THE SENSITIVE CHAOS: World of the Great Spirit

Symbol: Meandering Spiral

Civilization:

• • Nomadic hunting-gathering band as the largest cohesive social unit
• Palaeolithic era, Stone Age technology (no agrictilture, animal domestication, metallurgy, pottery, or textiles)
• Egalitarian social structures with an ethic of sharing and cooperation, mechanisms for limiting personal wealth, and little or no occupational specialization
• No written language or developed knowledge of mathematics
• Rich oral traditions, artas an expression of sacred rituals and beliefs (after about 30,000 B.C.)
• Examples: all hominids and homo sapiens throughout evolution up to the invention of agriculture; contemporary examples indude the Kung San (Bushinen) and Mbuti Pygmies of Africa, the Tasaday of the Philippines, the Australian Aborigines, Eskimos, and most tribal peoples living in the Arnazon forest, to the degree that they are untouched by "civilization"

Psyche:

• • Cosmos as a unity within the Great Spirit, in which all states of being are mutable
• Uroboric oneness (same as Piaget's "egocentrism," Cassirer's "sympathetic identification," and Levy Bruhi's "participation mystique"), suppression of ego so as not to separate Self from others and from surroundings
• The state of mind of the child in the womb and in infancy where there is no individual ego or psychological separation from the mother
• Anirnism, shamanism, sympathetic magic, veneration of nature spirits and totems; perceiving the world as a Sensitive Chaos animated by spirits, lines and nodes of energy, syncitronistic linkages, and magical events transcending our laws of space and tirne; oneness with nature, identification with animals and other life forms
• Non-linear tirne, synchronicity, feeling of eternity or timelessness
• Mythic images and rites concerning the Great Spirit, spirit places, totems and taboos, mimicry of animals, sympathetic magic, the making of ritual paraphenalia, transmuting to another life form (e.g., shamanically becoming a bird or animal), attaining psychoerotic perception
• Emphasis on psychoerotic activities such as music, dance, transformative arts and rituals, holistic thinking, altered states of consciousness, clairvoyance, ecstatic trance states, dreams, natural healing; greatest psychoerotic orientation of all the archetypes
• Concern with one's responsibility for maintaining the harmony of the living
• Psychological stagnation in the Sensitive Chaos can produce a desire to regress to uroboric unconsciousness in the womb
• Psychological liberation in the Sensitive Chaos can lead to erlightenment through transcending ego and healing the primal split between self and other.

Space:

• • Space as an immediate flowing topological continuum with little geometric order
• The landscape as an alive organism with lines and nodes of energy depending on human care for vitality (a belief that often gives rise to elaborate tribal myths and ceremonial cydes, as in the Australian Aborigines' myths and rites concerning the Dreamfime), a network of spirit places in nature as the most important spatial "structure" and view of the landscape itself as sacred
• Impermanent huts and shelters made of locally available natural materials (mud, thatch, vines, hides, ice), which readily disintegrate back into the earth
• Undifferentiated architecture (no distinctly different building types for different institutions and activities such as residence, burial, government, commerce, manufacture, and worship)
• Dwellings as spiritual "doubles" of their inhabitants, not bought and sold as commodities, and frequently serving as burial places which are burned or abandoned when the inhabitant dies
• Little sense of private property (beyond personal tools and huts); territorial rangeAand defined and maintained through myths and rituals rather than laws and walls