From the Facing Nature conference call #2, Katherine and Bonnie speaking about Katherine’s experiences with the horses at Alderlore.
Magellan Courses
~ Discover the world is whole, again ~
From the Facing Nature conference call #2, Katherine and Bonnie speaking about Katherine’s experiences with the horses at Alderlore.
I had to listen to it twice to believe it. And then I sat back with a thought seasoned with a glass of Jack Daniels that did its best to get me leveled out. And as level and accepting and compassionate as I can get right now, I still have to write that I am so goddamned disappointed (though not surprised) to hear someone who owns a horse say, “…the horse has no perspective.” It tells me–and this is written with all the compassion I can work up right now–the horse owner doesn’t know, or what’s more likely is that the horse in question has been ruined; ruined as a horse. Those last four words still make me angry…
Sit back now and listen to David Darling play his cello, breathe…
And then G Kings and La Dona…and this: I guess if a horse has been coddled or intimidated or coerced or bribed into being a four-legged extension of a two legged mind then there is nothing to say, cut the poor bastard some slack and let it go. He’s nothing but 95 percent of the horses in the country, same way with the people. I could go on and on and on about some horses who still think like they were born to think and are treated so by riders who still think like they were born to think and nothing is lost and no control is gained either way between them and I was taught to the horses by such a rider and so I write in his memory that it makes me so goddamned mad to hear someone who owns a horse say, “…the horse has no perspective.”
ah, steve. i was using the word “perspective” in the AQAL matrix sense. Do you think the horse’s view is parsed out with respect to subject/object and whole/part dichotomies? the way Wilber coins the term?
Man, once again I am so goddamned disappointed by the abuse of Dr. Daniels on another human heart at the bitter, old hands of a (non-AQAL) matrix perspective, though not surprised, quite empathetic in point of fact, mind you…
…For it was the same when they took me away to the hospital, that hallowed Christmas eve. It was the same mass-produced Dr’s rye-dichotomy running through my Centaurus veins. I’d acquiesced, albeit briefly, to one of a thousand visions that, like a horse’s non-perspective, had seen the truth of consensus reality. In this consensus, my true identity was that of being a bitter, old codger ranting from a cogent perspective from the remnants of my love-swatted and hallucinating brain… time having no meaning allowed such a state to coalesce into a reality,..
I repeated my name (Nickelson, Nickelson) to the attending officer over and over as I lay there dumbfounded at my condition and unable to return to the reality in which my true heart still resided. My cogent, youthful, compassionate, romantic heart was patiently waiting to confess having left a four-legged integration for a two-legged shelter that my intoxicated and fevered mind had been unable to respect and felt compulsively resigned to uncover…
Another few hours were yet to pass before this horseshit could be re-aligned into a respectively, un-constipated condition. Peals of mad laughter echoed with bliss-bestowing endorphin-coddling throughout the cantankerous halls, wiped and disinfected clean with straight Kentucky bourbon.
We might ask, instead, what must it have “felt” like to the horse. And I would have answered — “just listen to Katherine, because when the magic happens, what it feels like to the horse is the same as what it feels like to the person”… in other words, the work brings us to a moment of “collection” but not just of one body, but of “apparently two”, bodies in a single unified field of apperceptive (a-conceptual, a-theoretical) feeling-energy. In this field, there is no “translation” between horse and human, it is one beautiful speech-act.
Bonnie, sorry for being late to respond; too busy these days to participate in almost all of the MC features.
I don’t know quite how to deal with this. In the original post you simply said the horse had no perspective and now you try to change the argument to say that your really meant that the horse had no Wilberian AQAL perspective despite the fact there was no allusion to Wilber or AQAL in the recording. This is called the fallacy of raising the bar or moving the goalposts. And while I am not familiar with how the nuts and bolts protocols work in the Integral Province, this is not how discussions are conducted out here in the less exclusive pagan territories. I can’t help but wonder if I am being baited.
But I’ll let that slide because it opens the door to a few observations with one caveat: Your experience with horses and mine are probably not the same.
1) To consider the perspective of a horse in the context of a Wilberian AQAL “coinage” of the word…I don’t know. It certainly seems like a curious if not absurd kind of project. You may have a point unbeknownst to me for I have not enough interest in Wilber’s middle-brow philosophy or the outcome of this discussion to research the issue.
2) However, if we can use “Everyday Language” instead of you going to ground in the abstractions of Wilberian coined jargon, I have to say yes, a horse has a perspective in as much as it is aware of its self as a motile, spatial being, that it is aware of a rider as a separate, motile, spatial being, and it is aware of an environment that is the largely stationary, little changing ground over which this horse and this rider move. The scenario: The wise, ancient and ornery mare on which I learned as a little boy to ride always tried to scrape me off on apple tree limbs and she knew were they all were. It comes down to this: Mare = self, Me = rider, other-than-self, apple orchard = environment, other-than- self.
3) Now Bonnie you write “Do you think the horse’s view is parsed out with respect to subject/object and whole/part dichotomies? the way Wilber coins the term? ” So we can probably say that “Mare/self” abstracts out to “subject/part,” and “Me/rider/other” abstracts out to “object/part,” and “orchard/environment/other” abstracts out to “whole.” The relationship between Mare and Rider and Apple tree limb abstracts out to “whole/part dichotomies” and, thus, the little boy and the old mare and the orchard evaporate into over intellectualized smoke on the wind as it apparently serves the purposeful qualities of an other’s necessitous being.
4) Abstractions in the new paradigm are, and will be, no different than abstractions in the old for abstraction itself is the essence of the old.
5) As my grandmother used to sing: this world is not my home.