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'3-D' View of History: Significant Details, Sense of Storyline, and Healthy Spirit of Study ('Detalye, Daloy at Diwa');

 Critique of memorization-oriented and fragmented presentations in current teaching of history.

Constructive and liberative view of time continuum and collective journey

Holistic Collective conscious- ness on Holistic collective experience

Concept and challenge of consensus-building and synergy-building for a collective sense of mission as humankind and as a nation; and on this basis, the consolidation of synergies in nationhood and in humanity.

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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The Longer 'Now'

For a Holistic Sense of History

By Ed Aurelio C. Reye

History Professor, International Academy of Management and Economics; Lead Founder, Kamalaysayan; Executive Director, SanibLakas Foundation; Secretary-General, Pamayanang SanibLakas ng Pilipinas

This article was first published in LightShare Digest issue number 5.

MANY good poems and sayings carry the existential idea that the past is a mere memory, the future is a mere promise, and only the present is real. A very close friend even said that thinking of the past makes one recall a lot of frustrations, and thinking of the future only brings on worries. I can agree. But I would like to ask—How long, really, is the present?

Kamalaysayan (Kaisahan sa Kamalayan sa Kasaysayan) came out as early as 1991 with what may have been an advanced response to this: “Let us bring all lessons and happy memories from the past into the decisions and actions that we make and take in the present in order to prepare well for a pleasant future.”

This assigns to us, the present generation, a vital role that connects in thought, word and deed the lives of the Filipino people of the past with the lives of the Filipino people of the future. Abdication on this responsibility is a great sin of omission that may result in irreparable loss for this nation’s patrimony, indeed a great crime to our nation, albeit an inadvertent one due to sheer ignorance.

The name of this regular history-oriented section of LightShare Digest is “Kaha-Nga-Buk,” a coined word standing for a component of dynamic sense of history. Some would understandably imagine it to mean “an admirable book.”

The term actually combines the starting syllables of the Filipino/Tagalog words “kahapon,” “ngayon” and “bukas” (yesterday, today and tomorrow). About a decade ago, I coined this as only one word to emphasize the real relationships among events along a historical timeline, to stress the seamless continuity in the collective lifestory flow (also called “history”) of our people from ancient past to the distant future.

While the word “ngayon” was used as “today” in the sequence described above, this same word also translates into English as “now.” And “now” actually refers to a very stretchable amount of time. The word “now” can refer to a period within this day or within these few minutes. “Right this split-second” would, of course, be one meaning.  Still, “right this nanosecond” would be another.

The boundary between present-tense “now” and the past-tense “then” is seen more as one between qualitatively-different conditions. “Yesterday,” sang the Beatles, “all my troubles seemed so far away.” How long a “now” was being implied to follow that? The word “now” in the next line covers the entire stretch of time these troubles look as though they’re here to stay. How long a “now” that will be depends on what happens next. The same goes for the line, “Now we are tall, and Christmas trees are small!” Up to when shall we be tall and those trees small?

Maybe forever!

The ‘Longer Now’

Or take this summary passage from James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy from The Celestine Prophecy: A Pocket Guide to the Nine Insights by James Redfield¹, specifically the chapter title, The Second Insight: The Longer Now:

“Our new spiritual awakening represents the creation of a more complete worldview, which replaces a five-hundred-year-old preoccupation with secular survival and comfort. While this preoccupation with technological advancement was an important step, our awakening to life’s coincidences is opening us up to the real purpose of human life on this planet and the real nature of our universe.”

The just-ended past, where we, as the entire Human Race, were pre-occupied with secular survival and comfort, spanned more than half a millennium; it is too early to tell how long the current “now” of our spiritual awakening will last before we enter the centuries- or millennia-long “now” of having fully awakened to cosmic and divine realities. (Some scholars believe that short of that, the homo sapiens is actually still in the pre-human stage of evolution.)

In the Katipunan’s initiation rites, three questions on history were asked with pre-formulated three answers applicant members were expected to reply with. These questions asked for the summary of conditions in three distinct periods as the kahapon, ngayon and bukas of Philippine history:

Kahapon (yesterday): a period spanning thousands upon thousands of years where free communities and free peoples lived in the islands we now call Philippines (known by other names before being branded in honor of a dishonorable Spanish monarch), with the communities in gradual process of voluntary clustering and naturally developing a “national synergy.”

Ngayon (today/now): a period, more than four centuries so far, in which the majority people of the Philippines got and remained colonized/dominated by foreign powers, a present period that will last until we Filipinos are able to really free ourselves from foreign domination on the Philippine economy, politics, military, culture, educational system, etc. etc.

Bukas (tomorrow): People of the Philippines fully freed from foreign domination, with us Filipinos collectively in full and productive control of our lives.
Didn’t the second period end with the defeat and departure of the Spanish colonialists? Hasn’t that “ngayon” ended with the escape of Japanese of-ficers and soldiers or in the “granting of Philippine independence” by the Americans in 1946?
By now, AD2006, has that “ngayon” really ended? Any substantial depth of analysis of Philippine society would shout or groan out a negative response.

Lessons From a Ruler

It has been a generally-unchallenged expression of dismay over our self-image as a people: “Hay, naku! Ganyan talaga ang Pinoy!” (Filipinos are really like that!) The specifics would move us to laugh heartily on the outside, and to weep bitterly on the inside.

Writing an "open letter to Rizal" in 1989², this writer described the present-day Filipino as “increasingly cynical of his neighbor and even of himself, increasingly vulnerable to the temptations of systemic corruption and injustice, and pushed to be always on the alert for the easiest shortcuts, often at the expense of his peers.
“Underneath the crackling laughter of ever-ready Filipino humor now hides a tormented social psyche with numbness and confusion about the past, tears for the present, and subdued agony, manifesting as fatalism, over bleak prospects of the future.”

What tends to make us resign to this sort of national identity is precisely that “numbness and confusion” about our past. And let us now include another painful word: “ignorance.”

That last word would invite indignant refutation from many. But if we dare them now to recall for us the historical event that they know to be farthest back in time, chances are they’d tell us who supposedly discovered the Philippines. That is not ancient!

Of course it would be wrong for anyone to say that we know absolutely nothing about “pre-Spanish Philippines” (term not coming from our own point of view). After all, we did study in class about “waves of migration,” the datus, the aliping namamahay and saguiguilid, the baranggay and the so-called “trials-by-ordeal.”

But how much do we know about the lives of our ancestors during the time of, say, Philippines 1000? How were we during the time of Christ? Believe it or not, we were already here that early, in fact, much earlier. At the time Jesus Christ was being crucified, our ancestors already had the now-renowned Banaue rice terraces which highlighted communitarian ethics and engineering genius, and the Manunggul Jar (3,500 years old by now) which proved our early belief in the Afterlife.

In a chapter he wrote for the book Philippine Progress Prior to 1898  which he co-authored with Conrado Benitez, Austin Craig cited passages in Chinese history, including chronicles covering the Chou dynasty (B.C. 722), describing active interaction between the Asian mainland and our Philippine archipelago, and praising our ancestors as trading partners.

Rizal, in his “The Indolence of the Filipinos,” asserted that “the Filipinos have not always been what they are,” and cited as witnesses to this point “all the historians of the first years” after Magellan’s expedition. Wrote he: “Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Malayan Filipinos carried on an active trade, not only among themselves but also with all the neighboring countries.

“A Chinese manuscript of the 13th Century, translated by Dr. Hirth, which we will take up at another time, speaks of China’s relations with the islands, relations purely commercial in which mention is made of the activity and honesty of the traders of Luzon who took the Chinese products and distributed them throughout all the islands, traveling for nine months, and then returned to pay religiously even for the merchandise that the Chinamen did not remember having given them.”

Now there is an important realization to be had with the help of any one-foot ruler. If we take the Chou dynasty chronicles of BC722 as the hypothetical starting point and AD2006 as the end, we have had at least 2,728 years of existing written history, or about “230 years per inch” on the ruler. It was only in the last 441 years (since Legazpi’s successful colonization in 1565), or roughly a mere one-sixth of this entire time span, that we have been under Spanish and American spheres of influence and domination.

Looking at a one-foot ruler, therefore, we can say that we are relatively familiar with only its last two-inch segment, from the “10” marking to the end. We know next to nothing about almost the entire length (ten inches) of that ruler. To think those were thousands upon thousands of years of glory for us as a people!

__________

¹New York: Warner Books, 1996.

²This open letter, titled "The Philippines, A Century Thence, was published in a book of the same title, launched exactly 100 years after the publication in La Solidaridad of the final installment of Rizal's "The Philippines, A Century Hence"

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