Roaming the Mind is the online home for the writing and work of Robert Tindall.
Sacred Soil: Biochar and the Regeneration of the Earth details the remarkable potential of terra preta, the recently rediscovered sacred soil of the pre-Columbian peoples of the Amazon rainforest, to help reverse the catastrophic damage that has been visited upon our Earth. The authors, Robert Tindall, Frederique Apffel-Marglin, and David Shearer, lay out a fascinating description of how utilizing the biochar embedded in this highly fertile, living soil offers a way to free ourselves from dependency on petrochemicals, restore the health of our soils, and remove carbon from our overheating atmosphere by fixing it back where it belongs--in the earth. The book also shows that the rediscovery of terra preta is an opportunity to move beyond the West's tradition of plunder and genocide of the native civilizations of the Americas by embracing the deeper mystery of indigenous methods of inquiry and to participate in an animate cosmos that gave rise to such a powerful technology as terra preta in the first place.
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The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience is an exploration of the indigenous roots of Western literature, of the native mind lying in plain sight not only in the ancient epics of Homer, but also in the fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As such, the Odyssey as well as The Lord of the Rings can be seen as awakening and healing songs to return our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.
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The Jaguar that Roams the Mind is a journey into the vanishing world of Amazonian shamanism. Robert Tindall travels through the churches of ayahuasca, with the Kaxinawa Indians in Brazil; to a Peruvian center for the treatment of addiction, Takiwasi; and reveals his studies with an Ashaninca shaman in the rainforest jungle. Moving beyond the scientific approach of reducing medicinal plants to their chemical constituents, Tindall illustrates the shamans' intimate relationships with plant spirits. He explores the three pillars of Amazonian shamanism: purging (drawing disease out of the body), psychoactive plants (including the use of ayahuasca), and diet (communing with teacher plants).
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You mentioned in your interview that numbers were not real but a metaphysical construct got my attention, can you direct me or expand on this as I am having a problem on grasping this concept.
Thank you.
Jon
Hi Jon, numbers are an invention of the rational mind, and as such are metaphysical entities, just as any other archetypal form is. Empirically, you simply cannot locate one, scour the natural world as you will. You simply will not find a number three nesting in a tree, swimming in a pond, wiggling beneath a microscope, or twinkling in some deep recess of the sky. In this sense, numbers can be seen as a key component of a metaphysical belief system, one which we call “science”.
Naturally, this leads us to the next question — Are numbers real, then? 😉
The fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13 …) and golden ratio (1.618..) are two ways of expressing the same numerical relationship and are found throughout nature. The spiral of a snail’s shell is measureable with the golden ratio. Thus I would suggest that numbers underlie nature, which expresses the information contained within them.
For more, you may wish to visit http://www.pateo.nl
Also: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave expresses our mutliple dimensions well.
I agree there is order in the cosmos, and a language we’ve found to detect and express this order is mathematics. Yet, from a purely empirical perspective, numbers do not exist. This debate over the reality of the unseen, of course, has been going on for centuries. Thus, Diogenes could state about Plato’s archetypes, “I can see Plato’s cups and bowls, but I can’t see his cupness and plateness.” The issue arose again in the fierce debates between the Rationalists and Nominalists in the Middle Ages, out of which came Occam’s Razor and the founding of the modern scientific method.
My point is numbers, like archetypes, are metaphysical entities. You cannot find one in nature. Of course, that doesn’t invalidate your statement, “numbers underlie nature, which expresses the information contained within them.” The truth value of that statement is beyond my capacity to reckon!
I do question the implicit assumption in this statement that numbers are somehow primary, however, and that the manifest world is simply an expression of their encoded information. That seems to me to be unjustifiably reductionist.
The fact is, I have no trouble with there being multiple dimensions in the cosmos, seen and unseen. In fact, I am a vigorous defender of animistic perception. My critique is we’ve privileged numbers to a degree that has invalidated other dimensions of the cosmos as holdovers of a more primitive apprehension.
We ourselves are as “superstitious” about the existence of our invisible numbers as other cultures are towards the inhabitants of their own sacred dimensions.
Thanks for elaborating. Why would we not open our minds and hearts to creational archetypes other than numbers 😉 “Do numbers exist” is not a black and white question, and your elaboration illustrates that fact well.
Thanks for explaining tribal connectedness as a deeply spiritual contrast to the modern matrix. Tribes have been stereotyped as primitive. Far from primitive, we need to see ourselves as healing a schism between us and their wisdom.