Subject: [permaculture] The Human Volition's Condition
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:07:58 -0500
Sharon Wegsheider, et. al., took a look at the human organism and found
the Whole Person comprised of six recognizable "human potentials:" the
social, the emotional, the spiritual, the physical, the mental, and the
volitional potentials. She talks about these potentials in her book,
/Second Chance/. The volitional potential is the human choicemaker,
blending input from all the other potentials into choices for the entire
organism.
Core shamanism, which I've studied and practiced since 1994, names the
volitional potential by a rather quaint term - the soul. It's the part
of humans that chooses relations and how to apprehend and nurture those
relations and the subject of a book on its own weight. European shamans
were pretty much eliminated in the Inquisition. If you can imagine
eight centuries of public executions of primarily women by
brown-cassocked Franciscan monks, that was the Inquisition. Western
culture has not yet begun to address healing this wound to western
culture's collective and individual volition. I pretty much feel like I
dreamed the Inquisition and no one else did, yet I am almost constantly
confronted with the wounded volition in my life, public and private.
Part of it is that my practice attracts this to me, I suppose, but it's
not just in my practice. It's in people who vote for people who oppress
them, and who vote for measures that oppress others. Wounded volitions
seem to jump out at me from every corner of my wounded society.
Wounded people wound the land; in order, I suppose, to attain congruency
with the interior landscape. We are the land. The only division is by
means of a human abstraction which contradicts natural reality, the
reality beneath all others. Nature is autonomous, independent of human
abstraction and expectation. Practicing Permaculture, it seems to me,
means healing the human volitional potential in order to heal the land,
and/or in concert with healing the land. Working the land does heal us,
as I observed in my work in community gardens in Houston, but then we
still need developmental work on our volition. This is such a slippery
slope. People defend their wounded volition as if it were a treasure
that will ultimately save them. The denial systems built around this
wound leave me in awe. Humans are such magnificent creatures! I
understand the desire, the need, to maintain integrity. Denial's
amorphous stories accomplish this when nothing else is available.
The volitional is the political. I met virtually no one in my years of
working with the Greens in the US who did not carry a huge wound on
their volition. Teaching newcomers to work within consensus process
entailed, in many instances, addressing this wound so that they got
comfortable with the idea of being the primary choicemaker in their own
lives and so we could get on with the business of choosing group
policy. Some of it, too, involved acquainting the mental potential with
the tasks of the process.
As I recall, George H.W. Bush, when head of the CIA, destabilized the
government of Australia, a friendly democracy, when it appeared that
public opinion was leading Australia to withdraw from Vietnam.
Australia, once the most egalitarian country on Earth, got a
conservative government out of this CIA intervention which remains in
power, I think, and the US wags Australia into every war our monster boy
tycoons start. This CIA action wounded the volitions of every
politically conscious Australian at the time, it seems to me. This
happened in the Nixon administration, long ago. But many of us, US and
Australian, still carry the wounds of the Inquisition on our volitions.
This newer wound complicates matters. I feel guilty of this
manifestation of dominion by my government without honor, I personally
apologize to the people of Australia, and I am willing to make what
amends I can.
So this consideration of the wounded volition plays into the practice of
Permaculture, to me. Working the land's creatures is working the
land. The soul is that white light in each of us that is One which
Wilco sings about in a song I hear on the radio in my car driving around
Austin. As a shamanic practitioner (my tradition taught that it's an
error of ego to call myself a shaman, though others do) with a
Permaculture design certificate, I work the land's creatures, its
humans. Unrealistically, I suppose, I expect wounded volitions to
accept the public part of my work. This was even moreso earlier on. We
teach what we most need to learn, I think, and that's certainly been
true for me.
If you don't understand me, you're not alone. Living in the question, I
often don't understand myself to any significant degree. But if you
choose to seek to silence me, there's a problem. I also hold a MFA in
Writing and Consciousness from New College of California in San
Francisco and know the power of words used as weapons, with or without
precision. Truth is as strong, and as ambiguous and undefinable as
love. But love is what heals us, and what heals the land. I choose
love and forgiveness.
Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX
[permaculture] The Human Volition's Condition,
Tommy Tolson, 06/13/2007