SEPTEMBER 7 2019
BRAIN-DEAD?
Solomon, the not always wise king, wrote that “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).
I guess Solomon was right. But reading is my life. Always has been. Where speaking is silver, and silence is gold, so writing is silver and reading is gold. How else can I gather knowledge? TV does not provide it: on the contrary. Newspapers or periodicals have their peculiar biases, so selective reading is the only avenue left. Of course my daily Bible reading always inspires, and so does utilizing my library, where I continue to find nuggets of wisdom.
I am still brooding on Jung. Brooding may be too strong a word, but his words that “We are very far from having finished completely with the middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity,” still lingers in my mind.
Somehow my eye fell on a book I bought in 1991 and never read, “The Medieval Vision”. Here is how it ended, “Understanding the past means…..trying to re-create a holistic view of existence that has not been generally held for four centuries. To live in medieval Europe was to appreciate that the events of human experience were linked irremediably to the past and the future, and that beliefs and judgements were inseparable from a vast network of complementary ideas.”
Then people knew where they came from and knew where they were going. We may take issue with their Hell and Heaven notion then prevalent, but it gave them clear objectives. Then, as the book states, “The vision of Christ’s divinity and the Paradise of God were crucial not only to piety but to all earthly affairs.”
My brother Drewes each month sends me the digital version of Civis Mundi (Citizen of the world), written in Dutch, a high-brow digital magazine with some Roman Catholic flavor. Dr. Jan de Boer, a professor in Amsterdam, commenting why we are what we are, wrote the following in the August edition, and I translate,
BRAINS
Now even these beliefs are hardly ever mentioned in the church let alone by business and politicians. We are the last generation, because we are devoid of vision, devoid of perspective, devoid of knowledge of past and future. We have become gods in our own right, so we no longer need God, the creator. We are the first generation to have the power to destroy everything, both by our way of carbon-induced death, or through our nuclear arsenal. These powers are the direct result of us abandoning religion: we have become our own religion, no longer rooted in the Medieval way when magnificent cathedrals were living testimonies to their commitment, something we still long for, witness the outpouring of compassion when Notre Dame de Paris went up in flames.
Our faith is vested in ever higher skyscrapers, strikingly silhouetted against the horizon where the moneymen plot their ever more dangerous schemes, and the legal minds are twisting to make the rich richer.
That brings me to our brains.
The question remains: how come that our brains urge us to destroy the planet and wonders whether there is a way to prevent that.
That is precisely the subtitle of a book, Le bug Humain written by Sébastien Bohler (February 2019).
He describes how our cortex, the outer contours of our brain, continues to pursue goals which are incompatible with efforts to save human society on our planet. He quotes the author, “For a long time our brains were our best ally, but they now are a real risk factor in our demise. Why? Because our brains have a programming problem in its design, a veritable deviation right at the center of this unbelievably complex organ: the nerve cells, the neurons, which supposed to guarantee our survival, are now never satisfied, and require ever more sustenance, sex and energy.”
The British ecologist, George Marshall, gives a more complicated explanation. In his book, with the fitting title The Ostrich Syndrome (2014) he maintains that our denial to effectively deal with the threat of Climate Change can be traced to our evolution, which urges us to opt for the short-term advantage. According to Marshall our rational brain by not recognizing the seriousness of climate change, acts contrary to our emotional brain which determines our decisions and so is not capable to effectively deal with the reality of the anxiety and uncertainty caused by this weather anomaly.”
Dr, Jan de Boer continues, “Reading these two and other sources have pretty well convinced me to have little faith in a future that promises little and threatens a lot. I am sorry to say but I am convinced that we do not really face up to the deadly seriousness of climatic changes and their disastrous consequences.”
So writes Dr. De Boer.
Yet, Africa is still different.
Years ago my wife and I spent three weeks in Central South Africa, visiting our youngest son who had a two year assignment there. What struck me about the African people was their innate sense of art and beauty. With the simplest of tools and the most ordinary of material they are able to create something beautiful.
Again reflecting on the first chapters of Genesis, the first bible book, confirms the African mentality: when God pointed out the TREE to the first couple living in Paradise, he described it as ‘beautiful to look at and good for consumption’: beauty before anything else. Africa has understood that priority, we have not.
I believe that, unless we escape the brain-dead trap, and free ourselves from human tendency to ignore the evil in society, we are goners.
Jung maintained that we are the product of past generations, so it behooves me to look back to my ancestors to enable me to reflect on who and what I am. So here it goes.
My parents named me Egbert Drewes, both after my maternal grandfather, Egbert de Haan, my mother’s father, and Drewes Bouwsma de Haan, my great-grandfather. A double surname, in those days, signified country gentry, and that was the case with him, as his grandfather an Egbert Drewes de Haan was the honored member of the Groningen Provincial Parliament, an appointed, not an elected position, a fervent supporter of the Dutch Royal Family during the French annexation of the Netherlands in around the year 1800. In my ancestor’s church, dating from the year 1300, my great-great-grandfather was honored with a plaque cemented in above the church’s entrance, forever proclaiming him a true royalist. Both were organic farmers, loved the land. My parents were the first to settle in the city. I am the first to return to the soil that shaped me, surrounded by forests which have had a calming influence on me and prevented me from becoming brain-dead.
I relate this because Jung has told me that my psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find a proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.
My school Greek already taught me to “gnoothe seauton”, to ‘know thyself’, the eternal struggle to reflect on what I am and why I do what I do.
Jung tells us “Not to do so, has made us plunge down a cataract of progress, which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our up-rootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste.”
This past week is a perfect example of what Jung refers to: turmoil everywhere, including the oceans, including the not so Great Britain, including the trading frenzies involving the USA and China.
Don’t get emotionally mixed up in the frenzy that is modern life. Get used to the eternal pace, our glorious future that awaits us, because, as Jung also asserts, “we refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse”. He also said that, “The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.”
So, what am I implying?
For one thing, God has to enter again in our lives, in the person of Jesus Christ through whom and by whom everything exists, including us. Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
Right now we are on a brain-dead trajectory witness our unwillingness to tackle Climate Change. We need to imagine a cultural shift away from the way of death we now are on, and dream again, dream about our roots, which lie in the earth, not in concrete, not in steel and cement, not in high rise and technology, but in down to earth humility: ‘earth we are and to earth we must return.’
We have to start all over again, wised up, chastened, humbled: listening to the cries of creation, recognizing our complicity in the unfolding climate crisis, praying, PRAYING for forgiveness, learning the true meaning of METANOIA, because a mind-change is needed: we have to become trustworthy to Creation once again.
Psalm 51 comes to mind, “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.” We have to be delivered from the cult of objects that leaves little room for emotion, little room for reverence or wonder. False images and gods have hypnotized us so completely that they’re killing us – and yet we remain in their thrall.
We have to again admire the greatness of creation, where every snowflake is different. If that is true – and it is – then we too should refuse to become homogenized, molded into Homo Economicus, oblivious to the pain of creation.
Admit that we have lost our indigeneity, our Earth stories and our Earth-memories; admit that we do not make the time to cultivate these things, or to reinvent them. Re-discover again how synchronized we actually are to Earth’s living rhythms, her inhale and exhale; like the water in the soil, the liquids in our bodies rise and fall twice daily with the moon, like internal tides, no matter how far we might be from the shore.
At one time, we too walked the Earth with feet perfectly suited to all her varied terrains. In recent times, though, we have lost our baseline gait, a term borrowed from the science of wildlife tracking that refers to the prints left by a healthy animal moving in a relaxed manner through her environment. With our shoes and our pavements, our high-rises and cars, we have eliminated the in-built, visceral knowing received directly from the Earth. And because we are being bombarded by information, toxins, and electronic signals coming at us faster than our bodies can process, our brains assemble fragments of information into a distorted composite from which we react rather than respond.
I have read that some 500 years ago the earth in North America was so vibrant that disease was virtually unknown: now suicide and cancer are the leading causes of death there.
I have come to believe that only in surrendering to the grief that takes us apart and strips everything away, can we hope to salvage the essential alliances that keep life going: the partnership between God – Christ, humans and Earth and the reverence engendered by deep knowing that God is all and in all, which signifies PANENTHEISM.
In the Native American and Indigenous prophesies of what we now call the Americas, doom was foreseen.
The Bible, written thousands of years ago, echoes this sentiment. The great enemy, whose initial aim was to prevent the coming of the Christ, now that the Evil One rules our world (1 John 5: 19), has only one goal: to destroy God`s creation. Over the decades our brains have changed, no longer receptive to the cries of creation. Salvation is an all-inclusive affair: our redemption and the redemption of creation go hand in hand.