The Good, the True, and the Beautiful, sort of…

Unpacking a denatured colonial rule in contrast to natural law.

On the surface, these basic constructs can seem plain enough: art, morals, science; the natural sovereignty of first-, second-, and third-person perspective; essential facets of an ontological legitimacy and greater oneness…

A friend of mine passed some years ago, and a photo of him taken by another in our shared heartspace hangs above the front door, in the living room on the “wall of heroes.” The photo, shown below, portrays a man gently leaving the confines of a familiar path, setting off instead directly towards a monument to natural law.

The gentleman in the photo, Doctor Larry Emerson was, and remains posthumously, a great teacher. A humble yet sincere leader of the Diné tradition, he graciously took people from the classroom and from the “headspace,” back onto the land.

One of the tools he employed which I found tremendously helpful was the pointing out of knowledge, identity, and paradigmatic systems that have become in one way or another “denatured.”

Image courtesy of Katie Teague

In order to name something, to make it “object,” we must first provide some sense of separation, some distinction between knower, knowing, and known. Words, in this way, capture, constrain, and contain our attention; often usefully so, though in practical terms also cutting us off from truly realizing the full nature of the experience.

In the words of father Thomas Keating, “God’s first language is silence; everything else, just a crude translation.”

I’m reminded of the poem I have lying around, forgive my ambiguity with the formal source:

all which isn't singing is mere talking
and all talking's talking to oneself
(whether that oneself be sought or seeking
master or disciple sheep or wolf)

gush to it as diety or devil
-toss in sobs and reasons threats and smiles
name it cruel fair or blessed evil-
it is you (ne i)nobody else

drive dumb mankind dizzy with haranguing
-you are deafened every mother's son-
all is merely talk which isn't singing
and all talking's to oneself alone

but the very song of(as mountains
feel and lovers)singing is silence

EE Cummings

“Denatured,” to take apart, to remove the nature from or from nature, the holistic wellbeing of self… Singing or song, the sound aspect of a living “reality;” words, in contrast when they slip the bounds of poetic expression, denatured, objective, abstracted, grasping for definition, de-finite, escaping to the infinite, a hubristic assault to the throne of transcendent divinity.

I am sharing these words today as an inquiry, a prayer, towards the holistic wellbeing of our otherwise fragmented and wounded selves living in a fragmented and wounded world. This is the inquiry that seeks in each moment to be born through my heart, my actions, and my song.

I do not come from a place of condemnation. Though I look out upon vast landscapes of violence, pollution, colonization and harms innumerable, my faith holds this path, this place, this note in the cosmic symphony still sacred. Yet I do not blunder blindly, assuming it is all for the good and more of the same is warranted in our search for immortality as we are.

… “The world is too full to talk about…” – Rumi

Moment to moment, and in my better moments in particular, I realize some fullness of my experience, some natural pattern emanates, winks at me in love, and fades back into the fullness of the verse. From this I grow and learn and turn, as it were, into the great beauty of a primordial wisdom, a lovingkindness and boundless compassion.

I see this pattern expressed not just in the blood and bones of this small but majestic self, but just as fully in the turning matter of quantum dance and the vital play of living systems, our human family not least of all.

And so we turn to look at this moment in our world, a moment so filled with violence, division, depression, pollution on every dimension, and strain at scales increasing every day. This dissonant note in the symphony of time calling us back to the beat, the harmony, the deeper channel of this universal song of love.

Here we find the patterns calling out, whispering us back into the fold of weaving, the flaw in the tapestry compelling the beauty even more.

Beauty… Goodness… Truth… What are these facets of being?

“Nature” — a poor description it seems, as definitions of this word inevitably set apart humanity as a class distinct and separate from all else. This is of course a practical absurdity, we cannot demonstrate humanity apart from water, from air, from the living tissues eaten, or the transformations of organic material flowing through the body, let alone the innumerable microbiota flowing through and around us in every moment.

Nature is an absurdity. Knowledge systems which denature themselves, imagining some fantastical scenario of objectivity, an exercise in futility.

Again and again the case is made, technological wonder this, expansive lifetimes that, upliftment from poverty, the latter the most ridiculous – poverty by whose definition? We are so fascinated with our WEIRD and extractive knowledge systems, as if we can take God by the throat and drag out their secrets one by one. But the joke is on us, the transcendent ocean freely offers an infinite bounty of secrets to entertain our grasping minds until we realize…

That holy grail of objective truth, in sum of any part is but a laughing drop in an ocean of majesty and mystery and wonder.

I do not argue that truth is useless, only that it is dangerous when denatured. And what can we mean by this? Truth, objective realization arises when attention is directed. When we craft our lens, polish it just so, and focus the light, something miraculous springs into our life. Truth does not occur denatured, it is holonic, a perspective arising in context that moves with the light of awareness through infinite expanses of relationality.

Truth, in essence is the substance that emerges from morality. We look and we discern, in our collective aspect, where it is right to look and to discern. We decide together what to value by our collective effort, where to combine our efforts to bring forward some peace and call it fact.

This is not to devolve into an idea of infinite regress of relativity arriving at meaninglessness, but rather to speak into realization the full scope of our relationality, we are not separate from some nature, but relationship arises in all things, in all dimensions, at all times. Even in the empty heart of pure awareness, there is a beating, sparkling, vitality of bliss, a tingling fullness beyond the de-finition of grasping mind.

If we are to be objective about something, let us be so about our process of arriving at effect in the world. Contrary to our play, we did not begin at some first quantum thread of knowledge and make our way along a linear accumulation towards realizing the full set of useful fact. Those objects of our precious tome of knowledge, though they can and have taught us much about ourselves, are more like the child’s collection of sticks than artifacts of real wisdom of how best to be human in the world.

Together we decide our industrial efforts (and I admit I’m a little suspicious of this deviation from play), and it is of these efforts that we derive our focus that give rise to facts. Again, facts are in essence the effect of a collective ethic. This is not to say that they do not exist, only that as members of an infinite set, their expressions say less about profound cosmos, and more about those doing the looking.

Art, morals, and science… Where does this leave us?

When I awaken into this world, light fills my awareness, I blink in wonder and awe. If things have gone well, my heart opens, I open into the world, sovereign in my strength and unique expression, I drink in with welcome the majesty of all things. Art is the path I carve with my perspective, my attention as I move this sacred unique awakening through the vast mystery that is the blink of life.

If I take and force another in their perspective, I have colonized that “other” with my own sense of the beautiful way. In contrast, I might listen, discovering the beautiful resonance in some distinct emanation, some emergent note in the symphony with which I simply fall into harmony. This is the distinction between a denatured, colonial morality, and a deeper ethic of natural law expressive the profound sovereignty of every moment.

We tend to imagine, in our “modern” minds that the paths of beauty, morality, or science represent sovereign domains, with little to do with one another. There is a poem by the Nobel laureate that pushes beautifully back on this idea, I’ll link it here. Meanwhile, a blind following of technological objectivity leads us nearly to the brink as we look down our noses at the “primitive” path of walking a beauty way.

Which brings me to, thank God, the point of all of these words.

The current dominant cultural expression of humanity, which we might date back a few thousand years, has followed a certain trajectory rich with profound opportunities for deeper and deeper self-realization into the essence of our unique and sacred being. Many of these perspectives, we have called fact and set apart, denatured, colonized by a certain cultural morality, and declared above that messy other, dangerous and terrible nature.

This paradigm leads us today into acts of incredible violence, polluting every drop, threatening war at the scale of the biosphere, crumbling self-efficacy as a species and radical injustice in our wider community of life on earth. When we destroy the beauty in another, we destroy the beauty in ourselves.

Much will change in the coming years, whether we like it or not, and our path through is uncertain.

Natural law is the expression of a sacred respect paid to all things; a recognition of the economics of evolution, and the debt as well as the sovereign grace in every action. We do not realize these things except by a wide awake humility that walks gently upon the earth, taking care with each and every step to walk and build an offer and receive in a beauty way.