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Beyond the Tyranny of Taboos by William Whitecloud
The other day my eight year old son, Tokkie, went up the coast with his Poppy to buy a few books and computer games, leaving my five year old daughter, India, feeling very left out. It was an ideal opportunity to spend one on one time with her, so I took her out for a hot chocolate and a game of ten pin bowling. Ten pin bowling is one of my family’s favorite things to do together, and I especially like it because it’s about the only thing I can beat the kids at. After being whipped at Nintendo games and the like my self esteem enjoys a little boost.
India is still too little to pick up and throw a bowling ball, so she uses a frame to roll her ball down at the pins. Usually I would aim the frame for her and she’d push the ball off. My aim didn’t count for much because it’s the spin that India puts on the ball that determines where it goes, and as much as I did to position the frame as accurately as possible, her results were always pretty bad compared to the rest of us. As we drove from the coffee shop to the bowling alley, I was expecting that things would go pretty much as they always did.
Well, was I in for a shock! This time India insisted on aiming her frame for herself, and even though, by my eye, she was way off target, her ball kept on striking the pins with deadly effect. She’d heave the ball onto the frame and then, after a brief moment of intense concentration, push it away with an almost contemptuous flourish. It was bizarre to watch: the ball would start out heading for the gutter, and then the spin would pull it back into the lane, and, to my amazement, begin barreling straight at the thick of the pins. She was knocking every pin down five turns out of ten.
Meanwhile my game was going to pieces. I was playing like a dizzy zombie. The more I focused, the more things seemed to go wrong. All the eleven pound balls – my favorite weight – were taken and I couldn’t find one that felt right. My approach felt awkward and almost every ball left my hand with a clumsy jerk. Even when I was satisfied I had done everything right, I was astonished to see my ball skew off target and manage to knock over only couple of balls on the edge of the triangle. More frustrating than anything, a couple of times I hit the triangle dead smack in the centre and miraculously most of the balls were left standing.
Gracious in defeat, I congratulated my daughter on her decisive victory, honestly assuring her that I had done everything I could to beat her. “Yes, but I was choosing my ball to knock over all the pins,” she innocently informed me. “I imagined all of them being knocked over and I kept that picture in my brain until the ball reached the end.”
“So did I,” I said, somewhat baffled.
“Yes, but you didn’t close your eyes,” she offered. “I did.”
“Yeah, but I can still visualize with my eyes open.” Defensive – but true.
“But I didn’t only choose to knock the pins over,” she consoled me. “I was choosing to win the game.”
There it was, a humbling reminder from my five year old daughter. How easy it is to confuse the process with the end result. You would think that the end result of ten pin bowling is to knock the most balls down – certainly the person with the most strikes wins. And yet India had couched her ball by ball focus within the ultimate end result: winning the game. They say the person with the highest vision wins, and I’ve most certainly experienced the truth of that premise.
Imagine, though, how good my “baby” daughter felt. Out there in the world, taking it to her father in a “big person’s” game of skill, discovering that she has the power to steer matters to the conclusion of her choice – using nothing more than her own imagination. It kind of leaves learning to ride a bike in the dirt. You’d think magic is something everyone would want to teach their children. In fact, many adults don’t even want to know about it for themselves.
Only the other day I was on radio being asked if we humans had the right to create what we loved. Was it up to us to decide what works out in life? Isn’t it just egoic hubris to play at being God? I hear this reservation a lot. The thing that occurs to me is that for some reason there exists in the human psyche an intense self hatred, the origins of which are quite blurred. Somehow we hate – or fear – our own nature.
Take sex. One of the most beautiful, pleasurable, healing, honoring aspects of humanness is our sexual nature. Yet it is often portrayed as vile and depraved. There are millions of people who strive to abstain from sex completely, or only engage in it for the reason of procreation. Some people are so ashamed of sex that they do it through a hole in the sheet.
Crazy, huh? But it doesn’t stop there. There are whole populations that are against making music and dancing. Seriously. There are major religions who are against art – they believe that replicating an image is a sin. When you study comparative religion you get the impression that after the Gods made humans they were very displeased with their own creation. Apparently we’re all wrong, and we’ve been warned to do nothing we’re designed to do until further notice, unless we want to suffer pestilence and plagues.
To me, this creative cringe we all suffer from unconsciously is a throw back from the days of feudal rule by kings and priests who used taboos to keep the masses from discovering their own power.
There’s nothing wrong with human nature – only the messages we give ourselves about human nature. When we create without guilt and shame, we not only manifest our highest ideals and potential, we also discover the one thing that’s better than sex – our own power.
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