Читать книгу Reality Is Just an Illusion - Chuck Sr. Coburn - Страница 9

John Perkins was a volunteer in the Peace Corps right out of business school, and then a management consultant to the United Nations and the World Bank. He had spent most of his time in the rain forests of South America, assisting and teaching the natives the advantages of the modern mechanized world. He helped them clear the forests and build factories and power plants in order to bring the primitive culture into step with the twentieth century.

Until he woke up to what he was doing.

John realized that he was not helping the indigenous culture. In fact, he realized that he was actually a part of the problem. Although the Corps did much that was good, it was ultimately denying the local natives their own way of being. John felt that we were imposing our culture, our lifestyle, and our belief system on people who not only didn't understand it, but were perfectly happy with their own culture's status quo.

Journalist Joe Kane wrote a moving story about this issue (San Francisco Examiner, October 29, 1995). The article is about a man named Moi, an Ecuadorian native from the Amazon rain forest who traveled to Washington, D.C. to communicate the harm being inflicted on his people. He left his world of loincloth and bare feet to hand-carry a letter addressed to the "President of the United States of North America." As Mr. Kane recalled the story, Moi traveled two weeks by foot, canoe, bus, rail, and air to ask why the United States was trying to destroy his culture. "The whole world must come and see how the Heroin [tribe] live well,” he wrote. "We live with the spirit of the jaguar. We do not want to be civilized by your missionaries or killed by your oil companies. Must the jaguar die so that you can have more contamination and television?"

You can imagine the official government response.

Fortunately, our planetary awareness is beginning to change. John Perkins is one of an increasing number of environmentalists beginning to touch the consciousness of the world view. Because he has devoted much of his energy to raising money to purchase the rain forest in the name of the "people," the local shamans are reciprocating in their way. They have made themselves available to teach sacred knowledge—a practice all but forgotten in the hustle and bustle of our fast-paced world.

Our trip to this isolated location, this outer edge of my Western­based comfort zone, was to seek additional understanding about this ancient knowledge, this seldom understood nature of"reality."