The End of Festivals

The End of Festivals, The Beginning of Festival Earth

Maraya Karena, Reality Sandwich – Aug5.2013

Part One: Future

Many indigenous cultures directly trace their origins back to the stars. Often to one star system in particular. Ask the Hawaiians, Ethiopians, Aztecs, Hopi where they come from and their mythologies will all point to a specific spot in the sky. It is these emanating celestial lighthouses that bestowed the legacy of their culture unto them.

Cultures are survival strategies laced with profound gifts and severe limitations. Designed to dampen down the pace of change and maintain strict regulation of roles, these systems sharply divide us from each other, severely severing the world into harsh us and them dualities.

Many of the world’s tribal names for themselves is ‘The People’, a reality where by ontological definition other human beings don’t count. In one infamous story, an anthropologist asked a member of a cannibalizing tribe how he felt about eating the people on the other side of the hill. ‘What people?’ the man answered,

‘They are not people. They are animals!’

This way of seeing self and other is not limited to Bush tribes. The horrors of colonialism are so great, the atrocities of slavery, war and conquest so brutal that clearly the more developed cultures of empires only served to enable them to cannibalize the whole world. Civilization itself is a mechanism: crafting laws, disciplines and religious imperatives all to codify self as The People, others as savage beasts.

This division of self and other is the foundation of violence, anger, and fear still in play all around us. These persisting and shifting divisions exist simultaneous to the emerging understanding of our globality — our comprehension that we are one species of life living on a single shared planet. Colonialism, warfare, globalization, these are the traumas of our coming together, the wounds we incurred as we crashed against each other, plowed through each other and inextricably wove ourselves together as one.

These Self/Other encounters are Star Wars on our diverse home planet. A painful journey to come to appreciate the gifts of our many cultural lineages. A journey to come to appreciate the gifts of individuated differences. A journey to encounter and accept otherness among our own species, so as to grant us the opportunity to develop towards the next evolutionary stages.

CONTINUED ON REALITY SANDWICH HERE!

Maraya Karena is a Cyborg Anthropologist, mystic permaculturist and massage therapist at large dedicated to faciliating new world ecologies between nature, people and technology. For more check out www.marayakarena.com