On February 6 I wrote about how understanding chaos theory is having a significant effect on my mindfulness practice and leading to a metaphor of life as a river--constant movement, complex patterns, often turbulent, with whirlpools interacting with each other.
Another factor entering this discussion is my understanding of how languages can affect how we construct our worldviews. Most Native American languages are much more verb-based than English, and this has huge implications for how we see life: those cultures view life as a flow where everything is in flux. Rather than attempt a summary, I want to give the readers a feeling for how profound these differences are. Most of the descriptions below are taken from six sources, from which I have done a lot of condensing and paraphrasing. Since this is not a research article, I have taken out quotation marks to make the reading flow more easily.
Native American languages
A person from a noun-based language like English is conditioned to watch dancers, while a person from a verb-based language would see and feel the experience of dancing. In the Blackfoot language, there aren't nouns or verbs as we normally describe them in relation to each other. Instead, linguistic meaning is like events emerging out of a constantly moving, interconnected flux, rather than discrete interactions between subject and object.
The Algonquin languages are rich in verbs, with verbs often having hundreds of different endings! When speaking English instead of Mi’kmaq, Sa'ke'j Henderson feels he is being forced to interact with the world of objects, things, and categories in place of a more familiar world of flows, processes, activities, transformations, and energies.
One Western physicist stated that everything we experience is part of a process. Thus, information and mind should be verbs too—as in informationing or minding.
Echoing Thich Nhat Hanh, one Western scientist noted that we have emphasized things rather than relationships, and we've paid a very high price for that...and that we have to find a language of connectedness, and that comes from a different way of being in the world.
Describing medicine
David Peat is a physicist who got to know many Blackfoot people and was invited to participate in many of their rituals. He wrote that when we speak of medicine in the United States most people automatically think of a substance, an object, something tangible. For indigenous healers medicine is a verb, implying activity, process, a movement of restoring harmony and balance. Medicine is seen as energy, power, spirit, relationship.
Most of our diseases are signified by nouns. For example, I have a headache, a stomach ache, cancer. Each of these can also be seen as a verb or process instead of a thing: I'm headaching, stomach-aching, cancering, etc. What a difference! Now these are not things you have, but processes your body is going through. The experience is one you have more control over opposed to being a thing that has nothing intrinsically to do with you.
Careful observation of the world
This complexity of Native American languages comes from a careful observation of the environment and the many relationships between beings. One speaker told how in the Mi’kmaq language the names of the trees are the sound the wind makes as it moves through their leaves in the fall.
Another man said that when he was young, his grandfather told him to watch and follow one animal for many days. Over time he began to learn its habits, how it behaved, what its relationship was to other animals, how it fit into the web of nature, and how sometimes human beings did the same sorts of things that animals did.
Resonance between indigenous science and Western science
David Bohm, an eminent physicist, organized many interactions between indigenous and Western scientists. He was struck by the perfect bridge between their languages and worldview and his own work. What to him had been major breakthroughs in human thought – quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order--were actually part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mi'kmaq, Cree, and Ojibwaj. [Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology, also wrote that much of what she had learned through years of painstaking research was common knowledge to many indigenous people.]
How these explorations have changed my perspective
As a result of these ideas, I am finding that my current image of "me" is less and less "a body and a brain" and more and more a system that is constantly moving, constantly in flux, occasionally turbulent, and not easily understood by the rational mind. To say that I have gotten stuck evokes a very different feeling than to say that I find myself caught in a whirlpool. Saying I am stuck feels like there is a thing blocking my progress, while caught in a whirlpool feels like what is actually happening in my body and brain--there is still a flow of energy and information, it's just currently pretty chaotic and wild.
Navigating through the complexity and the frequent messiness of life, I am finding that awareness of these different ways of viewing the world (i.e. chaos and quantum theory and indigenous perspectives) is helping me to let go of old ways of trying to control how I am responding. Rather, I am paying more attention to all the energies swirling inside me, and I am noticing when a new whirlpool (e.g. fear-energy) has crashed into the whirlpool I am in. Then, in that space between stimulus and response, I am better able to decide which choice(s) make the most sense in that moment.
A personal example
We know that the various systems in our body--e.g., muscular, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive--are all in constant movement and sending and receiving information from each other. So too with our thoughts and emotions. I find that in my everyday interactions with other people, I can feel these whirlpools of energy inside and their interacting with other energy-systems.
I'll give just one example. When I was on FaceTime with my daughter Emily whose baby was one day old, there were many whirlpools swirling around inside me. These whirlpools were interacting with my memory-energies of Emily's birth 34 years ago and my memory-energies of friends who had complicated births. Then there were the memory-energies of anxiety and fear that rose in me--these whirlpools were more turbulent and chaotic. [Language note: Memory is a noun, so I have coined the word memory-energies.]
New ways of being in the world
In the past I would have been overwhelmed during periods of turbulence, and my mind would have been struggling to make sense of all the thoughts and emotions swirling around. Informed by my understanding of chaos and quantum theory and the verb-based indigenous languages, life feels more and more like flowing down a river, being in constant motion, and the turbulent rapids, the still pools, the whirlpools are simply part of the natural phenomena of a river system. I am beginning to integrate these different perspectives with my meditation practice. I am now finding that if I invite my mind to relax at these times, I can more easily go with the flow and trust that making sense will come over time.
This newly emerging map for navigating through life is enabling me to be more aware of the energies that are always swirling and pulsing through my being. For example,
• I can pay attention to my heart energies, including loving, appreciating, forgiving, gratituding, generousing, happying, compassioning, joying, and goodwilling.
• I can pay attention to my body energies and what needs attending to, for example, fatiguing in my eyes, aching in my shoulders or hips, paining in my head or back, etc.
• I can pay attention to mind energies like curiosity, calmness, and being non-judgmental; and to afflictive emotions like angering, irritating, resenting, shaming, regretting, and embarrassing.
In the next blog post, I will attempt to wrap up this three-blog series by focusing on explicit connections between Buddhism and what I have talked about in these last two posts. As in the previous post, I have condensed an incredible amount of information into a relatively short space. Which ideas do you resonate with? Which ideas don't make sense? If you are interested, I can give references for articles and books that describe more deeply what I have attempted to convey here.