This may be the longest period in my
two years in South America that I have gone without writing a blog. I
have been writing a lot, but just not the sorts of things that anyone
would want to read—essays for graduate school applications, GRE
studying, professional Close of Service paperwork for the Peace
Corps. Here's what's crazy: all of Peace Corps has been a slow,
sometimes-frustrating-sometimes-liberating process of meeting people,
talking to them, working with them, learning, teaching, and just
living; all of a sudden I am caught between this life,
tranquillo-pai'te, and
that other life, full of paperwork and propriety and professional
clothing and bullshit. Its weird to say the least.
These two years have been a day-in,
day-out emotional and intellectual confluence set in the sprawling
basin of sub-tropical Atlantic forests (Mata Atlantica)
and pastureland that is Paraguay. I have learned so much. Its hard
though—I can see how, from such a description, the wrong people
would idealize this kind of life too much; their reverence for
something they don't fully understand would project this life as
something that it is not, and in that sense, actually be extremely
irreverent. At the same, any person would be lucky to live the life I
have had for these two years. I am eternally grateful for those
people who made this possible. Thank you.
One of the inevitable results of
spending so much time outside of that western cultural bubble is
reflection, not only personal and interpersonal but societal as well.
Let me just acknowledge here the inherent limitations of me, Mario
Machado, ever gaining a fully objective perspective on something like
“western culture” considering that this was exactly the kind of
medium upon which embryonic me was grown and baptized into this
world. At the same time, stepping into the lives of half-indigenous,
half-Spanish rural campesinos for two years has give me some
perspective that I could have gotten no where else. I have been
blessed to live such a life. It has opened, ever so slightly, my
non-seeing, non-feeling, fixed-in-a-false-reality eyes.
I respect western culture for lots of
things, lots of tangible reasons (medicine, science, human rights,
etc.), but I understand, perhaps now better than ever before, its
shortcomings.
Look at our world, look at the west,
look at the social-democracies we have created. Whatever their
merits—be them concrete or philosophical—there is the undeniable
fact that they are, in so many ways, completely spiritually lacking.
I am not trying to sound funny or like some shallow-minded hippie, I
am trying to say something important I have realized. The gods of the
west, in the great historical tradition of the Greeks and Romans, are
functional. They are pragmatic tools used to direct or modify social
behavior, to be wielded like a bludgeon by those in power when the
masses strayed like wandering sheep in search of true gods, or to be
ingested like cheap alcohol to draw a curtain over the eyes of those
with a propensity to seek something real. Western gods, Christian
gods, the god whose name is sprawled like pornography across our
money, is a placebo; it goes hand in hand with self-centeredness,
self-righteousness, narcissism, commercialism, materialism,
commodification, conspicuous consumption. These are the alters,
please leave your money at the door if you wish to purchase your
salvation.
I am not a priest or a scholar but my
whole life I have struggled with spirituality. For those who know me
well, you will know that as a younger boy I was a very devout
Christian. As a teenager, I used to drive myself alone to church
early every Sunday. Whatever it was, I wanted, needed to understand
it. And yet, in due time, I fell out with Christianity. I was too
intellectually honest with myself, with the world, I asked too many
questions, and most of all, there was nothing in this Christian god
that slaked any of the thirst in my soul. I see now that I was
searching for meaning within the meaningless paramaters of western
religion; this has almost nothing to do with spirituality, and for
those who have found such spirituality within the western paradigm,
they have been almost always cast as pariahs and freaks. The west
does not believe in anything it cannot see or feel.
Those ignorant
fundamentalists who claim to know the Christian truth are as godless
as those corporate Christians who use the scriptures to placate their
guilty consciousness and justify their gluttonous greed. They would
cringe at the thought of real Truth, it would unravel their carefully
constructed world.
In the west, we have not tried to seek
truth on its own terms. Instead, we have created a god to fit what we
want, all of our earthly, superficial, capitalist desires.
Why do we fear drugs? Hallucinogenic
plants that have been used for millennium by peoples to aid them in
their day to day struggles within their environments and along their
spiritual journey. Why do we fear something so natural? Because it is
outside of our comfort zone, it threatens to challenge the thin-veil
of the western gods that just barely hold these societies of sheep in
place. Can you imagine what would happen if people just started
meditating and practicing ancient tribal medicine in huge numbers?
Can you imagine what would happen if people stopped listening to the
Catholic church? Can you imagine how our world would change it people
stopped participating in the sacrilegious orgy of consumption that is
Christmas? The social and economic west would collapse.
Listen, I know I must sound insane
from all of this, and I am not trying to make the case that all drugs
are good or that the west is some demonic, overbearing entity. But in
a world of 6 billion people that is slowly corroding the underlying
social and environmental fabric that supports us all, why should we
not seek answers outside of what we already think we know. There are
such great problems in the world, such suffering, such inequality.
Sure, you might argue that the march of the west is also the march of
slow, plodding, and yet inevitable progress, but at what cost and to
what ends. How much longer can our planet sustain us? How much longer
will marginalized and forgotten peoples be subjected to such
inhumanity?
There is a truth to be known outside
of what us culturally, religiously western people think we know. We
continue to ignore it at our own peril. It may take courage and
difficulty to reach for it, but I believe that any such journey will
be infinitely worthwhile.
from South America
-little hupo