Spiritual & Social | another MalpaTaffy story

“We shape our tools. And then our tools shape us.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911-80)

According to one story of science (palaeontology) we humans have been making tools for about 2.5 million years, so why after all this time are we are still in the business of tooling up to produce weapons for the killing of each other? Why after all this time do we humans still accept violence as a justified means for resolving conflict?

Long before we started making tools our primate ancestors knew how to harvest free energy and reproduce themselves by cooperating and finding each other attractive enough to forage for food, mate and even play together. For most of the past 2.5 million years of tool making our human ancestors must have naturally cooperated with and also found each other attractive enough to continue hunting, gathering, mating and playing together.

As a species we have become planet earth’s most efficient gatherers of free energy and reproducer of ourselves, yet in relatively recent times (probably well within the past 50,000 years) we humans have also distanced ourselves from our earlier more natural ways of cooperating with and being attracted to each other. We have now divided ourselves geographically and culturally to protect our well-defined physical places and selves from other groups of humans. This relatively recent dividing of ourselves is so far removed from our earlier more natural ways of cooperating with each other that it has now become a threat to our very existence. Our geographic territorial and cultural differences are so deeply entrenched and potentially dangerous that they could result in a third world (possibly nuclear) war and our premature extinction.

It appears from the same scientific story that we humans were planet earth’s most efficient gatherers of free energy and reproducer of ourselves long before we divided ourselves geographically and culturally. The reason why we divided ourselves thus may be because some groups were simply more efficient or lucky than others and during periods of prolonged scarcity (enough to stretch the dynamic of inter group cooperation to its limits) they had to protect their resources from those who were less efficient or fortunate and hence resorted to raiding and stealing from their neighbours – maybe. In any event at some point in time our ancestors divide into territorial, tribal groups with leaders and stories that place a whole new emphasis on protecting their place their resources and themselves from other tribes.

In spite of such external pressures being imposed on them, some groups of hunter-gatherers such as the Anangu of Central Australia maintained lore that deliberately avoided the rise of an internal group who might take control and have power over the larger group. Unfortunately such early examples of human egalitarianism were both rare and vulnerable, hence the inevitable emergence of relatively small centralised groups having power over the majority of their kin probably began during the later Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods, from 50 to 10,000 years ago.

These relatively small powerful groups would have originated from among chosen tribal leaders such as elders, chiefs and shaman, eventually morphing into religious leaders, emperors, war lords, pharaohs, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers and eventually the captains of capitalism who now dominate most if not all aspects of our lives. Those who we originally chose to lead and protect us succumbed to the temptation of increasing their own material wealth and power over our hearts and minds. Today there is little or no gathering of free energy as such, all our resources and our primal attraction for one another have been commodified and there is now a price to be paid for it all.

I don’t want to beat around the bush in this regard, there is the ‘ruling class’, a relatively small centralised group of wealthy powerful people who control the means of production and the wealth it generates via their stories and control over the vast majority of us ‘working class’ . The ‘ruling class’ are also the reason why after 2.5 million years of tool making we still tool up to produce their weapons of mass destruction on a grand scale. – Thankfully not all tool making is about weapon making: On my twenty-first birthday and while working for an engineering company that produced zip fasteners, I completed a 5 year apprenticeship and became a qualified ‘tool maker’. At worst I may have indirectly contributed to the ‘universal soldier’ being able to keep his or her trousers on during combat.

According to Wiki the above quote from Marshall McLuhan is referring to the fact that our social practices co-evolve with our use of new tools and the refinements we make to existing tools. This is valuable story telling presented to us by a philosopher of communication theory who was able to predict the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. 2.5 million years after the invention of tools we find ourselves living at a time when we should seriously consider ‘re-shaping our tools’. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword and one of our most powerful tools is indeed story telling – as Cosmologist Brian Swimme suggests the stories going on in our heads can be as hard as rocks. What is the primary story going on between our ears? If we are not carefully cultivating our own primary story then we are most likely being overly influenced by the many often confusing and conflicting stories that are so cleverly presented to us by those who profit from and depend on winning over our hearts and minds.

We may have many stories that are important and valuable to us such as those relating to our loved ones, our preferred spiritual practice, our nationality, our ethnicity, our politics, our career, hobby, favourite art, sporting endeavour etc., but any and all such stories can – and dare I say, should be carefully considered within the context of a more important primary story, the story of how we got here, a story that reminds us that each one of us is a unique, relational centre of creativity. Remembering our more natural pre and early human behaviour can help us to cultivate a storying of our Self as being related to other and all-that-is, as sons and daughters of a Mother Earth – Gaia, from whom we all emerge and to whom we all return. One such story is ‘The Universe Story – A celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos’ (Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry – Harper & Collins 1994).

Taffy Seaborne

Southern Summer 2013.

The name PaGaian.

“The universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. The unity of the planet Earth is especially clear; each being of the planet is profoundly implicated in the existence and functioning of every other being of the planet.”

Evening Thoughts – Thomas Berry, Sierra Club Books 2006.

Thomas Berry’s principles for a functional cosmology underpin the story behind the name PaGaian, which is best described by its author Glenys Livingstone PhD.

“… it expresses a reclaiming of the term “Pagan” as meaning a person who dwells in “country”, yet with “Gaian” spliced in, it expresses a renewed and contemporary understanding of that “country”. “Gaia” is a name for humanity’s Habitat, an ancient yet new name, which I understand to include whole Earth and Cosmos – there is no seam separating Earth from Her context. And Pagan religious tradition offers a spiritual practice of celebrating Earth-Sun Creativity manifest in this Habitat.”

http://web.archive.org/web/20121027094059/http://pagaian.org/book/preface

I was born and raised in ‘old’ South Wales (1944), close enough to spend some of my youth watching the ebb and flow of the river Taff, hence it is appropriate that most people here in New South Wales Australia, know me as Taffy. My given family names are Robert James Seaborne and my self chosen online name is malpagaia. The name malpagaia is a combining of the native Australian pitjanjatjara word ‘malpa’ – translated into English as meaning friend or helper, deliberately spliced with the name Gaia it expresses my desire to be Her friend and helper.

My choice of a pitjantjatjara word also expresses my deep appreciation for what I learned and experienced about the importance of relationship from the people who speak that language. It was a great privilege to be able to live and work among traditional owners of country in central Australia, the Anangu for eight years (1990-98). With the benefit of hindsight I enjoy reflecting on my time and experience with Anangu as a pilgrimage that was preparing me for my approaching spiritual liberation. My spiritual liberation began during the year 2000 when I met my beloved Glenys Livingstone who was soon to gain her PhD and become the author of ‘PaGaian Cosmology – Re-Inventing Earth-Based Goddess Religion’. Glenys introduced me to her spiritual practice of celebrating Earth Gaia’s significant seasonal moments as they occur in our southern hemisphere. PaGaian is the name of our spiritual practice.

The name Trotskyist.

The only meaningful political direction left now is synonymous with the only meaningful spiritual direction left now: towards the conscious re-fusion of the spirit and the flesh… This time it will be a global consciousness of our global oneness, and it will realize itself on a very sophisticated technological stage; with perhaps a total merger of psychic and electronic activity.”

The Great Cosmic Mother – Barbara Mor, Harper & Row 1987

Barbara Mor’s understanding and emphasis on the need for political and spiritual direction that are ‘synonymous’, with each other is what led me to finding the name and political story of Leonard Trotsky, who in 1938 when celebrating the founding of the Fourth International said –

“We are not a party like other parties… Our aim is the full material and spiritual liberation of the toilers and exploited…”

It was Trotsky’s emphasis on ‘material and spiritual liberation’ at the international – or better still Gaian, scale that attracted my attention.

(Here I should explain why I frequently use the word ‘story’, it is because I highly value the fact that we humans are a story telling species. All that we sense, think, imagine, and do, influences and in turn is influenced by the stories going on between our ears. This is a fact, what is not necessarily so factual is how we receive our stories and then, what we do with them; whatever your story, I strongly advise you don’t let them lie to you.)

A brief spiritual story.

My spiritual story is couched in female metaphor because beginning with my mother Dilys, it is the significant women in my life that enable me to experience my present spiritual well-being. My mother Dilys frequently reminded me that I was born lucky. Moreover, she meant it, consequently I have always believed it to be so. My first wife Carol inadvertently taught me how dangerous and futile it was to flirt with Jehovah and Christianity. My ex partner Marian rescued me from a life of ordinariness and inspired our highly valued life changing eight year pilgrimage to the desert country of central Australia. All of which paved the way for me to meet my beloved Glenys who took me by the hand and introduced me to the divine feminine, the Goddess. At the tender age of fifty-five I arrived at a profound and down to Mother Earth PaGaian ‘spiritual liberation’. My new spiritual journey has since enabled me to find and experience a more meaningful form of ‘material liberation’ and eventually a political story that I could relate to and value.

A brief political story.

My primary and tertiary education took place in Penarth South Wales and following a five-year apprenticeship on the Treforest Industrial Estate I became a qualified toolmaker. It was almost inevitable that I would vote for the political party that appeared to best serve working families; after emigrating to Australia in 1967, I voted Labor for several decades.

During recent decades the main stream political parties here in Australia have been moving further to the political right and hence it became more and more difficult for me to find any common ground between them, my spiritual practice and personal values. Finding a political candidate who could best reflected my world view and personal values was proving to be almost impossible.

Glenys drew my attention to one of her many feminist books entitled ‘The Great Cosmic Mother’ and it was the following part of the author Barbra Mor’s story that restored my interest in politics –

“A truly human politics must study the entire history of the world’s religions and spiritual beliefs. It must try to return to or move toward spiritual systems that are harmonious with all our visions of creative communal life… Because this is what is missing under both of the competing “world powers”: a creative communal life. Both systems – Western capitalism and Soviet communism – are based on the denial of communal celebration… p16

And so, we can make no separation between “spirituality” and “politics.” We are this world, we cannot leave it. We can only work to transform it as we transform ourselves, in acts of evolution and revolution… On earth, mind and spirit are definitively embodied. The notion that “mind” and “spirit” can be abstracted from the body is a patriarchal lie; and a continuance of this lie is the notion that we can indulge in a “spirituality” that is “above politics” – that somehow floats above the agony of this present earth like a little blissed-out cloud.” p417

The Great Cosmic Mother – Barbara Mor, Harper & Row 1987.

Inspired by B. Mor’s story, in 2010 I was attracted to reading the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) mainly because it was about an international political story with an emphasis on social equality. The discovery of a political party that was not confined to the borders of a particular nation state and that placed an emphasis on human equality was for me a political revelation. I have since become a member of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) making a modest monthly donation to the Sydney branch and the WSWS. I visit WSWS daily, it is now my preferred source of information about world affairs and albeit to a lesser extent, cultural information. I am particularly keen to become more aware of the ongoing ‘class’ struggle – the ongoing ‘revolution’ and how we might yet achieve a planetary – Gaian, social equality that is sustainable and appropriate for future generations.

From my PaGaian perspective the political story being told by the Fourth International and more recently via the SEP is the only political story to come anywhere near Thomas Berry’s unifying principle – quoted above, which if enacted, is capable of achieving the ‘full material and spiritual liberation’… of not only ‘the toilers and exploited’ but of humanity as a whole. I also like to think that L. Trotsky would have admired the Anangu traditional owners of central Australia, who for millennia prior to being colonised by Europeans cultivated their Lore – tjukurpa, that among other things deliberately avoided the rise of an internal ‘ruling class’ type group who might take control and have power over the larger group.Another way of thinking about this is that because of their relationship with country and kin and the organic way in which such indigenous Lore evolved, no such vocabulary nor story was able to exist between their ears.

A brief story of place and time.

During 1966 I made the decision to emigrate to Australia. It was a somewhat belated decision as I was well advanced toward emigrating to Boston Massachusetts and who knows what kind of future working for General Electrics. Instead a ‘born lucky Robert’ immediately after watching a movie about ‘a weird mob’ down under, in what appeared to be a relatively ‘lucky country’, I decided there and then, it was the place to be. So here I am having continued to be a lucky boy in a lucky country, who instead of aspiring to climb the ladder of success in an American factory ends up spending a couple of decades overseeing the forests of Victoria and managing Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park. Now I find myself working alongside my beloved Glenys as we maintain a place here in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales mainly for the purpose of ritually celebrating Earth Gaia’s seasonal moments as they unfold in this great Southern land of Her’s.

So, what is happening here and now (2013) in this so called ‘lucky country’ Australia, with its indigenous and more recent migrant population, all of whom deserve better, much better. I believe this to be true for the people of all nation states at this time.

The following is a quote of parts 5, 15 and 16 of the last of seven resolutions passed unanimously at the first national congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) held from April 6 to 9, 2012 in Sydney (see: “Australian SEP holds first national congress”).See resolutions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

“5. Vast changes in world economy over the past four decades, culminating in the breakdown of the capitalist order that began with the financial crisis of 2008, have led to the collapse of the old national-based organisations and parties that dominated the workers’ movement for decades. Today all the so-called “workers’ parties”—including the Australian Labor Party—which have played such a key role in propping up the capitalist order, have been utterly discredited in the eyes of millions. A political vacuum has opened up. The change in the objective situation has created the conditions for a profound shift in political consciousness.

15. This Congress declares that the cornerstone of the SEP’s program is to forge the international unity of the working class. The Congress denounces all forms of nationalism, racism and chauvinism, dredged up by the bourgeoisie and its political and media establishment to divert the social tensions generated by the crisis of capitalism against the most vulnerable layers of society, including refugees, immigrants and the country’s indigenous population.

16. In all the struggles of the working class, the SEP will encourage the development of new organisations, entirely independent of and opposed to the trade unions and the official political establishment, including workplace rank-and-file committees to defend jobs, wages and working conditions, and action committees to defend social rights such as education, health, housing and a safe environment. Such organisations will fight for the extension of all these struggles to encompass every section of the working class—employed and unemployed, young and old, skilled and unskilled, Australian-born and immigrant—into a common movement, across industries, workplaces and localities, that reaches out to workers internationally.”

What does it say when not even such a symbolic head of the ‘ruling class’ as Queen Elizabeth herself is aware of what is happening to her subjects?

“about the 2008 financial crisis… Her Majesty had asked: “Did nobody see this coming?” Perhaps she could also have asked three more questions: Does nobody see the suffering and socioeconomic injustices of oligopolistic-finance capitalism? Does no one see that the problems are structural and systemic? And is there no alternative to a system that generates continuous “quadruple crises” – the socioeconomic, political, environmental and personal/psychological?

Monthly Review Vol 65 Nov 2013 : p39

For me this validates that we do indeed live in an age of universal deceit, when just telling the truth can be regarded by the ‘ruling class’ as an act of terrorism eg; the whistleblowing of J. Assange and E. Snowden. For us ‘working class’ their true story telling is more like a revolutionary act.

While my usual conscious awareness and reflection is predicated on my spiritual practice, I do consider myself very fortunate ‘lucky Robert’ to have received what I regard as pragmatic spiritual and political stories that are sufficiently synonymous, I also understand that this is not and probably never will be so for the vast majority of my fellow ‘working class’. Hence there may only ever be one PaGaian Trotskyist, I hope not.

As with our spiritual vision, so too with our ecological and social vision, they are planetary by nature and PaGaian by name.

Taffy Seaborne & GlenYs Livingstone – Summer 2013.

malpagaia.

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