Perhaps, indeed, the earth should be thought of as a mighty breathing process... The supreme breathing process!
Karlfried Graf Durckheim
Progress through technology. Sure. Why not? But first you need to define what sort of technology you're dealing with.
The original techne + logos is nothing more than the body-mind + discourse....
The problem with the modern world's conception of progress is that it is no longer the coveted sanctum of the bodymind, but that which is outside the bodymind.
Of course, there is nothing 'outside' the bodymind, but modern man is no longer as insightful as he used to be, so he continues to plug away at the illusion.
This is how progress has come to consume the world, and the bodymind. With all manner of disease and un-ease, dementia, and obesity, all pushed through by man's refusal to look inside himself, illusion is rife, and Man has never been so unhealthy.
How then to retrieve that health, that wholeness?
By looking perhaps at language itself. We did it with technology, so why not with health?
Get to the root of language and you will get to the root of the self.
The word 'Health' derives from Norse hale, meaning whole:
- health (n.)
- Old English hælþ "wholeness, a being whole, sound or well," from Proto-Germanic *hailitho, from PIE *kailo- "whole, uninjured, of good omen" (source also of Old English hal "hale, whole;" Old Norse heill "healthy;" Old English halig, Old Norse helge "holy, sacred;" Old English hælan "to heal"). With Proto-Germanic abstract noun suffix *-itho (see -th (2)). Of physical health in Middle English, but also "prosperity, happiness, welfare; preservation, safety." An abstract noun to whole, not to heal. Meaning "a salutation" (in a toast, etc.) wishing one welfare or prosperity is from 1590s. Health food is from 1848,
If you consider language as a great family of words, simplistic as it may seem, you can see that the closest relatives to Health are words like in-hale, ex-hale, whole and holy.
When Blake wrote, 'All that breathes is holy,' he wasn't joking, and he knew of the relationship between the breath and saintliness. When the Scottish writer Kenneth White wrote that it was, 'plus facile d'etre saint que d'etre sain' he wasn't joking either. Sainthood is, in a world beset by the iniquities of excess and an unstable existence, easier to acquire than good health, good health being akin to some form of godhood.
At any rate, in order to 'see' this, whilst embroiled and embedded within a noisy and heavy-handed man-made world, is nigh on impossible. One needs exacting silence (as the sounds of Nature and the absence of noise), and the necessary and essential space within which to allow that silence free range. Seeing is no joke. People cannot see anymore because they are too dug in, and too entrenched within a linear world whose end-point is self-annihilation and suffering.
In order to see, they have to climb out of the trenches, get away from the frontline entirely, and make for the hills, or the coast, or maybe even the desert. it is only within these 'primordial breaks' (spaces with space) that one will have any chance of collecting one's self, and thus of seeing.
Inoculation is usually a word used around disease, but it simply means to 'put an eye into' from the Latin in + oculus. This is what I mean by seeing: insight, or 'inseeing' as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins referred to it. It is no coincidence that on the morning of the centenary anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the American president Barack Obama pleads with us to 'look inside ourselves'.
But man has turned his self inside out, so that looking inside becomes rather messy. He is the only creature out of billions who willingly cuts his self off from space, and while he's at it, pollutes that space (and his body, the elimination of distance only incurs new internal separations). He has become indurate and listless as a consequence. It is like this that he can listen to the news and the daily atrocities without so much as blinking an eye, not knowing that beneath the veneer of civility lies the same protocol that caused the holocaust, the same blind sub-routines that allow man to distance himself (to cut his self off from) his fellow animal being, commodify space and time, and turn his own self into some kind of packaged entity.
It is only by returning to great Space and great Time (become not overcome) through one's own locomotive power (locomotion dispels self-obsessiveness as well as spatio-temporal obsessiveness) that one will begin to graft that third eye back into the mind.
The human has become too compressed (without space to allow his dissolution), and Time has correspondingly grown into some tyrant. Space has to be re-absorbed into the bloodstream, re-inserted into our living. Hill-walking, coast-walking, cycling through open country, should be on every school curriculum for more than just a couple of hours a week. More like two days a week. Minimum. Children will learn more of physics, biology, language (and even metaphysics) simply by being out in the field, using their own steam to move. Moreover, they will discover where they are, learn to see things from different angles (Perspective and Parallax should be a subject unto itself!), and learn to identify native plants, animals, rocks and the like. In order to edify the self, one must ensure a good foundation. Rocks are a good place to start!
Glasgow is particularly blessed in that it is surrounded by wide open spaces, hills, and coastlines, all with the potential to transform (if not transfigure) the curious bodymind, and release it into its original domain. Cooped up in the noise of the city, and dismembered from the inside out, there is little hope for the inoculation of the self.
From the Kilpatrick Braes looking over the valley.
The sky and the sea from Cardross...
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