Favorite Excerpts from Night of the Jaguar by Michael Gruber

On marijuana use: You dead people are very strange. You know chaikora, but you take it without chanting, and also you don't mix it with its brothers and sisters, so that it can speak to you properly. We say that assua is the brother and uassinai is the sister of chaikora. Together they are one of the small holy families that help you listen to the animal spirits. Now, without the rest of the holy family, we can't hear the animal spirits very well, but only the spirits in our own heads. What's the good of that?

On modern man: Because we Runiya are alive in this world. We are inside it, and the plants, and animals, stones and sky and stars, sun and moon, are our friends and relatives. That's what it means to be alive. A fish is alive and a bird, too. But you are outside the world, looking in on it as the ghosts do, and making mischief and destruction, like ghosts do. Therefore we say you are dead like they are. Also, when a person is alive, they carry their death behind them and this is one way we tell a live person from a ghost. But you carry your deaths inside you all the time, so you can have the power of death over all things. So we call you dead people.

More on modern man: So later when they returned from the dream world Moie had asked the priest what was so funny, and Father Tim said that the yana gives you the eye of God, and to God everything must be amusing, as we find the stumbles and tantrums of small children amusing. They think it is the end of the world, but we just pick them up and give them food and a hug, knowing that their momentary pain will soon pass. And this is when Moie discovered that Father Tim was able to keep himself separate from the god when he traveled to the dream world in the yana trance. This was a wonder to Moie, and the two men talked often after that about what Father Tim called ontology. Long, long ago, said Father Tim, everyone's thoughts were like water, connected to every thing and part of every thing. There was no difference between people's thoughts and the rest of the world and the fathers of the wai'ichuranan lived just the like the Runiya. Then one of these ancestors had a thought that was made not of water but of iron. And soon many of the wai'ichuranan had such thoughts, and with such thoughts they cut themselves away from the world and began to slice it up into tiny parts. Thus they gained their great powers over the world, and thus also they began to be dead.

On religion: Well, my mother used to say that when people stopped worshipping God they didn't stop worshipping entirely. She thought the urge to worship was hardwired into humankind, like the urge for procreation. So they worshipped lesser gods, mainly themselves, as being most convenient, but also things like money, fame and sex. Or youth. And these gods all fail, just like Pan did, being tied to corruptible and earthly things.

On consciousness: ...substance dualism, the idea that consciousness is its own thing and exists independently of the material brain, as Descartes believed. It satisfies all the problems of consciousness by explaining them away - the ghost in the machine, as they call it, or rather all problems except one, and that's the killer: how do you imagine any gearing or connection between the material and the immaterial? How does an immaterial mind cause a material event, say, the firing of neurons in the motor cortex that move your arms? Substance dualism implies conscious immaterial beings that are nevertheless capable of influencing matter.

On self: In general humans tend to be uncomfortable locked in the prison of the self. Our own identification with nations and sports teams is probably a relic of that, and on a higher level there's religion, of course. Traditional peoples often identify with animals, and from this we get imitative magic. The shaman allows the spirit of the totemic animal to occupy his psyche. He becomes the animal, and not in a merely symbolic way. To him and the people participating he is the bison, or whatever. They see a bison. ...It's a mistake to assume that they psyches of traditional people are the same as ours. You might just as well say that the particle physicist hallucinates his data in accordance with a ritual called science. ...Traditional people are mainly substance dualists, of course. The spirit is completely separate from the flesh, and the body it happens to occupy at the moment is not the only body it can occupy. Anthro[pology] tends to draw the line here because we don't understand how it's possible to do that, since we're all supposed to be good little material monists.

Ruminations - 22 Feb '10

I've decided that there is faith in belief that focuses less on what could exist at large, but what will exist (maybe?) in a century or six centuries or 1,000 years from now. Taking the focus off of what has been (or said to be); instead focusing on what can and most likely will be.

At death, does it truly matter that you and your perceived center of the universe disappear? What really matters is what continues to be after you're gone. The belief that things will go on without you, despite you, completely ignorant of you. The belief that things could be going on, intelligently, 800 billion light years away from you. Looking at the scientific and historic record, however, you can accept with great faith that existence, wherever or whenever it may be, will continue. But you can't prove it.

I'm not saying that you can't believe in a higher power or a mischief-making God or an angry God or God transforming the universe with love. Is that the only central question in life? To grapple with other questions, such as:

• Have humans reached their full mental capabilities? If not, can humans reach a higher level of perception/improved use of the mind, or are we at our capacity in current form?
• Do societal pressure and man-made systems slow down our mental progression, and if so, can this be overcome? 
• Can humans save current and forthcoming scientific knowledge for distant generations in a way that is safe and accessible, and easily understandable, should there be a sudden, severe population decimation? Or would great knowledge be lost again?

I am not steady in my faith of humanity itself. I believe that things can and will go on, but not that we could improve ourselves and our consciousness to a level beyond that which has been the norm throughout human history. That will take an extra leap of faith.

Do Be Do Be Doooo

Left the office for once today. Got coffee, walked around the block, and sat in the sunshine on an old bus bench. Watched two policemen checking out an apartment, a man playing w/ his son & a woman w/ her dog in the park, and another woman in a red car sit w/ her turn signal on at the edge of the parking lot for 5 min.

I sat looking at that parking lot, which was a fenced-up wasteland for 2 of the 3 years I've been looking down at it out my work window. I reflected on how little I actually leave the building during the day to just sit, although I could easily do so. And I thought about the great urge to DO vs. BE.

I would say that the compulsion to do is greater, but there is a fair amount of guilt about not taking the time to be. Every day, with the vast amount of media at my fingertips, I spend plenty of time thinking about how I should work on this, or craft that, or read those books & articles & tech tips, etc. etc. - all the do urges.

But to be would mean standing back from all this input and making sense of it. Connecting the dots and forming an internal vision of how events/people/histories tie together; or alternately, taking the time to understand something in great depth, research and all. Maybe a class, or maybe just personal, insatiable knowledge, to set an example for my son.

Which leads back to the need to do...and instead, the other night I sat in bed and watched an awful movie on instant Netflix.

One walk outside at a time?