A Wilderness of Thought

[guest88]

An exerpt from, "A Wilderness of Thought"

.....
"OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO, in an essay titled “The Mind as Nature,” the noted anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote, “If the mind is indigenous and integral to nature itself in its unfolding, and operates in nature’s ways and under nature’s laws, we must seek to understand this creative aspect of nature in its implications for the human mind.” His challenge has certainly been taken up, especially in recent research on the cellular and chemical pathways of our thoughts and actions. What I believe Eiseley was also hinting at was the nature of the imagination—in particular the biology of the imagination—not only in terms of its functioning but as a natural process directly related to our own growth and understanding.

Much of children’s art and writing shows that there is a process of “unfolding” in their thoughts and feelings that lucidly mirrors the interlocking molecular structures of biology, the mind that is nature. For many children, it is not uncomfortable or unusual to see the wind or a stone as alive, the grass as dancing, or the rain as having a face, like four-year-old Adrian observed:


The rain screws up its face
and falls to bits.
Then it makes itself again.
Only the rain can make itself again.


This is not simply a matter of anthropomorphizing or cartooning but of truly experiencing the processes of nature as part of oneself. It is the same innate poetic and mythic instinct that allows a Bushman in South Africa to sing:


New moon, come out, give water for us,
New moon, thunder down water for us,
New moon shake down water for us.


Or an Inuit woman in the Arctic to sing:



Day arises
From its sleep
Day wakes up
With the dawning light
Also you must arise
Also you must awake
Together with the day which comes.


Or this seven-year-old child, writing on the back of his drawing of the sun:


The sun
warms
me so
much.


Each joins the human with the outer world—the natural phenomena of ourselves with the phenomena of nature outside of us—and creates an interchange, a melding of one nature into another."

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if you have time to read from start to finish, please do so
this is a beautiful article that combines the internal with the external through childhood imagination and poetry

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7587

[Jitendra Hydonus]

An exerpt from, "A Wilderness of Thought"

.....
"OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO, in an essay titled “The Mind as Nature,” the noted anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote, “If the mind is indigenous and integral to nature itself in its unfolding, and operates in nature’s ways and under nature’s laws, we must seek to understand this creative aspect of nature in its implications for the human mind.” His challenge has certainly been taken up, especially in recent research on the cellular and chemical pathways of our thoughts and actions. What I believe Eiseley was also hinting at was the nature of the imagination—in particular the biology of the imagination—not only in terms of its functioning but as a natural process directly related to our own growth and understanding.

Much of children’s art and writing shows that there is a process of “unfolding” in their thoughts and feelings that lucidly mirrors the interlocking molecular structures of biology, the mind that is nature. For many children, it is not uncomfortable or unusual to see the wind or a stone as alive, the grass as dancing, or the rain as having a face, like four-year-old Adrian observed:


The rain screws up its face
and falls to bits.
Then it makes itself again.
Only the rain can make itself again.


This is not simply a matter of anthropomorphizing or cartooning but of truly experiencing the processes of nature as part of oneself. It is the same innate poetic and mythic instinct that allows a Bushman in South Africa to sing:


New moon, come out, give water for us,
New moon, thunder down water for us,
New moon shake down water for us.


Or an Inuit woman in the Arctic to sing:



Day arises
From its sleep
Day wakes up
With the dawning light
Also you must arise
Also you must awake
Together with the day which comes.


Or this seven-year-old child, writing on the back of his drawing of the sun:


The sun
warms
me so
much.


Each joins the human with the outer world—the natural phenomena of ourselves with the phenomena of nature outside of us—and creates an interchange, a melding of one nature into another."

---------------------------------------------------------

if you have time to read from start to finish, please do so
this is a beautiful article that combines the internal with the external through childhood imagination and poetry

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7587

Do u suppose that some of us keep a connection with nature and how it mirrors us? Sometimes I really think that nature speaks to us like the voice of silent God. Just the day before yesterday
I was practicing with my band and let them have a connection without me. I sat in the van and listened to the rain falling while meditating...what an experience! The rain speaks to us silencing our thoughts and establishes our connection with spirit. Just as the wind speaks to us and the water from streams, lakes and the ocean soothes our heavy spirits. I have been alone with spirit in the soft falling of snow and felt the warmth that the spring sun brought to my inner spirit.

[guest88]

hi steve. i'd say yes, as well, it looks like you've answered your own question.

[Jitendra Hydonus]

hi steve. i'd say yes, as well, it looks like you've answered your own question.

This I see as the challenge:

Nature looses its beauty when we carry the burdens of the world with us. It seems to say nothing when we are overwhelmed by lifes challenges. This has been my experience.
Yet even if we get beyond our own difficulties long enough to put ourselves in the presence of
the spiritual forces within nature we begin the healing process to all wounds.

[guest88]

keen insight on perspective. nature never lost its beauty. you might find inspiration from todays saki. although you say you don't drink, i encourage you to take a sip. http://wahiduddin.net/saki/saki_new.php 

[Jitendra Hydonus]

keen insight on perspective. nature never lost its beauty. you might find inspiration from todays saki. although you say you don't drink, i encourage you to take a sip. http://wahiduddin.net/saki/saki_new.php 

What makes the soul of the poet dance? Music. What makes the painter paint beautiful pictures, the musician sing beautiful songs? It is the inspiration that beauty gives. Therefore the Sufi has called this beauty sāqī , the divine Giver who gives the wine of life to all.          


    from The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan