakening. One day he walked into his chapel while he was suffering greatly and, as we know, suffering is often a door to grace and wisdom and enlightenment. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said there is no spiritual enlightenment without suffering. Suso talked about “heavenly lightnings passing and re-passing in the depths of his being.” Moriarty likens this to the northern aurora borealis of Canada, or Scotland or even sometimes Connemara,  where he lived in Ireland, after he left Winnipeg, and other places where great curtains of light can be experienced in the sky. He says besides cosmic auroras there are also “auroras of soul.” For example, if you walk into Chartres Cathedral in France that is what you experience there. The stained-glass windows you see there “are attempts to make manifest the heavenly light within and without,” he says. Suso experienced the hidden auroras of soul that are within him. These had occluded in him but eventually the eclipse was over and the auroras of soul were revealed and he could see these heavenly lightnings passing and re-passing in the depths of his being.

The second mystic Moriarty brings to our attention was Teresa of Ávila, OCD (born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada; 28 March 1515 – 4 or 15 October 1582), also called Saint Teresa of Jesus. One day she saw one of the highest of angels, one of the cherubins, beside her. The angel held a golden spear with a tip of fire that he plunged into her again and again. She experienced incredible pain and joy at the experience. That was called her trans-vibration in which she experienced a heavenly fire inside of her.

The third mystic Moriarty asks us to consider was Pascal. He was one of the great minds of Europe. In a waist coat of his after his death a servant of his discovered a tiny parchment that has come to be called the memorial of his night of fire.

Each of these 3 mystics experienced in some way the fire of God inside of them. Then says Moriarty, everything in the universe can also experience the same thing, the same light, the same fire.

It is import that we enfranchise women, but, says Moriarty, that is not enough:

 

“We must enfranchise the universe…the truth about the universe is really ecstasy. The truth of the universe is a boon of heavenly lightnings…the truth about it is a night of fire.”

 

From all of this Moriarty says,

“If only we could come back to the fact that we live in a stupendous universe, if only we could know that every bush is a burning bush, if only like Elvira Madigan we would come down from our tightropes to our tears and creeds and stand on the earth then we wouldn’t be harming the earth…then we wouldn’t want to go up in space.”

 

Then we would have a new attitude to nature. Then we would know that nature—the earth—is sacred.

Walk beautifully on the earth

Movies, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Professor John Moriarty was always on a religious quest. In the lecture I listened to after all these years, he said he wanted to walk beautifully on the earth!

 

Moriarty describes the earth this way:

 “The universe is a continuous manifestation of wonder biding over, wonder overflowing any container it could be in…The only space journey we should ever take should be to take us home to  the earth, the great and sacred earth.”

 

Moriarty then refers to a story in Exodus Chapter 3 where Moses encountered a burning bush in the desert of Sinai. The bush kept burning and burning. It should be consumed quickly because it is a dry bush in a desert but it keeps on burning. Then Moses hears a divine voice—the voice of God—who tells him to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stands is “holy ground.”

 

To this Moriarty adds,

“all ground is holy ground. You cannot be standing anywhere on earth and not be standing on holy ground. And every bush is a burning bush. Like any bush in Connemara… They are burning with green fire in the spring. They are burning with red fire in the autumn… It took someone like Van Gogh to show us that every tree is a green column of flame. Is green fire.”

 

Moriarty wants us, each one of us, to take off our shoes and experience holy ground. He also wants each of us to take off our shoes of European thinking. We must get rid of European creeds. We must be open to new experiences. We must “walk the earth with a barefoot heart and a barefoot brain.” Like Elvira Madigan we must have the courage to get off of what is safe and experience the new and the dangerous.  We must experience a year of thinking dangerously. No, we must experience a lifetime of thinking dangerously.  Safety is a trap that can deaden the heart and the mind that should be open to the new.

As Moriarty says, he does not want to be interrogated after his last day on earth and be asked if he ever set foot on the earth. To say no would be heart-breaking, for “setting foot on the earth is to set foot in paradise.” This is what I have been calling a new attitude to nature. An attitude filled with wonder. Not a desire to conquer it.

Like Henry David Thoreau, he does not want to admit on that last interrogation that he never lived at all. That would be a heart-breaking admission.