A Story About a Tree

I am going to tell you a story. It is many stories together. It might be all stories.

People have forgotten how to know stories. Yes, they know how to listen to stories, how to watch them on screens. They even know how to make stories. But maybe we’ve forgotten how to know stories.

To be fair, much of what I am about to tell you is probably unknowable, and most of the rest of it probably cannot be told. And that’s ok. Open to the story and let it in—whatever you can and however much you can. Let it work on you. Let it live in you. Then see what happens. See if you like my story.

I’m going to lie to you when I tell you this story. This is the only way. We’re so very lost that this is the only way through to truth. This is the only way that some part of us can get where we once were, to where we started—to the root.

So, once upon a time, there was indeed a time, not so long ago—when very few people could read. And the people who could read did not read words like you are reading now; most of the reading was functional and accounting.

Modern scientists have studied non-literate, pre-modern people who still exist in pockets around the world. Alexander Luria (considered the father of neuropsychology), worked with groups of people like this in the 1930’s; he famously found that they were almost completely unable to reason in ways that are very natural to us.

For instance, they could not handle simple questions like this: “In the far north, where there is a lot of snow, the bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far north. What color are the bears there?” The elders in that society literally could not answer that question. They had not been to Novaya Zemlya and had not seen the bears there. So, they did not know what color the bears were.

The younger people with modern educations easily answered the question; the elders could not.

We modern thinkers are also deeply committed to political correctness and to the idea that all humans are equal, in every way, but this is a harsh reality: these elders, who were very wise in some ways, would be cognitively impaired in our modern society. They could not function in it without decades of reeducation.

What I have told you so far is not the lie.

It's not too hard to imagine that most people in the ancient world were more like the people Luria studied than like us. They probably would have struggled to grasp an elementary mathematical proof, or an algorithm (set of rules) for moving a marker through a maze. However, before we feel too sorry for them, let’s think a bit about what they did have.

They had a vivid connection to sound. The sound of words embodied meaning and the rhythm of words nourished memory. There were probably thinner barriers between movement of the body, emotion, and words. Truth danced. There was perhaps an immediate connection to power behind ideas. Language had not yet been abstracted to symbols. You could not skim them as you might be tempted to skim my words. When someone spoke words to you, you were enthralled in the grip of those words.

Their attention and focus ran deep. They were not clicking to the next Tik Tok video. If they did not wait, in the place, for the animal to walk by, and if they were not ready to kill the animal, they did not eat. If they did not eat, they did not live.

They could sit, motionless and aware, for hours. We struggle to make it three minutes with our meditation apps and feel “so blessed” after a yoga class where the constant chatter in our minds might take a breath.

Those people had a deep and natural connection to cycles. You didn’t live if you didn’t understand the rhythms of nature. Chances are, much of this wisdom (for that’s what it was) did not have to be taught. Live with awareness, in connection with other humans living with awareness, and you begin to understand.

Let’s add some fantasy to our story. Of course, we modern people understand that the material world is the only reality there is—it’s all atoms and energy and stochastics. To imagine consciousness and purpose beyond that material world is pre-rational. (We have such clever words for when we really wish to say “stupid”, don’t we?) There certainly are no spirits, or intelligences that don’t walk around in a meat suit. The dead have nothing to say to us, and there absolutely are no gods.

But if we were pretending there were, don’t you imagine these ignorant, pre-modern people might have lived in vivid, tangible awareness of and in connection to them? Communion with them, even? Couldn’t you imagine that contact with this other layer of reality was as mundane for them as turning on a light switch is for you? When we say this was their reality, that’s not a trick we are playing with language.

Can’t you see that those people would have lived in unbroken, throbbing contact with the sacred?

Then something changed, a few thousand years ago. In several places, an idea got some momentum: the world of things you can drop on your foot is bad. God, if he or she exists, is wholly separate from that world of matter—a darkly splendid world; a faithless depth, delighting in unintelligible images; a precipitous, winding, black ever-rolling Abyss.

It probably began as a good idea. Plato said it. The Gnostics said it again. Mystical Judaism codified it, and the idea behind those ideas rang through orthodox Christianity, and became the cradle for Islamic thought. That’s where the idea started, but they were coming for God in the end, too. It became woven into the very fabric of western society and culture.

So, it was easy, as history marched on, for the heretics to make their victory complete. A little nudge from a new technology here and there, a war or a dozen won or lost, and much became unquestionable.

The printing press made the written word omnipresent and cheap. The Enlightenment burned, and the Renaissance blazed. Literacy became commonplace. Abstraction and logic became the tools of Everyman.

Now, knowledge fills libraries, but knowledge became decontextualized—separated from experience. Yes, there is much good here because what we can know and imagine becomes much bigger, but there’s a cost: Living narrative dies. Knowledge becomes cut off from knowing.

As the army of progress goose-stepped into the promised bright future, the world became a thing to manipulate. At some point we decided that a culture is best measured by its triumph over that material world, which is simply dead matter, after all.

Scientists took the map of human experience and put good and orderly lines on that map. It was just and right to do so. Reason conquers superstition and knowledge beats ignorance. Thank goodness for this, otherwise, as Carl Sagan so poetically wrote, “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

And good thing our silly fantasy story about gods and spirits was fantasy, after all. Because couldn’t you imagine that people, as they changed—as they grew into their birthright as Masters of the Universe—that they might have first lost awareness of that inner world? Can’t you imagine that memory became dim and then, the holy flame sputtered and guttered? And, finally, one generation completely forgot? With so much new to remember, can you imagine they forgot that there was ever anything to forget?

Let’s play another game with another story.

We could imagine that this is the final expulsion from the Garden of Eden—that humankind finds itself isolated from the Ground of Being, cut off from the Source, and cast so far out of the Garden that it could never find its way back. Yes, the Angel guards the way with his flashing sword, but he doesn’t have much to do. He’s going to be a very bored angel, standing his vigil there, until the heat death of the Universe, at the border of a place that no human even thinks is real anymore.

Couldn’t you imagine, though, if this were not just a made up story, that the real guardian is that flashing sword itself, that reason and logic themselves have effectively barred the way?

Let me try this another way.

Could you imagine that the very gifts logic has given us: thinking in systems, abstractions, hypotheticals, and propositions, changed us in very real ways? Maybe, rather than living embedded in a participatory reality, we are now comfortable with our representations of the things? That we are so far lost we don’t even know what we long for?

Could you imagine that far from mistaking the map from the territory, we now affirm the primacy of the map with every gasp? If you want philosophers’ words, fine: we’ve rebuilt our ontology—and we don’t understand how ontology shapes experience. We might not understand what we have done or what has been done to us. Do you want to scream with guttural rage that this could be the very thing that closed the channel to real experience?

It's not a fall into ignorance. It’s a fall from knowing.

Of course, it’s good that this is only a story. Because, otherwise, we could imagine our entire culture and history as a grand tree. And how beautiful she is! At the top, there is tender new growth, full of promise—that hopeful color of the spring green, with new leaves questing toward the sun. And what this tree has endured—storms, floods, fire, so much more—but she is strong. Her roots run deep and no wind could possibly topple her.

But couldn’t you also imagine that, maybe, at some point, she was cut off completely from those roots? That maybe the cut was made where you couldn’t see it? Under the soil line perhaps. The sword, of logic and reason—that flashing sword that carries the consequence of True Justice far beyond vengeance or morality—the blunt-razor-sharp sword of cause and effect—completely and cleanly cut the tree off from her deep roots of experience?

And she is still a beautiful tree. Stand back and look—the eye reports that she grows strong and true. Even bears fruit. And the fruit is sweet.

You cannot know the dead tree by its fruit.

But do you detect maybe something frantic in that stretch toward the heavens? Some last gasp of desperation? Maybe we know that we are cut off from the earth. Maybe our spiritual hunger is not some echo of an ignorant, superstitious, pre-logical mind.

Maybe our depression is not a symptom and our emptiness is not something to be medicated.

Maybe it’s a message.

Good thing it’s just a story. And all is well.