Receiving your reply was an unexpected birthday gift for me, and, as always happens, it’s the unexpected gifts that make us happiest. I don’t want to cause friction in your hyper-prolific creative machinery — in other words, I don’t want to bother you — but for some reason I feel it’s worth going a little deeper into the question I raised.
It may have sounded a bit shanti-shanti on my part — Miss Universe-style talk — to speak of deepening our relationship with Nature, as opposed to legitimizing or rendering inevitable (pardon the expression) “our” nature, but I truly believe that “our” nature does not exist — or rather, that it doesn’t exist apart from Nature. I see Nature as the “naturally systemic system,” of which this so-called “our nature” is a part. And so, instead of seeing nature as ours, I see that we belong to Nature.
Perhaps this echoes La Palice, but I sense something here of profound meaning; it doesn’t seem to me to be merely a semantic issue. In fact, speaking from “my” experience — and so risking the appearance of contradiction — both the path toward Nature and the path toward love, as well as toward so many other graces of life, have opened themselves to me through the awareness that none of these things are mine. On the contrary — I belong to them; I devote myself to them.
There is a fundamental humility on the path to happiness which, when viewed as an individual pursuit, risks, I believe, losing its very meaning. Any crumb found along the way in this process of surrender to the “divine” — if we may call it that (without the religious baggage that often takes possession of meaning) — is organically “ours”: it belongs to everything, to everyone.
And this, of course, implies a deterritorialization of the human, an inner dawn that opens the windows of the self and gradually unveils what lies outside — that Other we used to see as enemy, as bearer of all evils, as guilty for our inner darkness. Pure attention defines there the reach of “humanity,” until, I imagine (for my little river is still far from flowing into that sea), that very definition — that existential demarcation — ceases to be useful.
Now, let me open up a little with you, at the risk of sounding ridiculous. For several years now, I’ve taken part in ayahuasca ceremonies. In one of them, which marked me deeply, I felt an irresistible calling toward something good, and I hesitated for a moment — because letting myself go would mean losing all control over what I still identified as “me.” I thought to myself: You have a daughter; you can’t go without considering that you’d be leaving your daughter behind.
But I went. It was inevitable. I felt such a great love within me and such a pure calling that there was no way not to go. It was as if I had let go of my grip on a slippery slope and flowed into an infinite expanse of love and freedom such as I had never imagined could exist.
In this “our” world, sometimes we have love but not freedom; at other times, freedom but not love. But to immerse in both — for them to be the same reality, and for that reality to have no body, no end, and for us to have no body or end within it, for us to be it — a beatific consciousness, yet utterly real, for there is nothing hallucinatory in it: no ghosts, no visions, no distortions, no separation, no subject and object — it is wondrous.
And, as has been the rule in my ayahuasca experiences, the deepest messages I bring back are not products of interpretation — they incorporate themselves, they accompany us in this embodied journey through existence.
On this point, I once did a retreat of meditation and silence with one of the people closest to holiness — whatever construction that may be — whom I’ve met in life: a small Indian man named Bal. When the retreat ended, he invited me for a walk through the hills of Monchique, which had been ravaged by a fierce fire, and he urged me to look up toward the retreat centre. Around it, everything was burned, and there was a circle around the centre, as if the wrath of the god of fire had spared it.
Still a young man, awed and impressionable, I asked him: “Wow, how do you interpret this, Bal?”
And he, with that serene simplicity I remember (he passed away two years ago), looked up at me — as I was looking up at the mountain — and said:
“Interpret, my dear? Isn’t it enough for you to see?”
That was one of the lessons that never left me.
And so, returning to that infinite of love and freedom I experienced with ayahuasca — what it brought me was the awareness that that is where life goes when it ends. And from there, already leaning on the “crutch” of interpretation — and therefore without the same essential reliability — I ventured the hypothesis that it may also be from there that life comes when it begins.
Now, this might sound very esoteric, but let’s make it more practical: a baby. Let’s imagine that a baby comes from that “nirvana” (concepts are tricky — they always reduce and stigmatize). The baby emerges from the mother, and there is inevitably a crucial trauma. Pure attention is what we owe the baby — so that it feels safe, so that it feels responded to in its needs, its appeals, its most pressing desires.
The idea that the baby comes from such a space of fullness gives us a greater sense of responsibility. To listen, to feel, to understand — that is the essential task of parents. It is from there that the baby brings us news. And perhaps, speaking generally of course, setting aside physiological specifics, the baby’s cry is proportional to the distance between the place it came from and the place it has been thrown into.
If we look at babies this way, we will be closer to undoing a whole set of illusory concepts that limit our experience of living — whether as individuals, as societies or sociopolitical paradigms, or simply as nature itself.
That’s where my benevolent provocation about the destruction of the illusion of the “human” comes in. I once heard a member of an Indigenous community say that we humans are “earth that speaks.” And I fully agree. Conceived in this way, we do not fight for our land, since it is we who belong to it.
The question of Palestine, were this worldview widespread, would not even need to arise. Israel, as it is, would cease to exist — it would dissolve, earth upon earth.
Often, for example, I’m astonished at the reactions of so many “civilized” people to the “events” of the world. You’ll surely remember the destruction of statues and the uproar it caused — the outrage, from both sides. Some were outraged that the statues still stood; others, that they were torn down. Yet when a tree is cut down, no one is shocked.
A tree is life; a statue is death. We value more the faculty to kill than the faculty to generate. This is clearly a problem of the “human,” because it is disconnected from life. It no longer feels itself connected to the only truly systemic system that exists — Nature.
That biologically dominant human being you describe, Niall — he wants to kill Nature. And since treating evil with evil only doubles the evil, I think it is very important — essential, even — that we reconnect deeply enough to realize that the only way we have to end evil is to cover it with good; the only way we have to enter the night is to fill it with light.
And for that, we must know evil, know the night, devote pure — or as pure as possible — attention to “its” nature.
In my view, evil does not exist except as the absence of good. To make evil lose its fear of good, just as, conversely, to help the newborn lose its fear of the world, requires attention, communication, sharing, tremendous openness, kindness, generosity, perseverance. Faith. To believe in order to see, and to see in order to believe.
I’ll finish with a thought that seeks to undo a possible misconception — that I might see myself as a “bearer of good.” When I advocate for pure attention to the Other, I mean the deep Other, just as the deep self — both as sources of good. And I don’t feel that the liberation of the deep Other is possible without the liberation of the deep self.
One of Fela Kuti’s sons, Semi, said it perfectly in a recent concert to young Europeans:
“I know you’re always eager to free Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, Iran — a new one every week. Free Europe!”
Hello again, Niall!
Receiving your reply was an unexpected birthday gift for me, and, as always happens, it’s the unexpected gifts that make us happiest. I don’t want to cause friction in your hyper-prolific creative machinery — in other words, I don’t want to bother you — but for some reason I feel it’s worth going a little deeper into the question I raised.
It may have sounded a bit shanti-shanti on my part — Miss Universe-style talk — to speak of deepening our relationship with Nature, as opposed to legitimizing or rendering inevitable (pardon the expression) “our” nature, but I truly believe that “our” nature does not exist — or rather, that it doesn’t exist apart from Nature. I see Nature as the “naturally systemic system,” of which this so-called “our nature” is a part. And so, instead of seeing nature as ours, I see that we belong to Nature.
Perhaps this echoes La Palice, but I sense something here of profound meaning; it doesn’t seem to me to be merely a semantic issue. In fact, speaking from “my” experience — and so risking the appearance of contradiction — both the path toward Nature and the path toward love, as well as toward so many other graces of life, have opened themselves to me through the awareness that none of these things are mine. On the contrary — I belong to them; I devote myself to them.
There is a fundamental humility on the path to happiness which, when viewed as an individual pursuit, risks, I believe, losing its very meaning. Any crumb found along the way in this process of surrender to the “divine” — if we may call it that (without the religious baggage that often takes possession of meaning) — is organically “ours”: it belongs to everything, to everyone.
And this, of course, implies a deterritorialization of the human, an inner dawn that opens the windows of the self and gradually unveils what lies outside — that Other we used to see as enemy, as bearer of all evils, as guilty for our inner darkness. Pure attention defines there the reach of “humanity,” until, I imagine (for my little river is still far from flowing into that sea), that very definition — that existential demarcation — ceases to be useful.
Now, let me open up a little with you, at the risk of sounding ridiculous. For several years now, I’ve taken part in ayahuasca ceremonies. In one of them, which marked me deeply, I felt an irresistible calling toward something good, and I hesitated for a moment — because letting myself go would mean losing all control over what I still identified as “me.” I thought to myself: You have a daughter; you can’t go without considering that you’d be leaving your daughter behind.
But I went. It was inevitable. I felt such a great love within me and such a pure calling that there was no way not to go. It was as if I had let go of my grip on a slippery slope and flowed into an infinite expanse of love and freedom such as I had never imagined could exist.
In this “our” world, sometimes we have love but not freedom; at other times, freedom but not love. But to immerse in both — for them to be the same reality, and for that reality to have no body, no end, and for us to have no body or end within it, for us to be it — a beatific consciousness, yet utterly real, for there is nothing hallucinatory in it: no ghosts, no visions, no distortions, no separation, no subject and object — it is wondrous.
And, as has been the rule in my ayahuasca experiences, the deepest messages I bring back are not products of interpretation — they incorporate themselves, they accompany us in this embodied journey through existence.
On this point, I once did a retreat of meditation and silence with one of the people closest to holiness — whatever construction that may be — whom I’ve met in life: a small Indian man named Bal. When the retreat ended, he invited me for a walk through the hills of Monchique, which had been ravaged by a fierce fire, and he urged me to look up toward the retreat centre. Around it, everything was burned, and there was a circle around the centre, as if the wrath of the god of fire had spared it.
Still a young man, awed and impressionable, I asked him: “Wow, how do you interpret this, Bal?”
And he, with that serene simplicity I remember (he passed away two years ago), looked up at me — as I was looking up at the mountain — and said:
“Interpret, my dear? Isn’t it enough for you to see?”
That was one of the lessons that never left me.
And so, returning to that infinite of love and freedom I experienced with ayahuasca — what it brought me was the awareness that that is where life goes when it ends. And from there, already leaning on the “crutch” of interpretation — and therefore without the same essential reliability — I ventured the hypothesis that it may also be from there that life comes when it begins.
Now, this might sound very esoteric, but let’s make it more practical: a baby. Let’s imagine that a baby comes from that “nirvana” (concepts are tricky — they always reduce and stigmatize). The baby emerges from the mother, and there is inevitably a crucial trauma. Pure attention is what we owe the baby — so that it feels safe, so that it feels responded to in its needs, its appeals, its most pressing desires.
The idea that the baby comes from such a space of fullness gives us a greater sense of responsibility. To listen, to feel, to understand — that is the essential task of parents. It is from there that the baby brings us news. And perhaps, speaking generally of course, setting aside physiological specifics, the baby’s cry is proportional to the distance between the place it came from and the place it has been thrown into.
If we look at babies this way, we will be closer to undoing a whole set of illusory concepts that limit our experience of living — whether as individuals, as societies or sociopolitical paradigms, or simply as nature itself.
That’s where my benevolent provocation about the destruction of the illusion of the “human” comes in. I once heard a member of an Indigenous community say that we humans are “earth that speaks.” And I fully agree. Conceived in this way, we do not fight for our land, since it is we who belong to it.
The question of Palestine, were this worldview widespread, would not even need to arise. Israel, as it is, would cease to exist — it would dissolve, earth upon earth.
Often, for example, I’m astonished at the reactions of so many “civilized” people to the “events” of the world. You’ll surely remember the destruction of statues and the uproar it caused — the outrage, from both sides. Some were outraged that the statues still stood; others, that they were torn down. Yet when a tree is cut down, no one is shocked.
A tree is life; a statue is death. We value more the faculty to kill than the faculty to generate. This is clearly a problem of the “human,” because it is disconnected from life. It no longer feels itself connected to the only truly systemic system that exists — Nature.
That biologically dominant human being you describe, Niall — he wants to kill Nature. And since treating evil with evil only doubles the evil, I think it is very important — essential, even — that we reconnect deeply enough to realize that the only way we have to end evil is to cover it with good; the only way we have to enter the night is to fill it with light.
And for that, we must know evil, know the night, devote pure — or as pure as possible — attention to “its” nature.
In my view, evil does not exist except as the absence of good. To make evil lose its fear of good, just as, conversely, to help the newborn lose its fear of the world, requires attention, communication, sharing, tremendous openness, kindness, generosity, perseverance. Faith. To believe in order to see, and to see in order to believe.
I’ll finish with a thought that seeks to undo a possible misconception — that I might see myself as a “bearer of good.” When I advocate for pure attention to the Other, I mean the deep Other, just as the deep self — both as sources of good. And I don’t feel that the liberation of the deep Other is possible without the liberation of the deep self.
One of Fela Kuti’s sons, Semi, said it perfectly in a recent concert to young Europeans:
“I know you’re always eager to free Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, Iran — a new one every week. Free Europe!”
Thank you so much, Niall.
Sorry, it's Seun Kuti.