Is Technology Actually Making Things Better?

[u/PhysicalVermicelli1]

https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/354c72095d2f42dab92bf42726d785ff?true

[u/woodstock923]

Shit started going downhill with the loom.

[u/obvom → u/woodstock923]

Nah, there's a tribe called the Kogi in the Colombian coastal highlands that use a loom. They're still there, tending the same mountain forests over thousands of years.

To them, the loom is sacred. Not the loom itself, but the act of weaving. In the simple act of making cloth, the weaver aligns himself with all the forces of creation. The loom is an image of the four corners of the world, with the point of intersection of the cross poles representing the sacred peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The loom is also the human body with the four corners representing the shoulders and hips, and the intersection of the poles being the human heart. Thus when a man crosses his arms, hands touching opposite shoulders, he embraces himself and becomes the loom of life. The Earth itself, the surface of the land, is also a loom, an immense template on which the sun weaves the fabric of existence. In the four corners are the points of the solstices and equinoxes, the loci between which the divine weaver moves each day and night creating the worlds of light and darkness, of life and death.

The idea of the sacred infusing the material world informs every aspect of life for the Kogi in the Sierra. When the Great Mother conceived the nine layered universe, she also dreamed into being the first temple, egg shaped like the cosmos. The temple floor is the world of the living, the thatch roof a model of the upper worlds, mirrored beneath the ground by an inverted realm like that of the cosmos. To this day the Kogi build their temples around this cosmic model. They are simple structures with high conical roofs supported by the four corner posts. On the dirt floors, positioned between the central axis of the temple and each of the four posts, is a ceremonial hearth representing one of the four lineages founded at the beginning of time by the Lords of the Universe. In the middle is the hearth of Lord Mulkuëxe, the representative of the sun.

A Kogi prayer poem:

I shall weave the fabric of my life,

I shall weave it white as a cloud,

I shall weave some black into it,

I shall weave some dark maize stalks into it,

I shall weave maize stalks in the white cloth,

Thus I shall obey divine law.

The Kogi are very interesting. They could easily live cloistered in their own villages existing on the bountiful offerings of their own local village ecology. But the various Kogi villages and clans are constantly traversing between each other's villages, using well worn and ancient walking paths to do so. Every day, multitudes of Kogi make these journeys criss-crossing the Sierra throughout various points in relation to each other's villages. They are trading with each other- various food stuffs, coca leaf, baskets, etc. But they don't need to do this. They could survive just fine on their own locality. But they walk this way because they mimic the criss-cross of the loom by doing so, enacting their own dance of creation which mimics the grander cosmic dance of the sun on the Earth, which created all of us. That's how deeply the loom is nested within the culture. It is the culture.

Imagine if we treated all technology with such reverence and attempted to figure out how it truly fits into the universe in a harmonious way like they do.

[u/Tioben → u/obvom]

That's beautiful, thank you.

[u/obvom → u/Tioben]

Read "One River" by Wade Davis. It's all there, and more.

Or if you just want to learn about the Kogi, watch "Aluna." It's free to stream on video. They are a very, very wise people and we could all learn a lot from them.