Existential Dissonance

The times in my life where I find myself in some nowhere place, folded into the darkness of night, gazing into the deep sky. These are the times when my life makes some sort of sense. Surrounded by the infinite, my internal world flows from form to the formless. Thoughts from this place seem like dreams, fleeting and momentary. These dream-like streams create the structure of my internal world, almost everything in my life that seems good or valuable flows from this space. This is where we create the structures of our personal lives, where meaning emerges as we mold chaos and information into reality. This is where our fear of the unknown melds with our search for stability. As our thoughts forge meaning within chaos, the unconscious and our consciousness imprints itself onto the world. This is the origin of the relationship between human beings and the universe…

As a product of the post-modern age. The thoughts that drift through my mind from the external world are the thoughts of philosophers, dreamers, and thinkers long past. Their ideas lingering as remnants in the corners of our collective mind. Manifesting themselves as identities, ideology, and religion. These thoughts are stagnations, reflections in the river of consciousness. They Arrange themselves on the shelves of libraries, present themselves in conversation at the local tavern, and collect randomly anytime we interact with one another. A mind frame of small ‘t’ truths we haphazardly happen to agree upon. These stagnations are stamped on every aspect of our collective civilization…

When I think of civilization, I envision the tip of human potential and desire penetrating the unknown, the creative edge where art, literature, and philosophy emerge. Splashing itself across walls, rippling through society, coloring minds. Where cultures collide, intermingling and influencing thoughts and dreams. Where conversations bubble from the spring of curiosity and possibility… The humanity I search for rises from these pools as we retell these ancient poems. Breathing new life into old stories as they’re recited, retold, and rewritten by us, for future generations. I also recognize the incompleteness inherent in this vision as I walk past the desolation of lives lying in gutters, consumed by emotional instability, or standing on the side of some distant war-torn road screaming. I’m saddened for these lives who have been passed by… lives lost in the vacuum of ideology, progress, and pride. For me Civilization appears as a house of cards built of tangled beliefs, spiraling upward as it separates us from our roots and each other.

This past summer I traveled to an Arizona reservation to support my clan brothers’ daughters coming of age ceremony. With the modern world in my rear-view mirror and the road unfolding before me, I passed through the desert South-West with its rusted-out cars and distant trains fading into a cloudless horizon. It was a journey through desolation, ending in a lush forest. The ceremonial grounds were down a dirt road beyond the power lines nestled in a bend of the river.  When I arrived, I was amazed, 100’s of people showed up to support these young girls in their transition to womanhood. I had no idea what to expect when I showed up, for me it was a was a way of supporting my family. The ceremonial songs and dances went for four days, starting at sunrise and continued through the day until sunset. The songs were sung in Apache and told the story of Changing Woman.

I had family staying 30 or so miles away from the campground, I would pick them up in the morning and drive them back in the evening. The road that connected us was a winding road through the forest, along the way there were meadows strewn with sunflowers and wild horses. On these drives, with the windows down, I noticed I could hear the ceremonial songs in the breeze. Then when I sat by the sweat lodges down by the river, I could hear the singers in the voice of the river… I could almost see the singers with their drums as if they were wading through the winds and water.

I was talking to a friend, and we were asking questions amongst ourselves about the ceremony. An Apache elder overheard our conversation, over the four days while we were there, she sat with us and answered every question we had. I told her I was having this strange experience, that I was hearing their songs in the wind and water. She looked at me, smiled and said…

“That’s because our language is made of the sounds of nature.”.

When she said that I thought of a story my cousin told me about our grandfather. He said they were in the marshes of the Minto flats hunting, through the brush on the other side of a pond they spotted some cranes in standing water. Our grandfather looked up and sang a song in Athabascan, the cranes glanced over and danced to his song. When he quit singing the cranes quit dancing looked back toward them and flew off. My grandfather turned to my cousin and said “I just wanted you to see that” ... My cousin said he saw him sing in this way to the cranes as well as long tailed ducks. I never knew my grandfather, from the stories I’ve heard he was one of the last of the Indians to live in the old ways, he had lived his life in the ways my family had lived for hundreds if not thousands of years. 

I love these stories and think what it would have been like to live in that way, where human beings interacted with the natural world instead of exploiting it, when our language had the ability to interact with the other beings of this world. I wonder what else humanity lost as we left the age of the spirit and entered the age of the mind. As civilization lifts us up, what knowledge have we forgotten that tethered our existence to the natural world and beyond? I wonder what else we continue to lose as our modern mind fills up with fears and we drown in anxiety as we confront the endless seas of meaningless information. The further civilization evolves it seems the more disconnected we have become.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state where one holds conflicting beliefs which leads to inconsistent behavior and confusion. To me I think we suffer from a similar state, a state of existential dissonance. Where through the ages we lost the meaning of our existence and with that we lost our ability to be human beings in the natural world. Where everything that created meaning and direction from our old ways dried up, leaving embers burned from the heat radiating from the fire of our minds.