viernes, 20 de septiembre de 2013

Ethnosphere

As a young man, I made several journeys across the United States, from San Francisco to New York City and back, crisscrossing the continent by car, train, bus; and a lot of hitch-hiking. On one trip I went north as far as Saskatoon, where on the night of a new moon, I fixed my eyes on the Northern Lights.  I was restless and searching for America. I wanted to get a feel for its immensity, its people, history and destiny. I was often haunted on my pilgrimage by the voices of slaves in chains, and on the Great Plains, felt the presence of thousands of hungry ghosts of the old ways...

“I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream... the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.” Black Elk

The hoop means the sacred circle of a people’s being. It was on those trips that I first had the sense that there is no straight line of Progress; it’s an invention of the West, along with the mechanical clock, and Taylorism. All cultures offer humanity different ways of being in the world with diverse ways of seeing, hearing and feeling.

“The central revelation of anthropology is the idea that the world does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices…” Wade Davis

That’s also a central tenet of NLP: The Map is not the Territory. That the limitations we experience are generally due to our model of reality and not Reality in itself.

There still exists myriad of ways of thinking, visioning, listening, connecting- experiencing the world. Maybe there’s still time to find another road before all the hoops are broken, before the dominant model of world globalization turns us all into hungry ghosts.

The anthropologist Wade Davis defines ethnosphere as “the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness”

He offers us amazing examples of how different visions of life make for completely different possibilities of existence:



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