The world is very noisy, anywhere. If we close our eyes, we can learn to select which sounds we want to let in. Even in the mountains and forests, we cannot escape from the noise.
The airplanes and helicopters… And our minds have also become very noisy. In this region, the Atlantic rainforest, lives an ancient Indigenous people, the Guarani. Their culture believes that we can escape that noise by taking refuge in a woodland, a dense forest, in the deepest of our being.
They say, "Go, enter the forest, "go far, go deeper, very, very, very far. "Then, you will find a dark forest. "It is covered in mist.
Stay in there, and all around will silence. " It is a kind of meditation, available to all, no initiation is required. I long for this place, and go there, for a real exchange that we can call learning, apprehending the world around us, the world out there.
To set on our journey, the environment can aid us, even inside this bamboo grove. It's a great privilege, even though we are in Rio de Janeiro. It doesn't seem like it, because this is a very noisy metropolis.
And the Botanic Garden woods, this multitude of trees, living beings that are here, they absorb all this violence, and transform it, allowing us to rest here inside this little forest, in our own dark forest. HAMMOCK TALKS SHIVA AND THE HUMMINGBIRD AILTON KRENAK AND SATISH KUMAR At the bamboo grove of the Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden Musical participation by Amora Pereira Only a few birds reach here. Many Indigenous cultures around the world have found peace and meditation in nature.
For example, the Indian Sadhus and meditators go into the Himalayas and sit by the fall and the spring of the Ganges, and be blessed by the eternal peace and harmony of nature and humans, where humans and nature are no longer separate. They are totally united, humans are as much nature as nature there. But in our metropolis and our industrial civilization, we have separated humans from nature.
And we see nature out there, and humans separate, here. And then we start to think that we humans are above nature, we are not nature, we are separate from nature and we are above nature. So to find that golden silence that you talked about, we have to feel that we are one with nature, and we are nature, and we are not separate from nature.
People, all around the world, long for the reconnection with what they call nature. At the same time, they consume images of nature produced by the food industry, the cosmetics industry, by all industries, which have taken hold of an idea of nature that can be manipulated, appropriated, and commercialized. So, in reality, people are being fooled with an idea of nature that is an illusion.
This nature, sold by the pharmaceutics, cosmetics, care industries, this nature is a lie. This nature does not exist. We both know already that this notion of nature is manufactured by us, humans.
So much so that, in many Indigenous languages there isn't the word "nature". In my mother tongue of the Krenak people, there isn't a word for nature, it would be something like saying "myself". And all my relatives, the Yanomami, Xavante, Guarani people, they also don't have a word for nature.
Hundreds of native, Indigenous, ancient languages, don't have a word for "nature". I have heard that the word "nature" is born with modernity. But even when there is a word for nature, people have forgotten.
Even the Latin word for nature, people have forgotten the true meaning of the word. Because the word "nature" comes from "natal", and "natal" means birth. Prenatal, post-natal, pre-birth, post-birth.
So, nature simply in Latin means being born. So, whatever is born is nature; humans are born, humans are nature. Trees are born, trees are nature; animals are born, animals are nature.
But now we think humans are not nature, only trees and animals and birds and rivers are nature. That is the problem in our modern thinking. So even if you take the meaning of the word "nature", in English, Latin, and European languages, if we see the true meaning, then all living beings are equal, because we are all born.
There is no hierarchy between humans and nature, humans and animals, humans and forests, and so on, there is no hierarchy. We are all at the same level, we are all born, we are all equal. But our industrial system, and urban-city mind, our new education, we have created a new meaning, that nature is only a resource for the economy, for making money, for businesses, for industry, for profit.
There is no other value for nature than its economic value. That is where we have fallen down in such a situation as we have today. There is a short story about a hummingbird, who, watching the chaos and knowing how big a wildfire was, fetches a small drop of water from the ocean and tries to put the fire out.
I am moved, propelled, imagining that we are, somehow, repeating the gesture of the hummingbird, understanding that whatever is born is natural, but that nature itself does not exist. And we go, with our little drop in the ocean. We have no purpose, because we know that the vast ocean is already very strong and established, and all we can do is the work of the hummingbird.
With that in mind, we can cultivate this small place, where we can retreat to and meditate. But we have got the word "nature", therefore I would like to go to the true meaning of nature. And nature is nothing other than life itself.
Nature is life. Nature is birth and, therefore, life. Therefore we need to go back to the true meaning of the word nature, even in English.
Of course, in our Indigenous cultures, and Indigenous languages, there is no separation between humans and nature, but in our European languages, we have the word. But even if we go to the etymological meaning of the word, it is a good meaning: nature means life. I have been hearing from friends and colleagues this notion of the principle of life, cosmic life, a life that is in all its forms and organisms, in everything we can imagine.
Emanuele Coccia, who has been to Rio de Janeiro and comes to Brazil regularly, is a professor in Paris, France. He promotes the understanding that life passes from one structure to another, one organism to another, always being life. He gives an example that makes it easy for people to understand his idea of life in all bodies, he uses the example of the caterpillar.
The caterpillar creates a cocoon and comes out as a butterfly, and it is the same life that was in that cocoon, moving through the caterpillar and becoming a butterfly, these different bodies have no awareness of what they were before, but they live in the now. And it is life that makes this… He cites an example: a caterpillar is a leaf-eating machine, and it fills itself with leaves. Then, it changes its cycle and rests for a while, coming out as life in another body, the butterfly, that old body doesn't remember the experience of the new life.
This notion of life living through this bamboo, through the soil, life expressing itself on this bench, life in the bird, also in the airplane, the helicopter, life in everything. It is so wonderful that there is nothing left that is not life and that is not natural. So all that is natural is alive, and this amazing transmutation is what moves the world.
But the problem is not so much with the language, for language is limited, language is only a vehicle to communicate what you really want to communicate. Therefore, the problem is not in the language, problem is in our industrial civilization. Industrial civilization turns not only the world out there, the trees, the animals, the soil, the land into an economic resource, it also turns humans into an economic resource.
Also humans have become Human Resources, so every business, every government, every industry, has an HR department, to show that humans are only a resource for making a profit, for running the organization and making money, for running the industrial system. And therefore our whole educational system has been turned, and all our children are being educated to fit the industrial system, In the economic system, and there is no other human value, there is no other value in nature. So the problem is not with the language, problem is the industrial civilization.
It seems that the 21st century is twisting the meaning of language. We are experiencing something very new, globally, in which a message sent somewhere can cause a global calamity. This new medium, this new tool for communication, changes the entire previous experience of language, because now it can be sent from a robot, from a chat, a GPT, something like that, which creates a rift between the one spreading the word, sending a language signal, and all of us, the receivers of the message.
All the experimenting with language in the 20th century, with McLuhan and other researchers, all are outdated, and many of our humanists as well, because they conceived language as a trick. Global corporations know this. Now, a guy can own all the means that dominate the sort of language they call intelligence, artificial intelligence, media, the non-stop reproduction of messages that are languages dominated by an ideology and a purpose.
We can go beyond the discussion of the idea of capitalism. Yes, we can go beyond capitalism, but it is also a centralization. You rightly mentioned it is a centralization of communication, centralization of education, centralization of the economy, creating a monoculture, a uniformity of everything, and destroying the diversity, destroying the biodiversity, the cultural diversity, and the linguistic diversity.
So this industrial urban culture is causing these problems, and, therefore, we need to find a more decentralized, more localized, more land-based, new culture. Then we can maybe move forward. The industrial system is geared towards mass production, mass consumption, mass distribution, uniform, centralized system.
So the problem is in the system, language is only a vehicle to communicate. Unless we change the system of industrial production and mass consumption, and uniformity and centralized… Whatever language you use, the system will continue. So, we have to change the system, rather than adjusting the words.
We've got urban cities, all the education as we talked about before, our education is being geared toward this industrial system, whatever you do they are all leading towards this industrial mass production. I mentioned the image of the hummingbird, fetching water from this burning ocean, and I go back to that image to acknowledge that we cannot undo the harm of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries to the realms of language, education and interpersonal relationships. Those humans that have not yet detached from the ground, that living part of our humankind, it can produce other meanings and ways of life, create a revitalizing effect in a sick organism.
But it would be a never-ending adventure to think we can enter that necrotic organism and revitalize it towards life on the planet, on Earth, because we live in very warmongering times. We all need to become hummingbirds, and act like hummingbirds. And that means leaving this industrialized, urbanized, economic system and creating something back into the land, back into the soil, and back into our Mother Earth.
Unless we become hummingbirds and start to put a drop of good water in this burning industrial system, we cannot do anything. So, we have to become hummingbirds. Brazil is a country with several third-world characteristics.
It means that it still holds many layers of what we could consider a more organic way. But not all countries in the world have that possibility of returning to the land. And some are in such an advanced state of necrosis that if they have to go back to the land, they will probably go back to someone else's land.
We are watching simultaneous wars in different continents to occupy other peoples' lands: Israel taking Palestinian land, Russia taking Ukraine's land. We have hundreds of armed conflicts on the planet dispossessing land from others. I, myself, since an early age, have fought for this country so that Indigenous people have their territories respected and keep their rightful place on the earth.
This is my life. But you know, all the people in Brazil now are people of Brazil. And everyone living here has to find a livelihood in this land, because Brazil is a very big country, and I think all the people who are here can be accommodated and find a livelihood for them if they live in a sustainable way.
Of course, Indigenous wisdom, Indigenous culture and Indigenous communities, we must revere, and we must respect, and we must make sure we learn from Indigenous cultures. We learn from Indigenous wisdom, they are our ancestors, and without their wisdom, we are lost. At the moment, we face problems in the world because we have lost Indigenous culture, Indigenous wisdom, and we think Indigenous people are backward, uneducated, undeveloped and we think they must be civilized.
That's the mistake we are making. So, if we can return to respect our Indigenous cultures, then we can learn from them how to live in harmony with nature. Indigenous peoples are our teachers.
At the moment, people go to take the land, they don't take land for livelihood, they take land for roads, for airports, for shopping malls, for cities. They take land for industrial purposes, they don't take land to live a good, harmonious life on the land. So Indigenous cultures and Indigenous communities can teach us how to live in harmony with the land, with nature and with the soil, and with the animals.
So it's not the people who are the problem, it's not the language that's the problem, the problem is industrial civilization, again I come back to that. I dedicated time to understand the economies that have managed to dominate the realities of people around the world, including China, and I don't really see another economy on the planet that is not inside what we call "the system". We call it "system" precisely because it is systemic, it is everywhere.
And this overarching system is so absolute that if we are inside it, shouting that we want to replace it, we would be like a small cricket, a small insect, shouting under this bamboo dome that we will take it all down. I have, still, the disposition to keep learning, apprehending this planetary phenomenon and observing the striking nature of humans that lead me to believe that <i>Homo sapiens</i> are serial killers and I don't want to save them. The system is self-destructive.
This is not going to last forever. Thank you. - You are my soul brother.
- Wonderful.
