Thinking is not Optional

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THE OCEAN IS RIGHT THERE AND YOU’RE GOOGLING PUDDLES

A writer who didn’t choose his own book, a linguist’s father who understood depth before physics did, and the uncomfortable question of why Americans keep flying to Bali when the wisdom is in their backyard

Based on a podcast conversation between guest Glenn Aparicio Parry and host Philipp Kobald.

When the Ancestors File Your Book Proposal

There is something magnificently inconvenient about being told by two separate people, eighteen months apart, that you are going to write a book you never planned to write. Glenn Aparicio Parry, a man who has spent decades facilitating dialogue between Native American elders and Western scientists, did not sit down one morning with a marketing strategy and a target demographic spreadsheet and decide that “Original Love” was a bankable title. His wife Tomoko announced it to him over breakfast like she was reading the weather forecast. A year and a half later, a woman named Jean Ellis Sankari interrupted her own sentence during an unrelated meeting to deliver what she called “a download” — that he would write this book, and that it would complete a trilogy he didn’t know he was writing. The ancestors, it seems, had already done the pitch meeting. Parry just had to show up and type. What emerged was not a book about romantic love, not primarily, but about love as a cosmological force — something that precedes us, moves through us, and will cheerfully outlast every self-help book that tries to bottle it. “I don’t even like the expression… people say we’re gonna make love. Well, you can’t make it ’cause it’s already here,” Parry noted with the calm of someone who has thought about this for a very long time. He is careful with the word itself, aware that love has been weaponised by proselytisers who spoke of divine affection while systematically dismantling indigenous languages and lands. His indigenous friends warned him. So the book approaches love sideways, through kinship, compassion, respect — words that have not yet been strip-mined by greeting card companies.

The Day English Ran Out of Words

The intellectual spine of Parry’s career rests on a collision that most people don’t know happened: quantum physicists discovered that English couldn’t describe what they were seeing inside atoms. David Bohm, one of the twentieth century’s most original theoretical minds, actually tried to invent a new language — the Rheomode, from the Greek for “to flow” — because Indo-European languages are hopelessly addicted to nouns, to fixed things, to objects sitting still on shelves. Inside an atom, nothing sits still. Everything is process and relationship, verb upon verb upon verb. Native American languages, it turns out, had been structured this way for millennia. They are languages of movement, of flux, of becoming rather than being. This is why Leroy Little Bear, a Blackfoot professor who held positions at both Harvard and the University of Lethbridge, initiated dialogue circles between indigenous elders and Western scientists beginning in 1992. When Parry’s organisation SEED inherited that tradition in 1999, something remarkable kept happening: native participants could grasp quantum concepts that left conventionally trained Western minds fumbling. Not because they had studied physics, but because their languages had always described a world in motion. The implications are staggering and largely ignored. We have spent centuries assuming that indigenous ways of knowing were primitive, pre-scientific, charmingly mythological. It turns out they may have been post-scientific all along, patiently waiting for European thought to catch up.

The Doorstep You Keep Stepping Over

Philipp Kobald, to his credit, pushed a question that clearly had been bothering him across more than two hundred episodes of conversations with American spiritual practitioners. Why, he wanted to know, do so many seekers in the United States fly to India, study Aboriginal dreamtime, rhapsodise about Mongolian shamanism, and yet walk straight past the indigenous wisdom traditions growing like wildflowers in their own soil? “It’s right in front of your doorstep,” Kobald said with the exasperation of a European watching his neighbours ignore the feast on their own table. Parry’s answer was layered and honest. The history of genocide — from the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the deliberate slaughter of buffalo herds, the forced erasure of languages — has created a chasm of trust that no amount of good intentions can casually bridge. Carl Jung noticed the same paradox in 1924 when he visited Taos Pueblo and asked Americans essentially the same question Kobald asks now. A century later, the question remains unanswered, hanging in the air like smoke from a fire nobody wants to tend. Parry does not pretend to be an expert on Native America. He borrows a story from his mentor, the linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford, whose father once gazed at the Pacific Ocean with his ten-year-old son. The boy said, “Dad, that sure is a lot of water out there.” The father replied, “Yep, and that’s just the top of it.”

The Black Dog and the Tapestry

Parry ended his book on politics with love, which is either the most naive or the most radical editorial decision imaginable. He tells an Apache story about an old woman weaving a beautiful tapestry. When she steps away to stir her soup, a black dog awakens and tears the whole thing apart. She returns, looks into the chaos without anger, picks up a thread, and reimagines something even more beautiful. This, Parry suggests, is where America finds itself now — staring into an unravelled tapestry, needing trickster figures who periodically destroy everything so that nothing calcifies into permanent self-satisfaction. It is a vision that requires enormous patience and the kind of love that does not flinch when confronted with its own shadow. In a representational republic, he reminds us, the politicians are a reflection of the people. The uncomfortable corollary is that when leadership appalls you, the mirror is pointed inward.

Guest Bio

Glenn Aparicio Parry is a writer, professor, and founder of the SEED organisation, which facilitated dialogue circles between Native American elders and Western scientists for over twenty years, and the author of the “Original” trilogy including Original Thinking, Original Politics, and Original Love.

Closer

Moonhawk’s father understood something that most cosmologists still resist: that the visible surface of anything — an ocean, a language, a nation, a love — is never the point. The point is always the depth you cannot see, the part that holds everything else up, the silence beneath the conversation that makes the conversation possible.

https://glennaparicioparry.com

Copyright

Copyright © HolisticCircle. All rights reserved. The full episode can be watched on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel.

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#HolisticCircle #PhilippKobald #GlennAparicioParry #OriginalLove #IndigenousWisdom #NativeAmericanSpirituality #QuantumPhysics #SpiritualPodcast #DecolonizeYourMind #SacredNature