THE SENSITIVE CHAOS: World of the Great Spirit
Symbol: Meandering Spiral
Civilization:
- • Nomadic hunting-gathering band as the largest cohesive social unit
- Palaeolithic era, Stone Age technology (no agrictilture, animal domestication,
metallurgy, pottery, or textiles)
- Egalitarian social structures with an ethic of sharing and cooperation,
mechanisms for limiting personal wealth, and little or no occupational specialization
- No written language or developed knowledge of mathematics
- Rich oral traditions, artas an expression of sacred rituals and beliefs
(after about 30,000 B.C.)
- Examples: all hominids and homo sapiens throughout evolution up to the
invention of agriculture; contemporary examples indude the Kung San (Bushinen) and Mbuti
Pygmies of Africa, the Tasaday of the Philippines, the Australian Aborigines, Eskimos,
and most tribal peoples living in the Arnazon forest, to the degree that they are untouched
by "civilization"
Psyche:
- • Cosmos as a unity within the Great Spirit, in which all states of being
are mutable
- Uroboric oneness (same as Piaget's "egocentrism," Cassirer's "sympathetic
identification," and Levy Bruhi's "participation mystique"), suppression of ego so as not
to separate Self from others and from surroundings
- The state of mind of the child in the womb and in infancy where there
is no individual ego or psychological separation from the mother
- Anirnism, shamanism, sympathetic magic, veneration of nature spirits
and totems; perceiving the world as a Sensitive Chaos animated by spirits, lines and nodes
of energy, syncitronistic linkages, and magical events transcending our laws of space and tirne;
oneness with nature, identification with animals and other life forms
- Non-linear tirne, synchronicity, feeling of eternity or timelessness
- Mythic images and rites concerning the Great Spirit, spirit places, totems
and taboos, mimicry of animals, sympathetic magic, the making of ritual paraphenalia,
transmuting to another life form (e.g., shamanically becoming a bird or animal), attaining
psychoerotic perception
- Emphasis on psychoerotic activities such as music, dance, transformative
arts and rituals, holistic thinking, altered states of consciousness, clairvoyance, ecstatic
trance states, dreams, natural healing; greatest psychoerotic orientation of all the archetypes
- Concern with one's responsibility for maintaining the harmony of the
living
- Psychological stagnation in the Sensitive Chaos can produce a desire
to regress to uroboric unconsciousness in the womb
- Psychological liberation in the Sensitive Chaos can lead to erlightenment
through transcending ego and healing the primal split between self and other.
Space:
- • Space as an immediate flowing topological continuum with little geometric
order
- The landscape as an alive organism with lines and nodes of energy depending
on human care for vitality (a belief that often gives rise to elaborate tribal myths
and ceremonial cydes, as in the Australian Aborigines' myths and rites concerning the Dreamfime),
a network of spirit places in nature as the most important spatial "structure"
and view of the landscape itself as sacred
- Impermanent huts and shelters made of locally available natural materials
(mud, thatch, vines, hides, ice), which readily disintegrate back into the earth
- Undifferentiated architecture (no distinctly different building types
for different institutions and activities such as residence, burial, government, commerce, manufacture,
and worship)
- Dwellings as spiritual "doubles" of their inhabitants, not bought and
sold as commodities, and frequently serving as burial places which are burned or abandoned
when the inhabitant dies
- Little sense of private property (beyond personal tools and huts); territorial
rangeAand defined and maintained through myths and rituals rather than laws and walls
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content © Mimi Lobell originally appeared in ReVision, A Journal of Consciousness and Change, vol.6 no.2, Fall 1983
page uploaded 5 August 1999, last modified 18 June 2004