Ron Price

Animism (from Latin anima "soul, life") is a philosophical, religious or spiritual belief that souls or spirits exist not only in humans but also in all other animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, geographic features such as mountains or rivers, or other entities of the natural environment. Animism may further attribute souls to abstract concepts such as words, true names or metaphors in mythology. Animism is particularly and widely found in the religions of indigenous peoples, although it is also found in Shinto, and some forms of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Pantheism, and Neopaganism.
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Throughout European history, philosophers such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, among others, contemplated the possibility that souls could exist in animals, plants and people; however, the currently accepted definition of animism which was only developed in the 19th century by Sir Edward Tylor, who created it as "one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first," separates totelism and animism. Again, this is a complex anthropological issue, too complex for a refined discuss in this section of my site.

Whilst having similarities to totemism, animism differs, according to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, in that it focuses on individual spirit beings which help to perpetuate life, whilst totemism more typically holds that there is a primary source, such as the land itself, or the ancestors, who provide the basis to life. Certain indigenous religious groups, such as that of the Australian Aborigines are more typically totemic, whilst others, like the Inuit are more typically animistic in their worldview. Readers are advised to google the subject of animism for what has become an immense library and resources on the subject of the religion of humankind until the neolithic revolution circa 8000 BC. or 10,000 B.P.
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The media is now both scapegoat and cause, explanatory framework and source of the rationale for the violent society.  Due to the pervasiveness and influence in its electronic and print forms, the issues surrounding them are immensely complex. The print and electronic media are a type of brontosaurus. Religion and politics, information and entertainment, the major concerns of the media in a host of different ways, have been intertwined with violence since the days of universal animism. In the hundreds of millennia before the neolithic revolution of 8000 BP(circa) and, arguably, back to Homo Neanderthalis at 500,000 BP. far back into the reaches of the hunting and gathering societies of human evolution violence has been part of the bread and butter, the air that is the breath of life of our species and its several precursors. 

One writer whom I read over twenty years ago, in the years of my middle life(40-60), Guy Murchie, wrote in a book entitled The Seven Mysteries of Life that: we’ve had 14,400 wars in recorded history(Houghton, Mifflin, Boston, 1978).  He was just referring to recorded history. Violence is as human, it appears, as apple pie is American or I might add: as potatoes, pasta or pumpkins are identified with other countries.  For a discussion of the complex subject of conflict and violence in the evolutionary process after the development of photosynthesis go to:

http://cpfphila.org/NL1009/NL1009%209.html

For a discussion of animism in the writing of one author, Andrei Platonov, go to:

http://The-train-and-the-tortoise-Animism-in-the-prose-work-of-Andrei-Platonov

Other sites or links which will result in some of my comments and the comments of others on animism:

http://bahai-library.com/ronprice_autobiography_essays_history

http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2010/01/tolstoy-animist

http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/Oldsite/38Baha%27iPhilosophy
(the blue background needs to be highlighted by left-clicking your mouse. This will make reading easier)
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EMBRYOGENESIS

In Shoghi Effendi’s World Order Letters(1930 ca), he says the “principle of the oneness of mankind implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society.” He also says that the “epoch-making changes that constitute the great landmarks in the history of human civilization” should appear “as subsidiary adjustments preluding that transformation of unparalled majesty and scope which humanity in this age is bound to undergo. -See The Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, 1969, p.114.

The nature and extent of large-scale structural transformations in Western society, as well as their corresponding effects on the nature of social interaction and on the construction of social identity---is a crucial issue raised by post-modernism. -Postmodernism and Social Inquiry, editors: D. Dickens and A. Fontana, Guilford Press, NY, 1994, p.10.

Those great landmarks in the
history of human civilization:

homo sapiens sapiens,
hunting and gathering
the neolithic revolution,
urbanism, the state, bands,
tribes, chiefdoms,city states,
nations, the prophetic figures
of the Adamic cycle, the classical
civilizations of Greece and Rome,
mathematics, the renaissance and
reformation,the scientific revolution
and......what more?.....what else?......

Subsidiary adjustments are all of these,
preluding a transformation of unparalleled
majesty and scope for humanity in this age....

What shall we call this ‘age’?
There are so many possibilities.
I shall take the first forty years
of Shaykh Ahmad’s life as the
embryogenesis: 1754-1793.(1)
That Star decided to tell of
a new Revelation, when revolutions:
American, French, agricultural,
industrial, sciencific, technological,
democratic, population, were all
brewing in one vast pot waiting
to explode onto the planet. And
they did, precipitating our modern
age and all its transforming effects.

Ron Price
10 May 1999

(1) Shaykh Ahmad left his home in NE Iraq in 1793 at the age of 40(Nabil, Dawnbreakers, 1974(1932), p. 1.



LIFE AS ARTISTIC CREATION: A NEW FORM OF HUNTING AND GATHERING---OF ANIMISM

James Agee(1909-1955), American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic spent his life in search for a manner of expression that would best enable him to see his artistic creation as a living reality in the present moment, that would help him create a world that existed solely in the present. Joseph Conrad, on the other hand, seemed to endlessly search for, and have his mind set on, one fact, the sea, and its beauty, nobility and monotony. It was the sea that permeated all that was mysterious in life and its protean elusiveness, in Conrad’s writing. –Ron Price with thanks to Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Vol.1, Gale Research Co., Detroit, 1978, p.14.

Ron Price’s entire career seems to have been, among other things, a search for a manner of expression that would enable him to see his artistic creation as history, sociology, psychology, autobiography, a world that existed not only in the present moment, but in past moments and, hopefully, as a time capsule for a future age. At the centre of this artistic creation was not the sea, but the ocean of a new Revelation. The quintessential mystery of life and its elusiveness was not permeated by the sea, but by an emerging world religion which had captivated Price in his youth and seemed destined to keep him captive well into the evening of his life, if not to the very end of his days on this mortal coil. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.

Well, it was not a conscious search,
at first,
more of a question of
what will I do:
job, marriage, life?
You know the sort of thing.
How will I serve?
Where will I go?
Gradually the search
became conscious,
more and more conscious
and more recently,
I’d define it as
life as artistic creation,
a manner of expression,
words, words, words,
a roving inner eye,
hunting and gathering
in a different way than those
animistic peoples of multi-millennia,
scanning the world for the story,
the preserved tablet, something visual
that would maintain and transform my life.

Ron Price
12 November 1999 to 1 April 2011.

ARNOLD TOYNBEE MY TRAVELLING AND THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION

The great historian Arnold Toynbee draws on the mythology of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, among the many sources he draws on in his massive 12 volume work A Study of History, to discuss the stimulus of new ground for the people going to that new ground.  I want to draw on this same mythology as I try to place this travelling-pioneering venture of mine into a fitting, a reasoned, context.  We have all become pioneers of a sort in this new age, an age we now give a multitude of labels to, labels which try to characterize the tone and texture, the sands and shifts, of our time.

Toynbee writes that in their removal out of the magic garden into the workaday world, Adam and Eve transcend the food-gathering, the hunting and gathering, economy of "Primitive Mankind and gave birth to the fathers of an agricultural and a pastoral civilization. Later, in their exodus from Egypt, the Children of Israel….gave birth to a generation which helped to lay the foundations of the Syriac Civilization in taking possession of the Promised Land." Such is part of the symbolic significance of, arguably, the first pioneers.  I do not take this biblical story literally, any more than Toynbee does, but more of a metaphor for the period after the Neolithic revolution(1200-8000 BC) to the period of the late second and early first millennium BC(1300-800 BC). 

Indeed, as I try to place this Baha’i, this pioneering, experience of mine, 1953-2011, into some context, I'd like to draw on the writings of Arnold Toynbee in his A Study of History, Vol.2 which was first published in 1934.  I have done so extensively in my writings, but not all of them are found here.  At the time Baha'i Administration was taking its initial form in several countries around the world from the 1920s through the 1950s, Toynbee wrote his A Study of History. Toynbee quoted the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume, who concluded his essay Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences with the observation that "the arts and sciences, like some plants, require a fresh soil; and, however rich the land may be, and however you may care for it and try to give it new life, this land will never, when once exhausted, produce anything that is perfect or finished, vital and alive, again. 

Toynbee is the great historian of the necessary global political unification process, of the world becoming, as novelist Lawrence Durrell put it: “one place.” For some reason, for many reasons, in August 1962, on the eve of my pioneering venture I felt quite exhausted, or should I say I felt a sense of the tedious, the tedium of the environment, the environment in which I had lived for the previous dozen years in my childhood and adolescence.  I lived in a small town in southern Ontario in the Golden Horseshoe on the edge of Lake Ontario.  It was the environment where I was in the porch-swing of my first bones, where I had first settled into myself and my life and where I stared out at the world with a complex mix of awe and boredom, confusion and psychological hunger.
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In an article in a new journal called Janus Head, Bernard Jager(1) writes about life's journey. He says that, cut off from the sphere of dwelling, life becomes aimless wandering.  It deteriorates into mere distraction or even chaos or fugue. Perhaps this was part of the human experience forty thousand years ago in band societies, hunting and gathering communities. In some ways we in our world have, in our time, become faced with "forced migration" which, as Douglas Martin, former Director-General of Public Information at the Baha'i World Centre, suggests is "the paradigm for the whole human race."  The process is unstoppable, Martin continues, and will radically alter humanity's sense of place and identity.  My migration was, on the other hand, "unforced."  I made a conscious decision to move, to migrate. My movement was not always unforced. Sometimes necessity in one of its many forms required me to move.  There were occasions among my many moves where relocation was forced by circumstances, circumstances I write about extensively in my memoirs.  But in all cases, as Jager emphasizes, "the sphere of dwelling" and "origin" was important to my sense of space and identity. -Ron Price with thanks to: (1) Bernard Jager in "Editorial: The Tower of Babel: Shadow of the Interdisciplinary," Janus Head: 1999, Internet; and (2) Douglas Martin, "Talk in Lowell Massachusettes," September 2001.

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I had come from a culture, a western culture in its North American extension, which in the last two centuries, say 1750 to 1950, had been increasingly rejecting its inherited tradition. This was especially true in the years from the 1960s onward, once that tenth stage of history came into our lives in April 1963 from a Baha'i perspective.  I was 15 years old in 1960 and 25 in 1970.  I was a child, so to speak, of the sixties.  Elvis Presley, Andy Warhol's art, the Mods and Rockers, a Pop culture had come to play its rhythms in the interstices of my life and it affected my ambience, my philosophy of life in complex and indefinable ways. Of course, there were many things that affected my life---too many things to include here on this page devoted to animism.  Improvisation, the instinctual urge, creativity, they were all the buzz in those years before my first wife and I went to live in a hunting and gathering community, the Inuit in the 1960s ,and when my second wife and I came to live among the Aborigines of Australia in the 1980s.  These two animistic cultures were going through a transition from their stone age culture which was dizzying in its speed and immensely complex in its ramifications.

SALVATION

...the countless days, months and years I have spent studying my craft, developing and honing my skills...the untold lonely hours of persistence and drudgery....so the believer as aspirant must constantly struggle to discover how best to dramatize the tenets of faith in daily action. -John S. Hatcher,The Arc of Ascent: The Purpose of Physical Reality II, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, p.32.

Salvation, now there’s a word
that has bedeviled history, theology,
people, religions and me at least
since we struggled out of animism
between 7000 BC and 2000 BC,
if not long before neolithic times.

Salvation is more of a process
than an event, a constant monitoring
of one’s condition, a persistent
evaluation of one’s performance
and an expanding expression
of our understanding in daily life.

Salvation requires a social context;
a theoretical spirituality must be
practiced in a social milieux;
indeed salvation applies to the
whole society as much as it does
to the individual in it.

Salvation involves our detachment
from our personal trip and our
involvement in the social institutions
which are the more inclusive expressions
of our own identity: this verity underpins
the oneness of humankind.

Salvation is an expression of the
desire to belong and to be appreciated
by the group, of the intertwined nature
of self-interest and collective interest;
for salvation is a social reality; personal
transformation involves social transformation.

Salvation, then, is about passionate intensity,
chaos, perplexity and consternation,
about being overwhelmed by longing
and unable to attain one’s desire,
about bewilderment, action and a
whirlwind of wonderment and exhaustion.

Salvation is about a sense of selflessness
that is acheived by individual action in
a divine plan and universal structure,
a perception of ourselves within a
collectivity of meaning, a catching
of a fragrance from an eternal garden.

Salvation is an entering and reentering
the world of shadows and its ephemeral
visions, an uplifting of the human condition,
an experience of the world of creation as an
emotionally charged vision and mystic journey
in this deathbed childbed age.

Ron Price
7 January 1996
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HUNTING AND GATHERING: THE LAST DAY

Beginning perhaps as early as 1953, I found ways of making money: collecting pop bottles, selling newspapers, doing the occasional odd-gardening-job but, in July 1960, I landed my first formal job with the A & W Root Beer Company. It only lasted several weeks due to the fact that my father was receiving unemployment benefits at the time as a retired man of 70. I was not allowed to make any money since I was his dependent. What I did earn I had to give back: all of it. The next summer, in July or August of 1961, I began my first job in an organization and received money I could keep. The job was with the Shell Oil Company in Hamilton Ontario. This time, as I say, I could keep the money and it was $60/week. It was more money than my father had ever made in any of his jobs, as far as I know. I had made a start in the modern form of hunting and gatheirng without the animistic religion of my ancesors of old.

From that summer of 1961 until today I have been working at jobs, hunting for jobs and/or going to school. About the same time of year as now, exactly forty years ago in 1961, I began negotiating in a job-seeking process for that Shell Oil job. Today that job-hunting process came to an end. I had been accepted onto a Disability Support Pension eight weeks before my 57th birthday. I would continue to work in a casual-volunteer capacity occasionally, presenting radio programs or teaching senior citizens. This I would do after 2001 but, it appeared for now, that paid employment and looking for it had finally ceased. This modern form of hunting and gathering in my life had finally come to an end.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 30 May 2001 to 1 April 2011.

There were times in those forty years
when schools and jobs were just not
on my agenda, when I was zonked out
in a mental hospital somewhere…...or
travelling to this place of refuge in this
little town at the mouth of a river on a
small bay where I watched the boats go
by and the waters of this estuary criss-
cross in many directions, as my life….
continued to flow to the sea.

Those times might add up to a year,
making a net of thirty-nine years on
the jobs-school circuit; and those 39
years of travelling-pioneering, they,
too, were a landmark as I enter these
winter months and a world beyond
those forty years.
Ron Price
31 May 2001 to 1 April 2011