Note: This article was originally posted at Saunteringsociety.org.
Something is wrong, and we who have eyes to see it know it. Art is uninspiring. Music is noise. Religious institutions are frail. Politics is cartoonish. Personal relationships lack depth and trust. People are physically and mentally sick. Our air, land and rivers are poisoned. Our food is toxic. Our once great culture of achievement, virility, beauty, innovation, discovery and power has descended into a dark, modern age of mediocrity, ugliness, vulgarity, sickness, and decadence.
You and I have been born into this modern age of spiritual decadence, but life can be more. Religious and mythical traditions tell us of a golden age when our ancestors were full of spirit and vigor and pursued excellence, created beauty and lived out of the soul. We see vestiges of spiritual power and confidence in the great cathedrals of Europe or the mystically-arranged rocks of Stonehenge. But most deeply we sense a limitless Source of life and power as we walk in Nature. We saunter alongside a woodland creek, ascend the limestone crags of a little mountain, or wade in the blue waters of the sea, and we sense a universal impulse that we share with all of Nature. We know by experience that a divine Source feeds all of life, and that we are its benefactors.
It seems today that few people know and experience this divine Source in their lives. We are victims of a great enclosure of Nature and of the mind. Our ancestors walked wild and free for hundreds of thousands of years. We were born to walk, to roam, to move toward the horizon and explore what lies over the next hill. We ate a wide variety of healthy meats, leafy plants and wild berries. We constructed small homes to protect us from the harshest elements of nature, but we were never more than a few steps from fellowship with Nature and its divine Source. This all began to change a mere ten thousand years ago, when civilizations were born. Cities were constructed, and walls went up, severing our ancestors from regular fellowship with Nature, our original homeland, and from the divine Source which speaks through intuitions and instincts.
Civilization’s enclosure of space was accompanied by an enclosure of the mind. Just as city walls severed us from Nature, likewise, systems, dogmas and institutions grew up in civilization which clogged our natural intuition and experience of the divine Source. Within the Apparatus of the state, religion and science a new kind of thinking that we now call “instrumental thinking” began to dominate how we think. Mechanical types of thinking – calculating, ciphering, organizing, mapping, constructing – were valued. Knowing by intuition and instinct, our primal ways of knowing, were abandoned. We gave up instinctual knowing for rational assessing. More and more our institutions – government, academia, religion, media – presented us with stultifying dogmas, mechanical processes, official procedures, acceptable thought, and social conformity. Our way of knowing and understanding the world was enclosed within the limitations of instrumental reason, religious dogma and social conformity. No doubt, civilization created and maintained efficient and complex organizations, which produced the production of surplus commodities and a degree of protection from the vicissitudes of life. But as mechanical and rational thinking became increasingly the exclusive means of engaging and experiencing the world, we lost the ability to know and understand the world by intuition and instinct, the original and natural channels by which the divine Source communicates to Nature and to you and me. We have material abundance but spiritual poverty. We have information overload but lack divine wisdom. We are safe and secure but fearful and anxious in a world seemingly devoid of God.
Religion emerged as a means to heal the wound that is our severance from Nature and the Source. Prior to the great enclosure, religion was unnecessary. As a people once intimately connected with Nature and the Source that boils over into Nature we had no need for religion. We lived and moved in constant relationship with Divine. With the creation of civilizations, we were pulled away from the wild and enclosed behind walls. Religion emerged to help us scale the wall and reunite with our Source. Religion is the connecting again (re-ligio, as in ligament) to something that has been lost. Religion is intended to reconnect us to our natural inheritance and reopen within us our closed-up receptivity to the inpouring emanations of the divine into our souls. Religion in large part has failed us, and it is no surprise, because religion has become just one more form of mediation between us and the Source. It is just one more wall, one more hurdle to the Divine.
Religion can have value. As we became civilized and lost our ability to know and experience by intuition and instinct, the priestly class arose to show us the way to Nature and Nature’s God through ritual and sacrament. Religion achieves its aim when it points us to the way of intuitive knowing. But invariably religion becomes ensconced within dogma, legalism, and priestly corruption. It assimilates to the Apparatus. The Apparatus is a wall, and religion becomes its justification.
We must break free of the Apparatus in body and soul. We must learn how to reopen our intuitive and instinctive channels through which the Source pours into our whole being. We must begin the long work of reconstituting ourselves, our families and our communities to live in fellowship with Nature and the Source. Until this happens, we will not escape the curse of the Apparatus. We will continue to experience only physical sickness, mental illness, weakness of soul, ugly landscapes, ecological destruction, spiritual darkness and general decadence.
There is a place and a way back to a direct relationship with Nature and her Source. That place is what I call the forsest’s edge. The way is sauntering. The forest’s edge is that verdant, liminal area that separates the Apparatus from the wilderness. The Apparatus is the world of the exclusively rational mind, of Apollonian order, of walls, fences, cubicles, careers, assembly lines, maps, charts, interstates, 24/7 screens, conformist mass society, and stale, dogmatic religion. Wilderness is the world of darkness, the abyss, silence, Dionysian chaos, the ebullient Godhead. We cannot survive in either world for long. The Apparatus suffocates us. Wilderness overtakes us. We go to the Apparatus for safety and security but find tyranny. We go to the wilderness for ecstasy, but it leads to insanity.
The forests edge is where we accept from the Apparatus basic order and security and receive from the wild that inpouring of virility and fire which is nothing less than the divine Source. The Apparatus is civilization. The wilderness is chaos. The forests edge is culture. Apart from thin space we either live in the dead materialism of the Apparatus or the unsustainable frenzy of the wild.
The forest edge saunterer is the one who creates culture. He is the poet, the painter, the saint, the philosopher, the dreamer. He has known the suffocation of the Apparatus and fled to the wilderness. For a season he strides among the brambles and bogs of a wild wetland. He roams through the dark silence of a primeval forest. His senses come alive. He feels the impulse of a Transcendent vibration in his sinews, reconnecting him to his soul. He becomes Emerson’s transparent eyeball in the blithe air of a cool evening. But the body cannot endure such enthusiasm for long, so the weary poet begrudgingly crawls back toward the Apparatus. However, when he arrives at its wall, he cannot bare the thought of returning to the suffocating regulations, policies and procedures, conformity and dogma there within. Having known an unmediated relationship with the Source, the saunterer dare not return to the Apparatus. He will surely die there, but the wild can only be taken in doses. Where is he to live? The forest’s edge.
Life and culture are brimming along the forest’s edge. Here are the majestic oaks and aromatic cedars, wild huckleberries and blackberries, darting redbirds, noisy blue jays, timid rabbits and shady gardens where one can walk slowly among the wild creatures, soaking in the Source. Here the freed mind can wander, dream, create new worlds and new possibilities whispered to him by divine voices. Along the rural countryside, fencerows and forest’s edge, geniuses such as Thoreau, Nietzsche, Kant, Wordsworth, and the Bronte sisters found their inspiration. Here is where the saunters of Van Gogh lead to a Starry Night and the meandering walks of Beethoven produced symphonies. Here the poet, the philosopher, the dreamer can lose himself, lay down his masks and social roles ascribed by the Apparatus. Here he can feel alive and imagine new worlds. Here he can breathe, intuit and know beyond knowing.
Life in the Apparatus has broken the will and enclosed the soul with its crushing grip on our minds and our freedoms. As a result, we find ourselves in a sick, lonely, weak and decadent society, lacking virility, fire, power and passion. Sauntering in body and soul along the forest’s edge reawakens our senses and reopens our channels of intuition and instinct so that we might experience and know the Source of all life and power.