A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the morning and thought dammit, stop thinking vaguely about writing a book, start writing it now and see what happens. So I did. I had run 2 long zoom courses on the Medicine Wheel last year, and found I had quite a lot to say once I started ad libbing. So 2 weeks ago I started ad libbing on paper, so to speak, and 25000 words later I'm still going strong. This is really wonderful😎😊 And about time too! Here is a short excerpt:
This Wheel, this Mandala, is so simple, and yet it contains the whole universe, with you at its centre. And it does not describe the universe in the abstract concepts that we are used to in the West – think atoms and dark matter, for example, neither of which anyone has directly seen, but which are fundamental to the modern understanding of the universe. No, think Sun and Rain and Soil and Wind: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. The Wheel brings us back to an understanding of the universe that is immediate to our experience.
This is radical, because for the last 1000 years knowledge of things-as-they-are has been in the hands of specialists, first the priests and then the scientists. And we have become used to there being just one story, that becomes ‘the truth’. This makes our minds disempowered and rigid, and it is one way that these vast collectives that we are all part of nowadays keep the illusion that everything is under control. It produces a certain kind of psychological stability for many people.
But in reality, no-one is in control, and we need to re-learn to hold in our minds contradictory stories about how the universe is “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” as the poet Keats put it, using the term ‘negative capability’ to describe this state of mind.
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