David Peat

70 From Certainty to Uncertaintyconcepts. Likewise names of things are not fixed. A person’s name willchange several times during his or her lifetime and to reflect particulardeeds and attitudes. Neither is there a fixed concept of personality.Indeed, while we find multiple personality to be a mental aberration,the Blackfoot would view someone who believed they had only a singleself, more or less fixed for life, as missing out on the richness of life’spossibilities.In place of fixed laws and organizations the Blackfoot have networksof relationships with all living things, including rocks and trees,as well as compacts that were negotiated by their ancestors with thespirits and energies of the cosmos. In a world of flux each person hasan obligation to renew these relationships and compacts. And so theBlackfoot world is one of ceremony and responsibility and the recognitionof life’s basic impermanence. How different their vision of realityis from that which has created our vast organizations, multinationals,and government bureaucracies.As yet the deeper meaning of quantum theory and process realityhas not permeated into our general culture. However, the world of theBlackfoot does show that a society can function in a world of process,flux, and uncertainty. We shall learn a little more about such a world,and its relationship to language, in the following chapter.