Jew World Order

Most of us in the developed world live with an atomized view of the world and lack the ability to perceive the subtle connection between things. We train ourselves to perceive the world as a load of individual and separate objects and categories of objects or separate ideas. We’re looking for the central element in the drama, the central object as separate from its background, and on that we train all of our attention. We cannot see the wood—the forest—for the trees…

When the three eighty-foot waves of the December 2004 tsunami struck Bon Yai beach on South Surin Island in Thailand, the Moken tribe, a small nomadic community of fishermen, witnessed the destruction of their village and the instant deaths of 24,000 people from a safe haven on one of the island’s highest hilltops. Tribal elders had alerted the entire Moken tribe of two hundred, and all save one, a handicapped boy, were successfully evacuated well before the waves struck. By the time the tsunami swept north, reaching the Andaman and Nicobar islands and southern India, all 250 members of the ancient Jarawa tribe living on the otherwise deserted island of Jirkatang had already fled into the Balughat forest. After ten days of surviving on coconuts they emerged unharmed.

All members of the other four indigenous tribes of the Indian archipelago of the Andaman and Nicobar islands—the Onges, the Great Andamanese, the Sentinelese, and the Shompens—were also said to have had a foreboding of the tsunami, even though ordinarily they would have been out fishing on the seas. When an Indian helicopter circled the island, scanning the region for survivors, a naked Sentinelese, affronted by the needless intrusion, grabbed his bow and lobbed an arrow at the chopper.

When asked how they knew the tsunami was coming, an elder of the Jarawa tribe shrugged. It was obvious. One of the small boys of the tribe had felt dizzy. The level of the creek near their village had suddenly dropped. One of his tribesmen had noticed a few small differences between the way one wave swelled compared to another. They’d noticed an unusual restlessness and scuffling among the smaller mammals, a slight alteration in the swimming patterns of the fish. As a child, the elder had been taught to pay attention to these subtle signals. They warned of tremors from the earth and the sea about to hurl forward with fury. The elder understood that these were signs, that the sea and the earth were “angry” and that his people should flee to higher land.

One of the worst-hit areas of the tsunami included Yala National Park, Sri Lanka’s largest wildlife preserve, where tidal waves flooded up to two miles inland. Yet according to Ravi Corea, president of the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society, of the hundreds of animals at the preserve, only two water buffalo died. Hundreds of elephants, leopards, tigers, crocodiles, and small mammals hid in their shelters or escaped to safety.

The remarkable survival of wild animals and indigenous people has been variously attributed to an exquisitely attuned sense of hearing, a “seismic” gift that allows them to sense the vibrations of the earthquake, or an ancient understanding of subtle changes in the wind and water. “They can smell the wind,” says Ashish Roy, a lawyer and environmental activist, about the native islanders. “They can gauge the depth of the sea with the sound of their oars. They have a sixth sense which we don’t possess.”

But another possibility is something even more extraordinary: an enormous difference between the way they see the world compared to the way we see it. A year before the tsunami hit, Anna Gislén, an ophthalmic biologist at Lund University in Sweden, was intrigued when a colleague told her that the sea gypsies, as the Moken are referred to by outsiders, had the extraordinary ability to collect obscure food from the sea floor. They could even distinguish small brown clams from brown stones underwater without the use of visual aids. Such a feat wasn’t usually possible, even with goggles, as human beings are poorly adapted to see underwater. When we are out in air, two-thirds of our eye’s refractive power is due to the curvature of the corneal surface, an advantage that is lost when we are swimming underwater.

Gislén headed off to Thailand’s Surin Islands and began conducting underwater tests on Moken children, comparing their visual ability with that of European children on holiday in the surrounding areas. What she discovered confounded most ideas about human biology. Ordinarily, when we’re immersed in a blurry environment, such as water, our eyes don’t attempt to focus, which is exactly what Gislén observed with the European children she studied. The Moken children’s underwarer acuity, however, was more than twice as sharp as the Europeans’.

A Moken child learns to swim before he learns to walk. He’s taught to slow his heartbeat when underwater in order to stay there longer. The Moken children train their eyes to control the “accommodative response” to the blurry underwater environment by constricting their pupils to a diameter that is 0.7mm smaller than the Europeans can in order to improve depth perception—”the same process that improves focal depth if using a camera with a smaller aperture,” Gislén noted. This minor accommodation improves vision so much that they are able to locate small clams and sea cucumbers, even at a depth of ten to thirteen feet underwater.

In every regard the Moken have learned to see with a better pair of eyes. They have turned their eyes into cameras, changing the aperture at will. They are able to notice detail and connections that most of us can no longer see.

They see into the space between things.

We have lost our sense of the Bond, but our loss is not irrevocable. We can recover wholeness in our lives and recapture our sense of the connection between things, but doing so requires a very different set of rules from the ones we currently live by. To live the Bond is to surrender to nature’s drive for wholeness and to recognize the whole in every aspect of our daily lives. We have to ask ourselves some fundamental questions: How should we view the world as something other than a place for just ourselves? How should we relate to each other, if not competitively? How might we organize ourselves in our neighborhoods—the immediate tribe around us and our smallest group outside the family—to be mutually supportive rather than competitive?

We need to perceive the world differently, relate to others differently, organize ourselves—our friendships and neighborhoods, our towns and cities—differently. If we’re not to be separate, but always attached and engaged, we need to change our fundamental purpose on Earth to something more than one based on struggle and domination. We must look at our lives from an entirely different perspective, a larger vantage point, so that we can finally see the interconnection. We must change the very way we see the world so that we see as a Moken sees, not to forecast tsunamis, but to notice the connections that tie us all together.

Most of us in the developed world live with an atomized view of the world and lack the ability to perceive the subtle connection between things. We’ve developed a peculiar form of tunnel vision that concentrates on looking for the individual thing. That thing is usually an object, or even ourselves, but it can also be the central protagonist or even the central point of the story.

We train ourselves to perceive the world as a load of individual and separate objects and categories of objects or separate ideas. Attending to the separate object entails seeing the world entirely from that object’s particular vantage point: categorizing the object, applying rules to it, and working out causal relationships only in terms of the object itself. We’re looking for the central element in the drama, the central object as separate from its background, and on that we train all of our attention. We cannot see the wood—the forest—for the trees.

We have forgotten how to look. We miss the subtle connection, the peripheral idea, the slightest of changes in the wind that lead us to the inescapable conclusion that a tsunami is about to hit. Even the Moken who were out in their boats before the tsunami struck knew to go to deeper waters and to stay away from the shore, unlike the Burmese fishermen nearby, who perished. A Moken greets the news of their demise with a knowing nod: “They were collecting squid. They saw nothing. They don’t know how to look.”

We have seen that our most fundamental need is always to seek connection and unity and to move beyond individuality, yet when we look at our world all we see are separate and unrelated, individual things. Our most basic impulses about ourselves run counter to how we presently see and interpret our world. By learning to see like a Moken—to see the space between things—we may learn to recognize the connections that were always there but remain invisible to the Western eye: the connections that tie us all together.

We will begin to recognize what is most invisible of all: the impact of ourselves on others and on our surroundings. We will notice the ripple effect of every action on an entire chain of being—the living things, the natural world, the friends along the network, the members of our community, the people from other countries whom we benefit or harm by what we do. Just as a Moken sees a chain reaction of events from the stirrings of a bird or the swimming patterns of a fish, so we may be able to see into the space where difference fades away and we find our common ground.

The lesson of the Moken runs far deeper than hunting for clams or surviving a tsunami. It shows us that when human beings look at the world out there, not all of us see the same thing. Our individual cultures teach us how to look and what to see. By recognizing this, we can begin to take a larger and more all-embracing look.

Imagine two international students, one from Japan and the other from the United Stares, at the Louvre, fighting the crowds to stand in front of the bulletproof, climate-controlled cage housing the Mona Lisa. Both are instructed to describe the painting.

The American immediately focuses on the woman herself and her most celebrated mysteries: her identity, now assumed to be Mona Lisa Gherardini, the third wife of wealthy silk merchant Francesco di Bartolommeo di Zanobi del Giocondo, and the source of her enigmatic smile. He is drawn to the painting’s very epicenter: the triangle of features encompassing the woman’s eyes and lips. He notices the sfumado registering the shadows on the outer points of her eyes, painted in deliberately to obscure the emotion of the sitter, and the odd smile playing on the left side of her mouth. Every other part of the painting seems stuck on like an afterthought and may as well disappear. No matter how long he stares at it, the American cannot integrate the wood—the rest of the painting—for the single tree—the figure in the foreground of the frame.

To the Japanese student, however, the painting represents a metaphysical statement about the cosmos: the connection between humanity and nature. His eyes flicker back and forth between the figure and the background landscape, noting details such as the finery of the stitching in the woman’s black veil or her curves echoed in the extraordinarily elaborate background landscape, with its winding paths and rivers and glimpse of the bridge at Buriano. He pauses to ponder the woman’s complete lack of jewelry, uncharacteristic for that period in history. For a good half hour he regards the painting through his fingers at different angles, using his paper museum guide as a kind of ruler, to work out the meaning of the violations of perspective and the variation in the size of Mona Lisa’s hands. Through his eyes the woman’s features entirely disappear into their surroundings.

There may as well not be a person in the foreground, so little does she stand out for him. Mona Lisa cannot be freed from her context. The Japanese student literally cannot see the tree for the wood.

In the difference between what these two students see lies a good portion of Richard Nisbett’s career. Nisbett, a professor of social psychology at the University of Michigan and the author of The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners See Things Differently and Why, has made a life study of cultural influences on methods of thinking.

Nisbett contends that thought processes and even perception itself are not universal, but a cultural phenomena. People do not perceive the world in the same way in different parts of the world; they don’t even see the same thing. Nisbett’s extensive work in this area, which he terms “the geography of thought,” clearly shows that different cultures develop very different styles of thinking. It starts with the very way we’re taught to see.

For most Americans older than fifty, Dick and Jane was the first book they read, and it described a perfect American fantasy, recording the comings and goings of the rosy-cheeked brother-and-sister duo, their little sister, Sally, and their black-and-white spaniel, Spot. They inhabit a Leave It to Beaver world, with a dad who sports a suit, even on weekends, and a mom who wears a pretty pastel day dress, even in her own kitchen. The narrative always focuses on one of them getting up to something: “Look Jane. See Dick. See Dick Run,” as Dick tears across the lawn.

According to Nisbett, books like Fun with Dick and Jane (and their British counterparts, Janet and John) taught children not just how to read, but how to see the world. In Dick and Jane’s world, and ultimately in the Western world, a child learns to zero in on the individual. What we do by ourselves—what we get up to, how we feel, what we achieve by ourselves—is central, the very point of our existence. Our parents and schooling emphasize individual excellence over all else. We learn that we are the subject and everything else is the object. We see the rest of the world entirely as it relates to us. We are taught—encouraged—to be separate, the central point of the story.

From the moment he is born a Western child is taught to work toward independence. Early training from the crib teaches us how to think, but also, in a sense, how to be. We learn that autonomy is most important. As Nisbett notes, Western babies are encouraged to sleep alone and to move as quickly as possible toward independence in their thinking and choices.

Mothers introduce the world in terms of objects to be labeled and choices to be made: Ham or eggs? The red pen or the blue pen? Barney or Sesame Street? The late anthropologist Edward T. Hall called this kind of thinking the outcome of a “low-context” society, by which he meant that our identity is independent of our context. We view ourselves as an unfettered free agent; take you or me out of our society, plant us somewhere else, and we will still be the same person. These overriding, atomistic ideas—that our identity is autonomous, that we are the master of our universe—inform how we interpret and relate to the riot of sensation and stimulus coming at us at every moment.

East Asian children learn to read with very different ideas. In one of their first reading books, a little boy sits on the shoulders of a bigger boy: “Big brother takes care of little brother. Big brother loves little brother. Little brother loves big brother.” An East Asian understands himself only in his relation to the whole, whether the whole is represented by his family, his neighborhood, his culture, the Tao, or even his sense of consciousness.

As children, East Asians (and also many indigenous cultures, like the Moken) are brought up with such a strong sense of connection to others that they can see the self (and objects) only in relationship to their context.

Because Easterners define their world so differently, they learn to view it with a different pair of eyes. In the East a child learns about the relationship and its primacy—that he and someone else are a unit, an indivisible Bond. Consequently, according to Nisbett, Eastern cultures actually think differently than we do in the West. Traditionally the Chinese (whose culture has influenced many others in the East) have learned to understand things only in regard to other things. They see life in relation to a field of forces and understand matter in the universe not as a set of discrete objects but as mutual, continuous, and interpenetrating.

The world, to the Easterner and to native cultures, is in flux, ever mutable and in the process of becoming. The Eastern or indigenous mind has learned to see the world far more holistically from the moment it is conscious.

Indigenous people, such as Native Americans, also learn to take in the totality of the physical and emotional landscape. “Seeing involves mentally experiencing the relationship between tangible and nontangible things in the world and in the universe,” says Donald Fixico, a Seminole and Muscogee Creek who has studied the differences between Indian and Western “linear thinking.”

To a Westerner, “thinking Indian,” as he describes it, is a bit like being in the middle of a hallucinogenic experience. It blends the visible and invisible, the present and the past, the dreamer and his surroundings. All of those relationships, past and present, color what a Native American sees.

The stories we tell ourselves about how the world works ultimately govern what we perceive. After a while we see only what we are taught to see. This is partly due to a mechanism in the brain referred to as “kindling,” discovered and named by a neuroscientist, Graham Goddard, who first accidentally discovered the phenomenon in 1967 after a surprise outcome in an experiment with a set of laboratory rats.

Goddard was fascinated by the neurobiology involved in learning and wondered whether electrostimulation might speed up the process. In his experiment he electrically stimulated the brains of a group of rats every day, enough to provoke a seizure, to see if this had any effect on their ability to learn. After some days he noticed something completely untoward: the rats began having seizures even when the electrical current and charge applied to their brain were far too low to provoke a seizure. Somehow he’d trained their brains to become epileptic.

As a result of Goddard’s work, modern neuroscientists believe that, like a coal fire that blazes more easily when ignited with small pieces of wood, so pathways within the nervous system become sensitive to certain connections if they are reinforced early on, after which they begin to occur more easily or with greater frequency.

The theory of kindling has been applied to bipolar disorder and depressive illness; it’s now believed that the more depressed someone has been in the past, the more easily he gets depressed in future. From our understanding of brain plasticity, we also realize that kindling is a feature of perception.

Over time the pessimist can see only the negative in any given situation, and the optimist can see only the positive. For us in the West, so used to picking out individual things in our world, the center of the picture is now all we can see. We are always looking for the star of the show.

In a fascinating series of studies Nisbett and his team in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan revealed stark differences in the way Westerners and Easterners perceive the world. Working with a colleague at Hokkaido University in Japan, Nisbett gathered together two groups of students from the two universities and showed them twenty-second videos of underwater scenes. After viewing the film twice, each participant was asked to report what he saw.

The Americans invariably began describing the scene with the objects in the center: the fish. To the Japanese the context was most important; they saw the field itself: the color of the water, the plants, the ocean floor. They were even sensitive to the inner lives of the fish and more likely than the Americans to describe what they interpreted as the fish’s emotions.

When Nisbett altered the videos slightly and then showed it to both groups of students, the Americans were most likely to detect the changes if they related to the central object, and the Japanese were most likely to see the changes if they concerned the background environment.

Nisbett has even found that Easterners and Westerners have developed different ways of using their eyes to take in theit surroundings. When he monitored the eye movements of a group of American and Chinese participants while they viewed batches of photographs, each with a single object, such as a tiger, in the foreground against a complex background, the eyes of Americans quickly fixed on the tiger, whereas the eyes of the Chinese flitted from one point in the background to another.

The Chinese made use of far more rapid intermittent eye movement than the Americans, but also required far more time to take in the entire image. From their upbringing, they’d learned to attend to the whole far more than did the Westerners. When viewing the same scene the two cultures actually saw something quite different.

Nisbet then asked groups of Japanese and Americans to take a photo of one another. The Japanese would always photograph the entire scene, with the whole person framed to be relatively small against the entire background, whereas Americans photographed the person in close-up.

What all this adds up to is that out philosophy of the world and how we see ourselves in relation to it govern what we actually see. In the West we are so busy picking apart what we see, looking for the individual thing rather than the Bond, that oftentimes we miss the vital connection right in front of us.