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The Ever-changing Law

I watched a very interesting film yesterday called “Ten canoes” which is a story about Australian aboriginals; it was certainly worth a watch. It is a story, within a story, and story is their vehicle for educating the young people and transmitting the tribal wisdom from one generation to the next.

The old man telling the story to his young brother, begins his tale by saying that his story is very old, and predates any living person’s oldest relatives lives, in other words it is ancient. He refers to “The Law” as having been handed down from the earliest times, and having been given to the people by Spirit. This interested me because it was clear that the foundation of this society was The Law, and it was fundamental that it did not change.

By contrast, during Blair’s premiership we saw the introduction of 2,685 new laws every year! The thing is, under these circumstances, no one can possibly know what is legal or not before the event; and only highly paid professional stand even a chance of guessing! Contrast this with a society where even the youngster child knows what is within the law.

Change is a two sided coin, on one face are those things we seek to change because they need to be better, and on the other, are those good things we want to preserve. I think in these ever-changing times, we have perhaps become disconnected from the second face of this ‘coin’.

Aboriginal law is all about relationships and defines the connections between the individual and their family, their tribe and others. It is fundamental to this precept that these relationships were defined in ‘Dreamtime’, before conception. Another fundamental is that “We don’t own the land, the land owns us”.

So in these ever-changing and challenging times, what are the key things that you wish to see preserved, and more importantly, what are you doing about them?

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.” Ronald Reagan

“If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever” St Thomas Aquinas

Resources:

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 09:43 and is filed under Business Change, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “The Ever-changing Law”

  1. simonmorice says:
    10 March , 2008 at 13:22

    Fascinating Richard.

    I did some research for a film some time back and came across the Lakota Indian prayer Mitakuye Oyasin which translates as “We Are All Related” or “All Our Relations”. Prayers such as this are designed for unwrapping in conversations around the fireside; they preserve the philosophy of illiterate cultures. Like the parables of Jesus Christ they are really difficult to think up yet are as powerful as they are easy to remember.

    I am intrigued by the notion of story and how it is a quintessential of all human cultures. It encodes the rules and wisdom found to be sustainable through the generations, makes an argument for how to deal with an issue through rehearsal by engaging with each of the listener’s three brains. And all because we love to worry. Now listeners have mainly turned into viewers and ephemeral entertainment is the prime focus. Stories have become a largely disposable feature of our ‘campfires’ with only a few well crafted enough to persist.

    The consideration given to prayers, parables and stories has diminished as they have become pretty much entertainment only and we are losing a tool of self regulation. As you point out, we live in times of prodigious legislation. How can our society benefit from nearly ten course corrections per day?

  2. richardderwentcooke says:
    10 March , 2008 at 13:25

    Simon,

    Firstly, thanks for such a great posting.

    Secondly it is a DVD not a TV programme, I believe it may even have won a series of awards.

    And finally, I don’ think there is any way we can cope with this level of ‘tinkering’.

    I wonder what our native English stories are and what lessons they would have taught us? The problem with the fact that we are used to always improving things on a technical level, is that we assume that we are improving everything else in a similar way, and just are so used to the ‘chuck it out’ mentality that we have little respect fro the lessons learnt by our ancestors. We just assume, rather arrogantly, that we are much smarter than they were. Granted we are probably better informed, but “Informed about what?” I ask! The tittle tattle of celebrities and a whole load of other trivia…

  3. Alexander_M says:
    10 March , 2008 at 14:36

    My understanding of both the aboriginal and Native American traditions is that their Law is not decided or defined by people, but an expression of their understanding of Universal Law – those principles that express the fundamental nature of things. How these then play out in human relationships, for example, is then named in their wise sayings and teachings. In this way, when teaching their Law, they impose nothing – they simply share and explain What Is. It is therefore a Law of natural consequences – no punishment or reward system exists or needs to be devised or administered. We can try to defy such universal principles of course – and those same universal principles will then dictate what happens next anyway.

    This is what Pythagoras was exploring when he discovered the properties of his right-angled triangle (stay with me on this for a moment!). He was exploring universal law, what it was, and how to talk about it. The first point of the triangle he called Self. The second point was Other, or the World. Much of our time, we try to work out how to improve our own experience through trying to interact with the world directly, manipulating it (or attempting to) so that it gives us more of what we want. And we are endlessly inventive. Sometimes the world conforms to our wishes, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes we think we have found the ‘magic formula’. But then the world does something contrary and we are all upset again. So we shuttle back and forth along this dimension, unaware of the third point of the triangle. The third point, Pythagoras called Truth (others might call it Universal Law, or even Spirit or the Divine). He said that Truth, or universal law, governed everything, both the World, and Self, and everything conformed to it. So if the World conforms to the principles of the third point of the triangle, and we do too, then he proposed that we spend more time aligning ourselves consciously with this third point, contemplating it, understanding it, respecting it. It was only through doing this, he said, that we could hope to find a happier alignment with the World (or in relationships, the Other). This is another statement of the wisdom in all great spiritual traditions, whether those already mentioned, or Buddhism, or Jewish Kabbalah, and so on.

    Perhaps in the light of this, we should spend less time trying to control each other through making laws, and more time reaching into the heart of things to understand more about universal law.

    Alexander Massey
    Authentic Voice

  4. richardderwentcooke says:
    10 March , 2008 at 14:37

    Alexander,
    I love this posting! Thank you….

    Interestingly in the film, one of the people killed someone by mistake and there was a formula of redress that they had to follow, so there were social conventions that ‘governed’ their behaviour. The chief had to agree to having the wronged tribe throw spears at him, and they either got their retribution or accepted that the debt was cancelled anyway.

    I think the thing is we are too engaged in social engineering, and spend far too little time thinking about Justice and what is right. Now I realise that there are many views on these issues, but our focus seems to be in the wrong place. We are effectively trying to tune the engine of a car, when we should be asking if this is the right method of transport in the first place!

  5. Alexander_M says:
    10 March , 2008 at 14:47

    ‘d be interested to know whether the offended tribe seriously tried to hit their target. In the ancient Arabic tradition of Sulha, the offended party can be approached by a mediator from the perpetrator (who might have murdered their son for example). The offended party ritualistically rebuffs the first couple of approaches, and then agrees to meet. Then the perpetrator, mediator and victim’s family all meet at the home of the offended family, who prepares a meal. The perpetrator apologises, offers gifts or money which the family ritualistically refuses, and then the really mind-boggling bit happens. The offended family welcomes the perpetrator as a member of their family in perpetuity. This is an extraordinary act of forgiveness and resolution. This ancient Arabic tradition, and the sharing over a meal, transformed into the Jewish bread and wine for celebrating the weekly sabbath, which in turn became the Christian communion ritual.

    I think that the origin of all this is the universal law that peace can be obtained only through acts of peace – a true connection with the third point of the triangle.

    Alexander Massey

  6. richardderwentcooke says:
    10 March , 2008 at 14:49

    No, in this case this was not what happened. They really wanted to hit him. He was able to nominate a second who shared the risk, and they agreed that if they hit him, this also cleared the debt. They were allowed to dance in such a way as to make them partially ‘invisible’

    The interesting points were that the alternative to submitting to this higher and ritualised form of justice was a tribal conflict with unpredictable consequences, so he chose to take responsibility for his transgression himself.

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