Read an Excerpt

Rise up with Wings like Eagles

Discover Inner Strength and Wisdom to Transform our Relationship with the Earth

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Life beyond Words

In a Nutshell

In this opening section of the book, I want to consider how we perceive the world around us. I am going to suggest that there are vast realms of human experience that we currently do not notice, or tragically undervalue, because of the culture that dominates the Western world. Bringing our whole set of perceptions into balance may give us a much better grasp on reality. One way to open up this subject is to consider those elements of our lives that are 'beyond words'; that is, existing prior to language, because these remain of vital importance to us.

The Workings of the Mind

My thinking in this area has been profoundly shaped by the work of Ian McGilchrist on the structure of the brain. His book The Master and His Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world reveals some extraordinary features of the human brain and its impact on culture. He has no time for the populist and simplistic statements that are so prevalent in our media about left- and right-brain activities, and yet he is convinced that more careful thinking about the structure of the brain can give us important insights into our behavior and our culture. The brain, it seems, should not be considered as a static structure, but in terms of its complex processes and flows, or 'ways of working' that it can adopt. It is also clear that the workings of the mind and the cultures of human society affect one another such that changes in one can reinforce changes in the other. It seems that Western Society is currently working with a very odd and inadequate set of mind processes.

The story goes something like this. The brain is structurally divided into a right and left hemisphere joined at their base by the corpus callosum which mediates relations between the two sides. Most brain processes involve activity in both parts of the brain, but the importance of each hemisphere to a particular process is not necessarily equal and can be revealed by a combination of imaging techniques and studies of the brain in people with particular lesions due to trauma or stroke etc. It seems that the left hemisphere is particularly concerned with representing the world in terms of signs and symbols and their interrelationship. It categorizes and classifies. It provides 'focused attention' on detail and constructs a static view of the world from a sum of its parts.

By contrast the right hemisphere is about experiencing the world. It perceives the world in relationships, connecting disparate ideas and emotions, working with metaphor and holding big-picture views of the world. It seems that all new ideas originate in the right hemisphere and it is the source of creativity.

The evolutionary origins of this distinction between the hemispheres can be seen in the bird feeding on the lawn. Have you noticed how it tips its head so as to turn its right eye to the ground and its left eye to the sky? The right eye connects to the left hemisphere and gives the bird 'focused' attention on the ground so that it can spot its food, while the left eye, connecting to the right hemisphere, gives it a very different 'vigilant' attention all around watching for predators. Vigilant attention is an open process watching everything for what might be unusual, right into the extremities of vision.

Careful analysis of brain processes leads to the following understanding of the roles of the two hemispheres in terms of our perception of the world.

Left hemisphere-dominated perception:
creating a representation of reality
tendency to abstract things from context
using signs and symbols
categorizing people and things
sees science as a mechanism
science creates a manufactured world of unconnected objects

Right hemisphere-dominated perception:
experiencing the world as a totality in context
connectedness
including relationships and emotions
working with big-picture ideas
using metaphor, poetry, creativity, humor
nature presents reality to us as an unmanufactured whole

So it is that we have two quite different ways of perceiving the world available to us as humans. They are both important to a properly functioning society but they are not equally important. It transpires from studies of people with particular brain lesions that the left hemisphere serves the right hemisphere, but does not do well without it. So a person with a stroke in the right hemisphere 'perceives' the world through their left hemisphere only. Their eyesight might be OK, but they may only recognize the right-hand side of the field of view before them. So, clocks appear without a left side. They can even consider their body to be missing its left arm or leg. By contrast when there is a left-hemisphere lesion the right hemisphere perceives the whole field of view, albeit lacking some detail, due to the absence of focused attention.

These very strange observations have important repercussions in terms of the way our minds are working today. It is apparent that our focus on science and technology, and our view of the world as a machine, is a left brain-dominated process and produces a very skewed society. As a result we see the world as a mass of constituent objects that we must categorize and reason from. People are viewed as 'categories' not as unique individuals and society becomes formulaic. After a fascinating review of human culture through the ages and the impact of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, Ian McGilchrist sums up the left brain-dominated society in phrases like:

... loss of big picture, focus on detail, specialized pursuit of knowledge, information gathering, failure to value skills or experience, importance of paper qualifications, bureaucratic domination of workplace, control, quantity replaces quality as goal, people defined by categories, morality/values measured only by utility, talk of liberty but increased surveillance, lack of willpower/self-motivation except for greed and desire to manipulate, people are passive, religion as mere fantasy, power and control through 'factual' worldview, spectators rather than actors, history not important.

I don't know if you recognize our society in that description? I certainly do. It suggests that many of our issues today have to do with a lack of balance in our minds and in our culture. Why do we hear the science about climate change, but not feel its implications? Maybe it is because we have lost the capacity to feel these things. We no longer feel for our relationship with the Earth. Why do we feel so unhappy and unfulfilled? Perhaps it is because we are failing to provide a proper focus on developing a rich set of relationships between people? Why are we so obsessed with our bodies? Perhaps it is because we see them as things or worry about our self-image? Why do we feel an antagonism between science and religion? Maybe the heart of it is that there are two quite different ways through which human beings can pay attention to the world? We need to correct this balance if we are to function well as a society. These themes will echo through the chapters that follow in this book as I try to work out their implications for a reform of our lives and our society.

Life beyond Words

I was standing behind a screen. I slipped a very uncomfortable red blob onto my nose and stepped out. Our task was simple. It was to walk across the makeshift stage to the safety of a screen on the other side, while turning just once toward the eager audience. "It can't be that hard," I thought. I was used to public speaking after all. But here you did not speak. You just looked. And they looked back. And something happened.

I was on a clowning course led by my friend Angela Knowles. As the weekend progressed so we engaged in more and more sustained acts of 'clowning'. I rapidly found that if I tried to be funny, it appeared hopelessly contrived, but sometimes I would do something, almost by mistake, that the audience found interesting. I would play on that theme by doing it again, or doing it differently, and soon the people were in fits of uncontrollable laughter. I was learning to respond to people without using words.

It is easy to imagine that clowning is a light thing, a superficial pursuit to distract us from real life, but Angela did these courses because she was convinced that clowning somehow connected with spirituality. By getting in touch with life beyond words we could reach into forms of self-awareness and expression that are simply not available to us in our modern culture. That evening she told us of a man who visited a psychiatrist in Paris with a deep depression that had dogged him for years. The psychiatrist was at the end of her tether. What could be done to help this man, now that all the conventional therapies had failed? The psychiatrist said, as a last resort, "There is a clown in Paris. He is one of the most famous clowns of all time. Why don't you go and see him perform?" The man looked at the psychiatrist with his deepdoleful eyes, and he said, "I am that clown."

That little story points us to a deep truth about clowning. Sometimes the clown is a grief bearer. We laugh at the clown's misfortune. We are captivated by their sorrow. I once saw this expressed in theater. Pete Postlethwaite was taking the part of Scaramouche Jones, a one-act play written by Justin Butcher that takes us through the life, and the tragedy, of a clown as the events of human history cross his path. It was a tour de force of acting. Pete Postlethwaite held the audience for an hour and a half, just him, talking through the life of this clown. At the end the audience rose to their feet and roared their approval. The play was, of course, expressed in words, but it was so much more than words. Great actors pour themselves into their characters, so that every nuance of their body, their movements, their eyes and their actions express the role they are inhabiting. Actors know about life beyond words. And they know about spirituality.

Laurence Anthony lived in South Africa and came to hear about a rogue herd of elephants that were in danger. They were behaving badly and considered a danger to humans. Some were calling for them to be shot. A terrible deadline was set. If Laurence could not receive them within two weeks, then they would be disposed of. Laurence had no experience of elephants, but he was a remarkable man. He rapidly built a 'boma', a small compound, to hold them within the Khula Khula reserve, which he managed. Then he sent for the elephants. By the time they arrived, they were seriously disturbed. The original matriarch and her young calf had been shot and killed during the capture. The very first night the elephants broke out of the compound by deliberately felling a tree so as to collapse and disable the electrified fence. Local people went out looking for them. They had guns, because now the elephants were considered 'fair game'. After a traumatic chase Laurence Anthony managed to drive them back to the boma with the help of a friend with a helicopter. It was then that he realized that his only chance of saving this herd would be to get deeply in touch with these animals. One more breakout would be the end of them. He camped just outside the fence waiting to see what would happen. Every morning the new matriarch, known as Nana, would approach him at the fence, ears flapping in an aggressive pose as if she was about to break out and attack him. He knew that, if she decided to, she could just walk through the flimsy fence. So he tried to soothe her, speaking to her in gentle tones, using words he knew she did not understand, but hoping that she would pick up on his intention to help her and her herd. Each morning this stand-off at the fence repeated itself. Laurence would back off as she approached, showing deference, but staying relatively close. Finally, there came a morning when Nana approached without the usual aggressive body language. Laurence noticed, and retreated less than usual. Then, very gently, the elephant reached her trunk over the fence. Laurence gingerly put forward his hand. And they touched. It was a moment of obvious trust, evidenced by the trail of pachyderm slime that Laurence found on his shirt afterwards! The elephants were released into the nature reserve shortly afterwards and began an extraordinary relationship with this man, who said, "I did not adopt the elephants, they adopted me." The full story is told in his fascinating book The Elephant Whisperer.

Part of the wonder of elephants is their extraordinary abilities of communication. Our phrase 'a rumble in the jungle' relates to the deep sounds that elephants use to communicate among the herd. A rumble can carry through deep forest for 2.5kms or even further in particular seasons and places. It seems that the rumbles allow them to clock each other's presence, and communicate things about their situation. Elephants also seem to have a special ability to sense when rains have come, even hundreds of miles away. Setting out on a migration in such inhospitable terrain spells certain death unless there is water at the end of the journey. How they know about the rain is a mystery, but human tribes in Africa have learnt to set out when the elephants do. They trust that the elephants know when they should go.

Laurence Anthony's life came to an end unexpectedly when he died of a heart attack at age 61. At the time of his death, there had been no elephants around his home for a year and a half. They were spread across the vast nature reserve. Yet, when he died, they came. How could these great animals know that this human, whom they had adopted, had died? Within 48 hours of his death, two herds visited his home. They stayed for two days, as if in memory of him and, according to his wife, they have returned each year on the anniversary of his death.

Elephants may be showing us something of the amazing world of communication that is known by social animals. Some of these things we understand and some we don't. Animals clearly have abilities we don't have. They may also show us some abilities that we have lost through our word-dominated culture. Think of creatures like the whale, the dolphin, the meerkat, the wolf or even our domestic dog. They have phenomenally complex and successful social systems, all of which are mediated without words. Could it be that we human beings have allowed words to supplant some of our natural abilities in this area? Do we simply fail to appreciate the importance of the touch, the glance and the smile? Have we lost the ability to read the concerns and interests of others from their demeanor? These are important questions and they may be a clue to that other failing of modern Western culture, namely the loss of any meaningful spirituality.

I was recently on holiday in Fowey, a delightful port in Cornwall. We had crossed on the pedestrian ferry from Polruan and sat down with some others by a coffee shop looking out onto the Fowey estuary. There were, perhaps, a dozen other couples doing the same thing. And I wondered just what it was that was going on? People were staring at the view. There were snippets of conversation, but somehow it was more than that. We were sat there experiencing life. We were there in a whole sense, hearing, seeing and feeling together with the whole complex of emotions that moved within us like the waves of the sea that lay before us.

Then it occurred to me that this is most of what we do in life. We are in it, immersed in it, as whole beings and we experience it as a whole. Most of our conversations are not really 'about' much. They are superficial, merely encouraging that great flow of experience within us and between us. This explains why the higher social animals can do so well without language. We may still have all those capabilities, but have grafted on language in such a way that we tend to forget that great undertow of subconscious communication that is going on within us and around us. As I walk around the park with my dog, I make casual remarks to strangers about the weather, or some local happening, while my dog greets another dog with a mutual sniff of the backside. Both are really the same thing. A hallo, how are you, don't be afraid, everything is okay. In one sense they are just a ripple on the surface of our lives, but they are also an enrichment, giving a sense of place and belonging.

Music and Art

It is clear that some animals have a facility for music. Birds, whales, dolphins, elephants and even mice use pitch and rhythm as a means of communication. Elephant vocalizations actually span four octaves even though we cannot always hear them. It seems that music existed prior to language in evolution and grew among some social animals as a means of managing their society. Music has a similar, but less complex, structure than language, as shown by the fact that children have the capacity to sing before they can speak. More importantly for the collective, music conveys emotions. Humans are well aware of the emotional stirrings that music provides, but we may not have recognized how important this is in cultural formation. McGilchrist suggests that music was originally passed on between people in a process of mimicry. It was not taught, as we have come to assume, by applying pupils to a series of written notes on a page, but by people hearing music and trying to repeat it, or respond to it. The joy of the choir, which many still experience today, is the joy of a collective act of mimicry. In traditional societies the musical celebrations, dirges and dances were part of what made the community. McGilchrist says that music "is a vital way of binding people together, helping them to be aware of their shared humanity, shared feelings and experiences, and actively drawing them together." He speculates that music may have taken over as the primary means of bonding between people when the community became too large for physical acts, like grooming, to be affective. An interesting animal analogy for this process is the Siamong Gibbon, where male/female pairing is accompanied not only by mutual grooming but by 'duetting', where the normal territorial call is enhanced responsively as the pair announce the strength of their relationship or, we might say, celebrate their love.

---

Excerpted from Rise up with Wings like Eagles by Chris Sunderland. Copyright © 2015 Chris Sunderland. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---