Telegram from the Solomon Islands

I’M STILL ALIVE stop
LIFE AT 9 RICHTER A DAY stop
NOTHING REMAINS STANDING HERE stop
EVERYTHING COLLAPSES IN THE STONE AGE stop
ONLY TO BE REBUILT
FROM STONE stop

Malaita Island, Solomon Islands, Kwaio tribe (2007)

I sit in a simple hut with the parents. Outside it is pouring rain. Through the hut’s small entrance, which is more like a window than a door, I see, as if in a mirage from another era, naked children playing in the rain. I find myself focusing on the figure of a boy with his hands overstretched towards the sky and an expression of utter bliss. His body contorts spontaneously as he is trying to dance in unison with the Music of Rain. The rain – what joy! He’s getting soaked – what happiness! Other children come toward him, filling-in the hut’s window frame. They start running frenetically up and down a small hill, jumping into the newly formed puddles, touching their bodies and those of their playmates with self-indulgence. Ecstatic screams fill the wet atmosphere. Joy – for it is raining and they are alive! Joy – for they can all run together and play and scream! Joy – for they are absolutely free! The joy, the joy of Being!

The hut’s small opening through which these scenes unfold suddenly feels like a sci-fi wormhole disrupting the space-time continuum and giving me a glimpse into humanity’s past. For a split second, something flickers in the deepest recesses of my soul. Something as old as the beginning of Time itself and as timeless as Eternity. I feel that I am that young boy dancing – sometime 200,000 years ago at the dawn of humanity, or sometime at the age of six, in first grade. I have déjà vu of being blissful in the schoolyard just because it is raining and I have playmates and I am alive and can run and scream and feel the raindrops and the wind caressing my skin. I stand up and I am about to take off my shorts to join the naked kids in their frenzy. But a moment’s hesitation is enough to allow my mind to take control: I feel embarrassed, I imagine the other adults making fun of me – I become forty-five years old again. And I instantly revert to the middle-aged visitor who attempts to capture the moment by filming it – I take hold of the camera to record the scene. I have already lost the Now.

Today, I have some photos of the scene and a short video clip with the kids running about. Once or twice a year, I return to the short clip, replaying it over and over again in a futile attempt to reconnect with that minute of bliss – being one with the rain, Nature, the Cosmos; the utter bliss of Being. But to no avail. I have lost the connection to my Primal Roots – a connection that is identical to pertaining to the plenitude of Being. Now I am back in the twenty-first century, behind my desk, surrounded by confining walls and even more confining bookshelves. It is as if the “life of nine on the Richter scale” (mentioned in the above poem, sent to friends from the Solomon Islands) has been reduced to a life of four!

I, and most of us, have long lost the ability to connect effortlessly and naturally with the Timeless dimension – maybe sometime at the age of five or six, just after school began, or sometime around 5,000 years ago when civilization and the first cities appeared, or maybe when abstract thought developed – that portentous moment in our evolution when we started living in our minds.

But the Kwaio (pronounced: koyo) never ask why they are here. The problem of the meaning of life or any other philosophical issue has not yet been born. Even the simple abstractions that form the templates upon which our minds work are absent from their world, or are completely uncultivated. Everything in the “Stone Age” is concrete, palpable, referred to and derived from the present moment. There is no living in the mind. No extended past with a million events stuffed in memory and libraries. No projected future toward which man moves; no elaborate “future goals” on which the present sustains itself. “Now it is raining, now I’m hungry, now I’m sad, now I’m tired.” Yet this apparent simplicity encloses something deep.

A popular Zen Koan goes like this: The pupil asks “What is Zen?” and the master replies, “When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.” But Zen is calling us back to basics after we have formed the question. To ask “What is Zen?” one must have traveled along the path of philosophy and struggled with abstract ideas residing in the mental world. The Kwaio, on the other hand, are at the stage before the beginning of the long journey in Mind. They are Man before the birth of history, philosophy, science. Their cosmology is not sophisticated: They believe in the power of ancestral spirits to bring about changes in the present moment or to fulfill or work against their wishes. These ancestral spirits and beings inhabit some spirit domain and that is all. There is no religion in which gods behave in some preordained manner, nor any system of metaphysics. There is simply a men’s hut where the skulls of the recently deceased relatives are held, and a women and children’s hut nearby, with no shrines, no statues, and no big or small theories of the cosmos.

Living in the Now, as all the major philosophies of the East (and more recently, Eckhart Tolle in the West) urge us to do, comes effortlessly to the Kwaio exactly because they live in the impressions and sensations of each moment and not in their minds. I find it so extraordinary that modern man has to live in the mind in order to achieve whatever he sets out to do, but then he has to make a special effort to revert to the natural state of Being. Yet Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, and Yoga practices notwithstanding, we all have the innate ability to reconnect with the Ground of Being by completely immersing ourselves in Nature. Nature is the easiest portal to this Ground. But we must let go of our mind in order to participate in the beauty of Nature and the wonders of the natural world. When we do that, we start discovering that even the most apparently ordinary natural phenomena, such as a sudden rainstorm, have an inherent beauty and uniqueness (no two storms are ever the same). Even such simple daily occurrences may be seen with the eyes of the child we all still are, thereby infusing the everyday with a freshness and energy it always has. And once we start seeing the extraordinary in the everyday and in the apparently ordinary, we may begin gradually reconnecting with our Primal Roots from which we have all sprung forth.