We take it for granted that what differentiates colonized humans from all other living species is their knowledge of death. But this is complete nonsense. We don’t know that we are going to die, because if we knew, we wouldn’t be able to live in selfishness, vanity and the gratuitous conflict of competitiveness. We solemnly ignore death, believing that we will live forever, that we are indeed immortal.
And immortality is our efficiency in transmitting to our children the same destructive values that we have nurtured our entire lives.
We praise the dehumanization of humans every second of the day. With judgments, convictions, prejudice, use of power.
Outside the colonial world, beings respect death. All beings, not just earth-humans of a shared humanity.
The Lakota coined the expression Hoka Hey with a full sense of solemnity: today is a good day to die!
For us, who believe in immortality, we need to give up living forever in the name of a kind of honest dignity that reminds us, at all times, that it is not worth prolonging life with power. Embracing the vital potency, we face the ever-present possibility of death head on.
This wisdom equalizes our journey with the refusal of greed, as we cannot rely on the search for lack by refusing fullness.
We are facing two times: chronos and cairós. Chronos is the linear time of the colonizers while Cairós is the time of God.
Lakota cosmogony translates with surprising clarity the role of being in the cosmos.
“Each of us was placed in this time and place to personally decide the future of humanity. Did you believe you were here for something less important?” – Arvol Looking Horse, Chief of the Lakota Nation.
This implication is of fundamental importance, as each being is at a point that affects all humanity. And here we are talking about shared humanity, not the colonial form that we are used to conceiving as human sovereignty guided by reason.
Digital generated infinity like time spiral
Eduardo Bonzatto*, Political Pragmatism
Read all of Eduardo Bonzatto’s texts here
If the linear and dichotomous time of chronos sacrifices the present in the name of the future, cairós time refers to an indeterminate occasion in time when something special happens. And this is always in the present. The opportune moment of the significant event. But you have to feel the moment.
All life is coagulated not present, not instant.
He is the Ikitomi god of maximum Lakota wisdom, in the form of a spider weaving dreams so that life cycles fulfill each sphere for a new beginning. Every day is a fresh start, every life is a fresh start, so that nothing exhausts, nothing ends, nothing begins. The symbol is made with willow branches, horse hair, bird plumage, beads and small objects, braided with a hole in the middle, to retain good dreams and leak bad ones. A filter. The beginning and the end meet. So we do not move forward, but towards the end, which is the new beginning. And this continuously, every day.
Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of birth, the end of the cycle restarted with birth.
The attitude of nullifying the influences of chronos and the option for cairós, moving away from linear and dichotomous time and embracing the wonders of the present is an important step towards living according to a very specific code that the Lakota translate as Hoka Hey, that is, “ learning to die.”
Aware that death is present, we do not waste time with nonsense, with vanity, with greed and with a lack that in fact is not in us, but in the attachments of colonial reality.
Life in the present also restores a principle that everything that lives is our neighbor and that we cannot neglect its existence in the name of our ego.
Ikitomi explains that at each stage of life there are many forces acting in different directions. Some are positive and others are negative. These are contingencies that we need to turn our attention to recognizing, since good does not always seem good, nor is bad seen as something bad.
Colonial moral judgments are invalid for these feelings that can lead us to the good life. Only internally, with feeling, can we intuit such differences.
The poet Horácio announced Carpe Diem, quam minimum credula postero, that is, seize the day and trust as little as possible in tomorrow.
Already the 11th century Islamic wine poet, Omar Kayyam, warned that “the Quran, the supreme book, can be read sometimes, but no one always delights in its pages. On the wine glass is engraved a text of adorable wisdom that the mouth reads with more and more delight each time.”
The present time represented by wine is its unique and unrepeatable moment. That’s why his maxim “never, for even a moment, leave your glass unused! Wine keeps the heart, faith and intuition entertained.”
The conception of present death makes life fully lived, without the material debris that slowly weaves a sarcophagus of illusions for the future.
Now, a wine, a good cigar, a love bring infinity in an instant.
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