Letter of the Chief of Seattle to All

 

Chief Seattle's Letter To All
THE PEOPLE

Chief Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish Indians allegedly wrote to the American Government in the 1800's - In this letter he gave the most profound understanding of God in all Things. Here is his letter, which should be instilled in the hearts and minds of every parent and child in all the Nations of the World:

 

CHIEF SEATTLE'S LETTER

"The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you.

One thing we know - there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We ARE all brothers after all."

Kantian View of Perception

Perception

1.1. Whenever we see/perceive, we always see/perceive it as something. We do not just see without having determined what we are seeing.

1.2. The world is represented to us in our minds. But if our minds did not have a way to understand what is being represented, the picture would just be a confused jumble and we will be disoriented. If we put a goldfish in front a television screen it cannot make sense of the images, because it does not have a developed perceptual apparatus to understand the signs/symbols as human beings do. The goldfish might react to sudden brightness, or change of light intensity, but not to individual objects as they emerge. This is because it cannot understand those objects; its perceptual system cannot process the image, which to it is just a bunch of raw uninterrupted signs.

1.3. These signs/symbols when represented in the mind are processed by the human perceptual system. This perceptual system subconsciously makes judgements regarding these signs. It picks out objects from their surroundings, labels these objects, labels their surfaces (colour, texture), it judges the depth of vision, the brightness of light, identifies the space (as one’s bedroom or school), and identifies objects which were not there earlier, or highlights things which have newly appeared, and only after a complex set of judgements, this picture completely labelled is presented to us. That is what we call seeing!

1.4. If we want to investigate particular parts of what we are seeing, then we focus on those parts, and our visual apparatus yields us more specific knowledge of these parts.

1.5. Example: We do not consciously separate objects that we pick out from their background. It would take a tremendous amount of calculation to clearly identify the silhouette of a rabbit sitting against the background of a tree. It would require knowledge of how the shades which appear closer to the shade of the skin of the rabbit belong to the rabbit and so on. Or for example when we see a man holding a hat in his hand, we immediately recognize as such, and not as another organism with a slightly different limb on the right side of the body. Neither do we ever see protons, neutrons, photons, and not just because they are so small, but because our visual system is not interested nor designed to see them. Whatever is presented to it, the visual system will try to understand it using the concepts that are hard-wired into it.

1.6. Example: we are able to pick out objects from their background on the basis of depth perception. Now this judgement is not an obvious one, and requires two eyes to work simultaneously, with slightly conflicting angles. If we close one eye and put two fingers out in front of your eyes in such a way that one is closer than the other, then one cannot judge which one is closer. You need to as if look behind the fingers, with the other eye, from an angle. And to put these two angles, of conflicting images together, requires a complex judgement. And that is performed by the perceptual system.

1.7. Processing the light that impinges on the visual system is so complicated that it can be compared to the following situation: Imagine lot of people simultaneously jumping into a pool, but you can’t see them, you can only register a splash, and on the basis of the particulars of the splash you determine exactly who has jumped and at which part of the pool. This kind of a confused jumble of light signals reaches the visual system, which is immediately and automatically able to make judgements regarding what is what and where.

1.8. Thus this input data only appears as such because the perceptual system has the categories and the apparatus which enables it to interpret the way it does. This situation is also similar to light being refracted in a prism whereby the entire spectrum becomes visible. Now the spectrum is an aspect of light, which only comes to light in the presence of some apparatus which can separate wavelengths. And, if that apparatus was no where available one would never know that light had this quality. Our perceptual system is similar to this. Without it, there is no such thing as an apple, or an orange. These objects emerge only after the perceptual system processes the data in its own particular way. So, while one may grant that there is some extra-mental existence which produces the data, but the form/shape of the data is beyond our understanding. Because our understanding is of things as they appear after they have been processed by the visual system, not before it. So, whatever is before it is necessarily unrecognizable.

1.9. If one suggests that there must be some thing corresponding to the apple which produces the apple in our minds then one may respond in the following way: (1) Apple as we know it is not uninterrupted data which we do not recognize, it has a particular form which we do recognize, so that thing is not an apple (This is analogous to the difference between a chocolate sitting on a shelf, and chocolate being tasted on the tongue. The taste is not identical to the chocolate on the shelf. It necessarily requires a human interpreter of chocolate to bring about that taste.) (2) The problem with associating a particular thing corresponding to an apple amounts to a claim that we can pick this object out from existence. How does one pick out red from a stream of light without a prism?

1.10. Thus apples and oranges do not enter our visual system. Data does, which is then labelled by our perceptual system as apples and oranges. Outside of human scheme of objects there are no such things as apples and oranges-because “apples” and “oranges” is an imposed scheme that arises in the mind, and which necessarily require a mind to arise. When we close our eyes, there is no interpretation on the input data, then there are no apples and there are no oranges. But if you say you can touch them and tell, then again, the same arguments apply: your tactile systems are again at work in a way that create forms out of the tactile data and identifies it as an object. (Note: Without the visual apparatus one would never know what an apple looks like, but only how it feels like. Stretching it further, without the tactile apparatus, one could only taste the apple and not feel it. If we did not have the perceptual and tactile apparatuses could we in any way speculate how the thing that tastes would look like or feel like? Likewise, there may be 10 other ways of interpreting data (we have 5 ways) but this depends on the interpreter. What is the objective way of interpreting data? One may interpret the world by just looking at electromagnetic activity (and there won’t be any apples, and the judgements regarding separating objects will probably introduce an entirely new classification of things). What is wrong with that? Only that human beings don’t do it that way.

1.11. Outside of a human judgement there are only marks, symbols, lacking an interpretation, lacking any human meaning, like random scribbling on a piece of paper. The world is a language, a set of signs, which without human beings (as interpreters) would be without the meanings we (are designed to) associate to it.

1.12. A less philosophical corollary: Perhaps one could say, in the light of this, that outside of human judgement there are marks, symbols, lacking an interpretation, lacking any human meaning, like random scribbling on a piece of paper. The world is a language, a set of signs, which without human beings (as interpreters) would be without the meanings we (are designed to) associate to it.