In a discussion from a post last week, I was once again confronted with how we have been trained to think and how this affects EVERYTHING about our life…not just our outside lives, but our internal life as well. How we think about ourselves, our souls, our bodies. Some call this our world view…yet I would say it is deeper than world view…it is our body view as well for lack of a better term.
Here is what I shared on the conversation on Facebook:
I have been reading another book that might seem completely unrelated, but again it points to the different thought structures that dictate our inner world and therefore our outer world. Called Wise Woman Herbal series “Healing Wise” by Susan Weed. Her words completely have given voice to what I have been saying myself for at least 5-7 years: That everything happens in the body – that we cannot separate it into parts and try to treat the parts separately. We are not machines, but dynamic living creatures, always moving always changing. The only constant is that we are changing always.
In her book she breaks down the way we treat our health into 3 categories: Wise Woman tradition (which is the energy not a person), Heroic and Scientific.
*Wise Woman ==>50,000 BC on; oral tradition, which is invisible; life is a spiral, the number 13, non-repeatable…even if it looks like it is the circumstances around the “repeated” event are different. there is no such thing as problems, nothing wrong with death, sickness is seen as part of life and an ally to health, and so much more. There is no judgement, condemnation nor “wrongness” about the body and her fluids, parts, etc.
Heroic ==> 1000 BC to now; dualism enters, allowing the rise of one part over the other, allowing the degradation over the other, the suppression of one over the other. Rules are part of the mix, and are something you have to count your life on. birth is seen as a trauma instead of natural, death is seen as an enemy – one in which we need a savior from…and not part of the natural life cycle…at least not a good part. Circles are the standard …meaning things are repeatable until you “Learn your lesson”
Scientific ==>1500 AD to now; line is it’s symbol, everything is repeatable and “fixable” – treating the body as a machine and static. Anything that changes is seen as the enemy and must be “fixed”, made right in the machine. Birth is seen as impossible and medical intervention is needed (just look at the rate of C-sections), the “healers” are the experts trained for years on a part of the machine/body…and their drugs they have studied and drilled down to the “fixed” parts that can be repeated. The whole is the same as its parts…and thus just parts can be isolated, studied, and treated and the whole will become “healthy” again.
My point in bringing all of this up is that some where between the Heroic and the Scientific is the way we think about all of the world…for this is all we know. Most of us are so far beyond the Wise Woman tradition of looking at all of life as a spiral to seek whole/health/holiness…and we try to treat even history in “parts”. Here is a quote from her book I am just saying, “Yes, YEs, YES!!!” to – as in what I talked about yesterday, that in our world 2 realities cannot co-exist, and if they do, one is invalid:
“Numbers don’t lie, claims the Scientific tradition. The implication is that everything else does, including feelings, intuitions, hunches and memories. Numbers are true because they are constant, they quantify, and they repeat. Feelings and such must lie because they are changeable.”
PATRIARCHY, GENDER & REALITY
If you look closely at the dates, you will see that the Heroic tradition came in about 500-1000 years after Patriarchy was firmly established into our society and our thinking.
Why is this important here?
For until we learn how patriarchy brought to light dualism into the world through our THINKING, and how this dualism allows for the creation of gender and thus gender roles…and thus power/control/abuse, we will not find our way back the Oneness that is our craving, our deepest desire. Community will continue to allude us, “enemies” will continue to plague our minds, and life will continue to be shallow.
Yet, if we can change the way we think, if we can step out of linear, rule bound thinking – we have a path back to Oneness…and that path back just so happens to be through the reality of duality.
