Writing SPIRAL
The story of SPIRAL began in the previous century. It came out of a
long period of "considering," thinking about phenomena that I had
witnessed but, with my western view of reality could not accept. This
considering began forty years earlier, after I met and got to know a
small group of aborigines, in Southeast Asia.
When I first met them I had a strange sense of recognition. There was
something about them that immediately struck me as familiar. In my book
(What It Is To Be Human, later called Original Wisdom, etc.) I wrote
that I "fell in love" with them; that was wrong. It took me many years,
however, to find a better description of how aboriginal people affect
modern man (maybe only some). They were primitive certainly, poor,
wearing almost no clothes, living far from "civilization," and yet
there was something so endearing about them. It was as if something
about them resonated with me, somewhere deep inside. In the years
following I read what other people had written about aborigines in
other parts of the world,
This is what Peter Mathiessen wrote about a small group of aboriginal
people he met in Central Africa, as he writes in his book The Tree
Where Man Was Born, © 1972:
"Shy, they await in a half-circle,
much less tall than their bows. “Tsifiaqua!” they murmur,
and our people say, “Tsifiaqua mtana,” and then the hunters
say, “Mt-aa-na!” for warm emphasis, smiling wholeheartedly.
(Tsifiaqua is “afternoon” as in “good
afternoon,” and mtana is “nice” as in “nice
day.” and tsifiaqua m-taa-na, as the hunters say it, may mean,
“Oh beautiful day!” I am smiling wholeheartedly too...; my
smile seems to travel right around my head. The encounter in the sunny
wood is much too simple, too beautiful to be real, yet it is more real
than anything i have known in a long time. I feel a warm flood of
relief, as if I had been away all my life and had come home again--I
want to embrace them all."
The people I knew had the same effect on me. They made me feel I had
come back to what we, humans, used to be like--when we were wild
(wild in the sense of "natural") before we thought ourselves better
than the rest of creation and made what we call civilization.
Laurens van der Post, a South African writer who wrote extensively
about another group of aboriginal people in southern Africa, whom he
calls Bushman (they call themselves San), says that these little people
"could not be tamed."
That is what civilization does, it tames us, it destroys the wild in us.
What kept haunting me, years after I left Southeast Asia, was that the
aborigines I met "knew" things they could not possibly know. I took one
of them, who had never seen the ocean, for an overnight visit to a
beach. When we came back to the settlement he told the people in his
group things about the world ocean that were almost scientific, but how
could he know all that? He had only stood on the beach, looking. He had
not even stuck a toe in the water, yet he knew that ocean water is
salty. He described the ocean floor with mountains and deep canyons, he
mentioned the "rivers" (currents) in the ocean. How could he know?
During the two years that I was there, I visited many of their
settlements, but never planned. It depended on having free time, the
use of a car, no other commitments. Of course they had no telephones.
And yet, on every visit, to settlements I had not visited before, I was
met by someone sitting on the path, half an hour or so before coming to
the settlement. They always denied they were waiting for me, but they
did not deny that they were there because they had dreamt that this was
a day when a visitor would come.
Or, when I asked them a question that needed thought, there was always
a silence (sometimes as much as five or more minutes), and then one
person would answer. Always a short, concise sentence that went to the
core of the question. I could not escape the notion that somehow they
had exchanged thoughts among themselves and then decided who should
speak for all of them: mind to mind communication? (I avoid using words
like telepathy. That has come to mean trickery).
The riddle stayed with me for years, nagging me every time I thought of
these people--and that was almost daily. I read every writer I could
find who made even a casual remark about meeting aboriginal
people in other parts of the world. There were amazing similarities.
All of the writers mentioned the joyfulness of aborigines, a joie de
vivre, a sense of being fully and gratefully alive. Many of the writers
mentioned, often casually, what I call "knowing."
Anthropoligists and other scientists who studied them, agreed that they
were remnants of how we all were, ten or more thousand years ago. In
the latter half of the 20th century Civilization had pushed them to the
most inhospitable places on our planet: deserts, deep jungles and the
arctic. Now, in the early years of the 21st century there are very few,
if any, aboriginal groups left: either eradicated together with the
many wild animal and plant species whose habitat we have so casually
destroyed, or otherwise forcefully integrated in the larger country
population, destroying their cultture, as we have systematically
destroyed almost all indigenous culturess in our haste to conquer (and
so destroy) the planet.
I remembering reading several accoiunts of the women who spent half
life times being with one of the ape species (why all women?). The more
I learned about them, the more it was clear that their patient "being
with" was a way to learn to communicate. Body language certainly,
sounds perhaps, but also something more: there must have been some kind
of mind to mind contact.
There have been times in my life that I lived with a dog, sometimes
more than one. Certainly, we learned to read each other's body language
and tone of voice, but now and then there was more. I do not
question that I communed with dogs.
(It is curious that I cannot communicate with cats very well, although
I have no doubt that I communed the few times I have encountered a
tiger in the wild. I resent that house cats are domesticated, no longer
"wild.")
No, I cannot "prove" all this. I am not a scientist now. To me there is
nothing wrong with anecdotal information. Statistics don't prove
anything but frequency of occurrence of a certain behavior. What I am
interested in is not a behavior.
Many years ago I came across a web site of Rupert Sheldrake, he of
a(nother) doubtful reputation. He asked people to send him examples of
"dogs that knew when their masters were coming home." Dogs whose
behavior showed that they somehow "knew" their masters were coming home
before they had come to the door. He published a book by that name,
discussing the literally hundreds of emails and letters he received,
with examples of dogs who knew even when their master first thought of
leaving, sometimes long before they actually came home. Not an uncommon
behavior of dogs, it turns out. I want to add, not unusual for people
either.
How often do you know who is calling when you hear the phone ring?
There are obviously many people who have had that experience more than
once, perhaps most of the time. When we talk about it we giggle, and
make excuses. But that is a kind of "knowing."
My little house is not visible from the road; I cannot see the gate
that I keep closed (and locked because otherwise it swings open in the
wind). Closed to keep dogs out, not people! Not infrequently I "find
myself" walking to open the gate "for no obvious reason," and when I
get there, someone comes driving up. I have had several experiences of
being ready to go out but turning around at the door, not knowing why.
I sit down, with my hat and coat on. The phone rings, long distance:
someone I do not know who has read my writing, wants to talk with me.
At first, many years ago, I made all kinds of excuses to myself. What a
coincidence! Synchronicity--a term coined by C.G.Jung, meaning "the
simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but
have no discernible causal connection."
Strangely, once I accepted that these things were happening, they
happened more often. Once we let go our conditioning that tells us
these things are "imagination"--when we allow these imaginations--they
occur more often than we knew.. That seems to indicate that many of us
still have these qualities and talents, hidden under layers of
conditioning; that if we can break through the conditioning we can
relearn to use these qualities and talents.
We have always known that animals can pick up our intention. Most
animals can sense fear in us, for instance. Hunters, who are familiar
with their environment and the animals in it, probably also sense the
intent of animals. I am convinced that plants and trees also "know"
intention. In all the places I have lived, I have always had abundant
plant life, even when the house and garden were sad, neglected dumps
when I moved in. An old Hawaiian man once came with my landlord, a
month after I had moved in. As he got out of the car, he sniffed, and
said with some surprise: "Hey, this place is alive—it did not
look alive before. The plants must love you!". I responded, Yes, and I
love the plants. It is not that I give them fertilizer, or plant
flowers; I rarely do. After all these years, and all these different
homes I have lived in, I accept that it is something between me and the
plants and trees. We call it "a green thumb." That does not explain
anything, of course. I think it is a matter of communication of intent.
Plants and trees can sense my intention, my interest in their
well-being, my love for them just as they are. I try never to control
them, accept them as they are.
I know, of course, that these phenomena are considered paranormal. What
if they were normal, part of our humanness, before we became alienated
from the earth, from Nature, and made ourselves civilized?
People who finish each other's sentences, or, our communication with
very young children (babies)--obviously without words, but equally
obviously true communication. Mind to mind communication is not as
paranormal as our culture tells us. And "knowing" things that we cannot
possibly know? That too is probably not at all unusual, if we were to
allow ourselves to "know." Our society is so vehemently opposed to
anything that is out of the center; we spend a lot of energy and time
educating, training (conditioning) our children not just with facts we
want them to know, but more important, a point of view we insist they
share. We imprint our children with what this culture considers normal
and allowed, and what falls outside normal and therefore not allowed,
frowned upon, considered sick or even criminal.
I learned from the aborigines that learning is important, teaching is
conditioning. What we learn on our own "sticks." Facts and figures are
not important except in context.
All my life I have read voraciously. I began to pay attention to
descriptions of these talents and qualities, as I call them. Not
difficult to find hints, and in the writing about aboriginal people,
there were frequent mentions of such unexplainable knowing. One
example: Laurens van der Post, who was fascinated with the Bushman of
the Kalahari Desert (then South Africa, now Botswana). They hunt with
poison arrows. The poison kills, but does not taint the meat. A large
animal takes some time to die. In one of van der Post's books he
describes how he and his caravan (trucks with water and fuel for the
vehicles, tents, food, a doctor, a mechanic, etc.) had found a small
band of San as they call themselves. One day they hunted and shot a
giraffe. The giraffe of course runs away, the hunters follow his trail.
Van de Post follows in one of the LandRovers. After several days the
giraffe finally dies, the hunters cut up the meat, preparing to carry
all that meat back to where the women and children are, probably 50
miles away. It will take the hunters some time to walk with such a load
of meat. He offers to carry them and the meat, and remarks "the women
will be surprised when we come back so soon!" Oh no, they assure him,
they already know, "they are preparing the fires." As the car drives
up: the women are not at all surprised, they knew exactly when the men
would get back with the meat.
It took me years to accept that, perhaps, probably, almost certainly,
these qualities and talents are a basic human heritage. The difference
between "wild people" and us, is our civilization. It is our
civilization that prevents us from "knowing."
I think that despite a few thousand years of civilization those qualities and talents are still within us.
How can I write a story about this?
People are not going to believe me.
Maybe the only way to broach the subject would be as an import from aliens, beings from outer space!
I have never doubted that, of course, there must be Life on other
planets. It does not fit my understanding of the universe that we would
be unique. Nothing is unique in the universe. Life on other planets
must have different shapes, functions, but there must be some kind of
common "spirit," for want of a better word, something non-material that
all Life everywhere shares.
And so, bit by bit, the writing of what came to be called SPIRAL began
with what little I know of space and our earth, and humans. The
beginning was fun to write. I could well imagine the world-wide
reaction to "visitors from space"--although, now, almost ten years
later, 2006, I think now we would react with more violence; today we
seem to react to anything with the unbridled violence of our paranoia.
What happens when you make up a situation, with people and
circumstances? At a certain moment the story gets a life of its own.
Gradually, SPIRAL took over the writing. It felt as if I were just
writing what was dictated to me (in my head). There were many times
when I worked with fierce concentration, and suddenly I woke up (got
out of the concentration), looked at what I had written... did I write
that? Much of the writing felt like description of a "real" experience.
That made me think about fantasy and reality. Our civilization thinks
that these two realms are totally different. I am no longer so sure.
Much of what we think "real" is obviously illusion; and much of what I
experienced may be imagination but it felt utterly "real." It was real
to me!
The dream in the book is a dream I had.
I have no idea where the humans I communed with, came from. My
imagination? But the communing in my head felt painfully real, as you
may guess when you read.
The title of the book came to me ready-made (toward the end of the
writing). I am not sure what it has to do with the story, I don't know
why it must be written in all caps. But that is the way it came to me.
I tried to change the title and the spelling several times, and each
time it was as if I was given an electric shock, NO, the book is SPIRAL.
~ ~ ~
SPIRAL was written many years before I even began writing what now is
Rain of Ashes. As we moved into this new century it became abundantly
clear that our civilization is going to extremes of destruction and
illusion; I think it is crashing. Something sinister is happening to
people. And I realize that where ten years ago I had thought it would
take visitors from outer space to help break through our conditioning,
now I know that a great catastrophe would shake people loose from their
conditioning just as well, and make it possible to rediscover ancient
talents and qualities. I experienced extreme situations (the almost
total breakdown of society) in WWII, which I survived after five years
of German Occupation in Netherland.
I was lucky to survive the war, more lucky to have had a childhood
among non-western people, growing up with—almost in—an
indigenous culture, where the conditioning is lighter and different.
"Knowing" is not thought strange, or paranormal. Indigenous cultures
then still knew and practised what we call "unconditional love," which
western civilization does not know. Unconditional love feels warm and
welcoming and has nothing to do with passion or sexual attraction; it
makes for cohesive societies where people cooperate rather than
compete, and where individual egos are laughed at.
Now I have accepted that it is all right to know things that I cannot
know, and to talk with plants and animals, and receiving what they
commune to me. A good way to be, even when it makes it difficult to
live in our modern so-called civilized society!
Hawai'i 2006