Premonitions & The Extraordinary
Collective wisdom as a worldview is similarly a break with classical
ideas of group behavior that are defined by singular determinants
such as motivation, leadership, or interpersonal communication. It
is instead an expression of the belief that there exists a field
of collective consciousness—often seen and expressed through metaphor—that
is real and influential, yet invisible.
Collective wisdom is an orientation embedded in nature, the nature
of the physical world and our own human nature. It is therefore dependent
on a keen sensitivity to the natural world and our powers of observation,
mediated through our senses: touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste.
Yet it is also a commitment to an open-ended inquiry and understanding
found beyond the established modes of conventional perception, beyond
ordinary sensory experience.
There is a wonderful story reported by Laurens van der Post, an
Afrikaner and colleague of Jung’s. He was one of the first whites
of that nation to decry the tragic consequences of inequality between
whites and blacks in South Africa that led to apartheid. And he also
decried the inequality within our own psyche that elevated human
traits of rationality and abstraction over the instinctual and collective.
As a child, he was fascinated by stories of the Kalahari Bushmen,
a vanishing group of extraordinary hunters who descended from the
most ancient of our human ancestry.
In 1955, the BBBBC commissioned
van der Post to make a documentary
of the Bushmen, which led to his most well-known nonfiction work,
The Lost World of the Kalahari. In it, he describes his time with
Dabe, a Bushman, and their hunting of a giant eland, the largest
of the world’s antelopes. Returning to camp, van der Post asked Dabe
what his people would say when they saw the success of the hunt.
Dabe, who had had contact with the outside world, told him with assurance,
“They already know.” “What on earth do you mean?” asked van der Post.
Dabe told him they knew by “wire,” using the English word for the
telegraph he had once seen when accompanying a white man into the
city. “We Bushman have a wire here,” he said, tapping his chest,
“that brings us news.” Much later, as they approached the camps,
van der Post could hear the women singing. “Do you hear?” Dabe asked
van der Post. “They’re singing The Eland Song.” |
