Ruiz' Gospel of the Agreements: Intro

Domestication and the Dream of the Planet (an edit)

Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams. This includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its religions, its different cultures and way to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays.

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive. The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. That is the way we leaned everything we know. We learned how to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong.

The outside dream hooks our attention and teaches us what to believe, beginning with the language we speak. Language is the code for understanding and communication between humans. Every letter, every word in each language is an agreement. The only way to store information is by agreement. As soon as we agree, we believe it, and this is called faith. To have faith is to believe unconditionally.

Don Miguel Ruiz calls this process the domestication of humans. And through this domestication we learn to live and how to dream. And we also learn to judge: We judge ourselves, judge other people, and judge the neighbors.

When we went against the rules we were punished; when we went along with the rules we got a reward. The reward is the attention that we got from others. We soon develop a need to hook other people’s attention in order to get the reward. With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else. We are afraid of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. Eventually we become someone that we are not.

All our normal tendencies are lost in the process of domestication.

The domestication is so strong that at a certain point in our life we no longer need anyone to domesticate us. We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. We can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same punishment and reward. The belief system is like a Book of Law that rules our mind. We base all of our judgments according to the book of Law.

The inner Judge uses what is in our Book of Law to judge everything we do and don’t do, everything we think and don’t think, and everything we feel and don’t feel. Everything lives under the tyranny of this judge. There is another part of us that receives the judgments, and this part is called the Victim. The Victim carries the blame, the guilt, and the shame.

The Judge in the mind is wrong because the belief system, the Book of Law, is wrong. Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because believe all these lies.

Your whole mind is a fog which the Toltecs called a mitote (pronounced MIH-TOE'-TAY). Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other. This is the condition of the human mind - a big mitote, and with that big mitote you cannot see what you really are. In India they call the mitote maya, which means illusion. It is the personality's notion of "I am." Everything you believe about yourself and the world, all the concepts and programming you have in your mind, are all the mitote. We cannot see who we truly are; we cannot see that we are not free.

that is why humans resist life. Death is not the biggest fear we have; the biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive and express what we really are. We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other people’s demands. We have learned to live by other people’s points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

During the process of domestication we create an image of how we should be in order to be accepted by everybody. We create this image, but this image is not real. We are never going to be perfect from this point of view. Not being perfect, we reject ourselves. The result is that we feel unauthentic and wear social masks to keep others from noticing this. We are so afraid that somebody else will notice that we are not what we pretend to be. We judge others according tour image of perfection as well, and they naturally fall short of our expectations.

Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be. Nobody ever abuses us more than we abuse ourselves, and it is the Judge, the Victim, and the belief systems that make us do this.

There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave.

If you want to life a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless.

If we can see it is our agreements, which rule our life, and we don’t like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements. When we are finally ready to change our agreements, there are four very powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements.

You will need a very strong will in order to adopt the Four Agreements—but if you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing.

from The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz

edited via Being Jane

and further abridged by Son

Preston's Chaco Book of Judge's: Six

The Earth was not created for us. We evolved to live on this planet, and everything, down to our very genetic code, is exquisitely tuned to that Earth. In this way the landscape of the Earth is sacred; according to E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, we carry a primitive mirror image of this landscape in our very genes. If we transfigure the Earth, we literally destroy something within ourselves.

***

A year later, I was discussing these things with Edsel Brown, a Navajo spiritual leader. We were sitting in the twilight darkness, at a camp in a forest on the slopes of a remote mountain on Black Mesa which the Navajos call Dzil nitsaa: Big Mountain, the heart of the Earth.

"This cycle goes back to a long time ago," he said. "It goes back to the first invention that was created. It goes back to when the Bilagdana realized they had the power to make things. They had the power to create things. And they started to look on the land as a resource. They didn't look at the land as relatives, as living beings, which it is. And they made these inventions, electricity, dams, cars, bombs, pesticides, everything. They kept thinking that all these inventions would help them. And yet they're still not helping them. And now, today, things are starting not to work for them, and they have no place to go, and they have a hard time realizing what is happening.

"But the Earth has already told us this through stories and ceremonies: 'Have patience. There's no way you can stop this turn, this cycle. The world is already unbalanced. It's already on its way, going full momentum. And in this manner, when this world ends, you will eventually go in a peaceful manner. In a respectful manner. Because you human beings, you may be gone, but the Earth is always here. It will revive itself. If you all die, that doesn't mean the Earth will die too. The Earth is going to become anew, fresh, and beautiful world again. There will be new life, and it will be beautiful. So have patience, and go to the end in a respectful manner. ' This is what the Earth has said."

from Talking to the Ground by Douglas Preston

Preston's Chaco Book of Judge's: Five

As the twentieth century draws to a close, we find ourselves involved in a similar effort to control nature, only this time on a much larger scale. Our experiment is not based on ritual but on technology. We believe, as the Chacoans did before us, that we have gained a certain mastery over nature. Our God gave us dominion.

The question is: have we really achieved it? Could our mastery of nature be as much an illusion as the rain ceremonies of the Chacoans? Are we, like the Anasazi, headed for an environmental or technological disaster?

This is the parallel that the Navajo legends have drawn: between the last days of the Anasazi at Chaco Canyon and what the Navajos perceive as the last days of Bilagaana the White People in America.

When traditional Navajos look on our great works, they see something very different from the triumph of technology and the upward progress of civilization. They see our technology and science as challenging, overturning, and even perverting nature. They see the ascendancy of the values of materialism, invention, and competition, which are not positive values in Navajo society. They see white people coming into the Dine Bikeyah, boring into the earth seeking uranium, stripping the land for coal, felling the forests, damming the rivers, drilling for oil, and stringing vast powerlines across the landscape. They see ski resorts and logging roads and toxic waste dumps being placed on or about the four sacred mountains. To them, this kind of progress looks more like an attack on the sacred. They see occurring right now, before their eyes, the ultimate disruption of hozho. They see the white man doing what the Anasazi did. They see witchcraft: the reversing of the spiral.

As Monster Slayer learned in his final confrontation with Old Age Woman, there are some things better left as they are; there are things in this world that we cannot, or should not, attempt to overcome.

This is a lesson our culture could take to heart. There seems to be no limit to the reach of our science and technology. We’re still acting out our Genesis, acting out the orders of the God whose image we mirror: commanding, creating, multiplying, enforcing our dominion over nature. There is no brake on our search for better technology, for weapons of mass destruction, for artificial intelligence, even for the re-engineering of the human genome. Our arrogance is breathtaking. If we can do it, we will do it. The time may come when we have the ability to overcome death itself with our medicine. I ask: when we meet death in this final battleground, will we have the wisdom of Monster Slayer? Will we lay down our weapons of technology and proceed no farther?

It is not likely.

from Talking to the Ground by Douglas Preston

Preston's Chaco Book of Judge's: Four

But the Chacoans, according to the Navajos we had met, had destroyed themselves through witchcraft. Was there any evidence for that? Witchcraft almost certainly existed among the Anasazi. The evidence is circumstantial but convincing. A number of apparent witchery items have been recovered in archeological digs, including in the Lost City of the Lukachukais and in Chaco Canyon itself. Witchcraft is still considered the most heinous of crimes today among the Pueblo Indian descendants of the Anasazi. Clyde Kluckhohn, the Harvard anthropologist and author of the brilliant work Navaho Witchcraft, defined Navajo witchcraft as "malevolent activities which endeavor to control the course of events by supernatural techniques." By this definition, the efforts of the Chacoans to influence nature might just be classifiable as witchcraft, in a metaphorical way.

This doesn't answer the question of whether or not there was a surge in actual witchcraft activity at the end of the Chaco Phenomenon. Unfortunately, the question is fundamentally unanswerable. We do not even know the details of Anasazi beliefs, let alone what would constitute a perversion of those beliefs. Witchery objects are usually perishable or so common as to be impossible to identify. Among the Navajos, for example, witchery items include such things as beads, small bones, gall liquids from certain animals, fingernail parings or hairs, wood from a tree struck by lightning, ashes from a ghost hogan, fragments of sweat-bath rock, or powder from a corpse. As for the reversed spiral that is so prominent among Anasazi petroglyphs, the fact is we do not know what most Anasazi petroglyphs mean, let alone whether they were related to witchcraft. It is true that many Anasazi spirals are counterclockwise, including the secondary spiral which is part of the famous Sun Dagger on Fajada Butte.

Counterclockwise to the Navajo is the witchcraft direction, as opposed to the clockwise or "sun-wise" direction said to duplicate the sun's motion across the sky. Was the same true for the Anasazi? We do not know. And, of course, the same spiral can be clockwise or counterclockwise depending on whether you trace it from the outside or the center.
The idea that witchcraft might have accelerated the breakdown of the Chaco Phenomenon is not, however, a far-fetched one. According to Clyde Kluckhohn, there is often a surge in witchcraft and accusations of such in societies that are undergoing stress. This happened to the Navajos right after the Long Walk, and also in the years leading up to World War II, when the Navajos came under increasing pressure to become "white." Kluckhohn also made a fascinating observation: he found that accusations of witchcraft among the Navajo were most often directed by poor people against powerful and rich medicine men. Such accusations were often devastatingly effective and sometimes resulted in the execution of the medicine man in question.

If we look at the declining days of Chaco-the drought deepening, the priests losing control, the ceremonies ineffectual, the crops failing, the trading networks in disarray-what we see is a society undergoing enormous stress. Accusations of witchcraft may very well have been leveled at the priests, the medicine men, and the wealthy of Chaco by the poor who had been oppressed by the system.
Taking this speculation a step further, it is not implausible that the priests may have actually turned to witchcraft in a lastditch attempt to control nature, bring rain, and save their position. Both Navajo and Pueblo medicine men are believed to have witchcraft power, should they choose to use it. Is it possible that the priests of Chaco also had a knowledge of witchcraft? Would they have tried to use this knowledge in the desperate, last days of Chaco? We will probably never know.

What we do know is this: one thousand years ago, the Anasazi embarked on a great religious experiment at Chaco Canyon, an experiment based on the (illusory) control of nature. It was an experiment whose ultimate consequences the Anasazi did not foresee. And it failed.

from Talking to the Ground by Douglas Preston

Preston's Chaco Book of Judge's: Three

There were other signs of trouble. Around this time the Chacoans' diet changed-from larger mammals such as deer and antelope to smaller animals such as turkeys, rats, and squirrels.

It appears that this was caused by two factors: the trading system had been disrupted and the Chacoans had severely overhunted their area.

Overhunting wasn't the only environmental damage wrought by the Chacoans. The nearby stands of trees had long since been clear-cut, and even those stands thirty or forty miles away appear to have been devastated. Chaco Wash started cutting into its bed, making irrigation impossible. The water table dropped. This sudden erosion may have been natural. More likely it was caused by clear-cutting of trees and brush in the side canyons and along the wash, overfarming the floodplain, and trampling of the canyon bottom's vegetation by large numbers of people.

What was worse, the canyon soil, over-irrigated and overfarmed for years, was becoming exhausted of nutrients and salinized.

All this may come as a surprise to many people who consider the ancient Anasazi to be a people living in harmony with their environment. Quite the contrary. The archeological evidence strongly suggests that the ancient Anasazi, wherever they settled, soon caused "resource depletion"-the archeological term for environmental damage. Again and again, Anasazi settlements, towns, and cities were abandoned because the Anasazi exhausted and alkalinized the soil, cut down the trees, and depleted the game. Chaco merely carried this trend to an extreme.

The system might have collapsed, except for one thing: the rains began again in 1095. For another thirty-five years the rains continued without interruption. Building and ritual activity continued.

Nevertheless, the system had suffered a shock. A general cultural malaise showed itself. New construction showed a marked "architectural degeneration." The building was sloppy and the masonry ugly. The painting on the pottery became cruder. The firing of the pots was less carefully controlled. The population seems to have declined. The drought had, perhaps, shown that the priests were fallible. The system had cracks.
And yet, the excessive building in the canyon continued.

The system limped along of its own inertia, burdened by its very complexity, while thirty-five more years of steady, aboveaverage rainfall came.

Around 1129, another drought hit the canyon. This was not the vicious drought sometimes described in popular writings: it was certainly nothing Chaco Canyon had not experienced from time to time prior to A.D. 1050. This time, however, the drought had a deadly effect. The system, strained even when the rains fell, began to collapse. As crops failed in the canyon, the outlying communities probably balked at supporting a bloated priestly class at Chaco. After all, they were no longer able to generate the rain. The compact was broken, the illusion revealed.

The vast trading and distribution network centered at Chaco disintegrated. The degraded Chaco environment could not support even a small resident population, let alone a vast artisan and priesthood class. In three years following the inception of the drought, all building in the canyon came to a halt, and in twenty years Chaco was totally abandoned.
The collapse extended across the Anasazi world. Dozens of Chacoan "outlier" pueblos were abandoned. The roads themselves were ritually closed, lined with burning brush. Over time, most of the San Juan Basin was depopulated.

It was, however, an orderly and gradual departure. Household items such as pots and baskets were carefully stacked in corners, canteens hung on walls, the rooms left clean and orderly. Most ritual items appear to have been taken, and those that were left behind were carefully wrapped and stored. This was not a cataclysmic upheaval in fire and violence, but rather a civilization-wide acknowledgment of failure.

The Chaco Phenomenon was finished. It had lasted less than a century. Never again would the Southwest see the kind of centralized control or cooperation evident at Chaco, or the high degree of achievement in pottery, architecture, trade, engineering, and surveying. For a brief shining moment, the diverse Anasazi peoples had laid aside their differences and had come together in a great religious and political experiment centered on the ceremonial control of nature. That experiment failed.

from Talking to the Ground by Douglas Preston

Preston's Chaco Book of Judge's: Two

The permanent population of Chaco was never large, probably less than a thousand people. However, studies of the trash mounds indicate that there were large seasonal influxes. Chaco Canyon appears to have become a great religious center, visited regularly by numbers of "pilgrims" traveling in splendid ceremonial processions along the road system.

The timing of these religious gatherings would be determined by the priests at Chaco, who (through their astronomical and solar observatories) could track the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Announcements of ceremonies could be sent at short notice across the San Juan Basin using the network of lighthouses-towers or hills on which fires were built.

Around this time, immigrant groups seemed to have moved into Chaco Canyon, bringing different and even non-Anasazi influences. At Pueblo Bonito, the evidence is that two different peoples (perhaps even speaking different languages!) lived in the same structure at the same time. On the north side of the canyon, across from the magnificent Great Houses, a different sort of people lived. They were poorer, with cruder pottery and more primitive buildings. Their religious kivas, moreover, were slightly different from kivas elsewhere in the canyon. These people might have been a laboring class, or they might have represented a different cultural tradition. The Chaco Canyon experiment was becoming increasingly diverse.

As long as everything went well-that is, as long as the rains fell-people across the Anasazi world laid aside their cultural, linguistic, and theological differences. Whether this was a voluntary confederation of communities or Chaco gained absolute control over the Anasazi is still a matter of debate among archeologists.

Chaco Canyon had indeed become the Mecca of the Anasazi world.

"As the system expanded," Judge said, "these pilgrimages would be attended by increasingly large numbers of people, involve increasingly complex ritual, and thus would require increasingly larger degrees of control and administration by those in charge, presumably those resident in Chaco Canyon." The rains, as always, continued to fall.

The entire edifice was built on a single, grotesque illusion: that the priests of Chaco had gained control over nature. As Judge noted dryly: "Embedded in ritual, yet tied intimately to the continuation of a favorable environment, the system would also become increasingly vulnerable to environmental fluctuation. " That "environmental fluctuation" came in 1085 and again in 1095, when the canyon and the entire Anasazi world suffered back-to-back droughts. These droughts, while not unusual for pre-1050 Chaco, appear to have shocked the Chaco system.

They caused a breakdown of sorts. The Chacoans started enclosing their open plazas with fortified walls, leaving only a few doors open. In succeeding years, even those doors were walled up until there were no ground-floor openings at all; access to rooftops was through ladders that could be pulled up at the first sign of trouble. This puzzled archeologists, who made a diligent search for possible enemies of the Chacoans. No likely candidates turned up. The archeologists could only conclude that the Anasazi were protecting themselves from. . . themselves.

from Talking to the Ground by Douglas Preston

Preston's Chaco Book of Judge's: One

According to Judge, Chaco Canyon probably started out as small series of settlements in the highly marginal area along Chaco Wash. From A.D. 900 to 1050, rainfall in the canyon was highly variable. Had the people of Chaco canyon been typical Anasazi, their settlements along the wash never would have amounted to much. In the early period, the Anasazi were scattered across the Southwest, living in independent communities, possibly speaking several different languages, but all practicing a similar culture and religion. They built small settlements and moved often, usually when the local game, timber, and other resources had been played out. If they followed the typical pattern, the people of Chaco would eventually have moved on, leaving a few scattered houses. It would have been a minor site.

But the people of Chaco were not typical. They had, Judge theorized, a unique skill: the ability to process and finish a deeply sacred and valuable material: turquoise. The people of Chaco, apparently, traded in raw turquoise and traded out beautifully finished beadwork, inlay, mosaic work, pendants, and carvings. (snip)

During the days of Chaco, the turquoise had to be mined by hand using stone tools and then transported several hundred miles southwest to Chaco. There it was carved, drilled, polished, and inlaid without metal tools, using only stone, bone, wood, and grasses high in silicates for polishing. The Chaco workshops turned out exquisite work, including beads that were almost microscopic in size with holes drilled that would barely fit a human hair. It took immense skill to work the soft, easily breakable turquoise without metal tools or the wheel.

Around 1020, Chaco seems to have developed a monopoly in the processing and distribution of this sacred material-what Judge called "the primary symbol of the ritual." Turquoise was probably an essential aspect of the rain ceremonies. As a result, Chaco started to become an important religious center. An elite priesthood class-something previously unknown among the Anasazi-appears to have developed. At the same time, Chaco seems to have gained cultural and perhaps political ascendancy over communities beyond the canyon boundaries.

Then, from 1050 to about 1085, there came an extraordinary and fortuitous change in the climate. At Chaco Canyon and all across the San Juan Basin the rains began to fall. And they fell, and they fell. Not once did the rainfall dip below the seasonal averages. In an area where a mere inch or two of rain could mean the difference between a bumper crop and a burnt-out field, this steady rainfall made a tremendous difference.

The increased rainfall, Judge theorized, had an enormously strengthening effect on Chaco's power and influence. By controlling the supply and distribution of turquoise, Chaco had gained control over the rain ceremonies and religious system of the Anasazi. And then year after year, like never before, the rains came. What more proof could the Anasazi have needed to affirm this great religious experiment centered at Chaco?

Vast building projects began in Chaco Canyon. Across the San Juan Basin, too, dozens of magnificent Chacoan structures started to be built, linked to Chaco by ceremonial roads dotted with religious complexes, shrines, and lighthouses.

from Talking to the Ground by Douglas Preston

Austin's Epistle to 'Amerind' Poetry

The Amerind makes poetry because he believes it to be good for him. He makes it because he believes it a contribution to the well-being of his group. He makes it to put himself in sympathy with the wokonda, the orenda or god-stuff which he conceives to be to some degree in every created thing. Finally—and on almost every occasion—he makes it to affect objects that are removed from him in the dimension of time and space.

This affectiveness is secured by two processes, by the subjective coordination of the major rhythms involved, into a rhythmic unit, and the objective coordination of the movements involved, by mimesis. At the same time that the Amerind is using his body as an instrument of rhythm, he is using it as an instrument of realization of the result he desires to affect.

~American Rhythm by Mary Austin

Fifth Psalm: Bridging the Trough

It was the lowest tide that I had ever seen
within the riverside of Sandy Point and then
a January afternoon as well. Such subtle
situations seem like cold apocalyptic
facts but in effect they’re full of rising promise.
I just normally forget the other side
of that indigenous equation. But this time
I saw the western canyon shore and russet river
butte as ancient desert landscape waiting for

the sea to cover it with sky blue revelations
soon enough. I walked into the dunes before
that era dawned and saw the waxing moon ascending
in the east. A silhouette of hawks were sailing
over silver birches in the south. Across
the river, spirited construction workers drummed
a steady rhythm. Overhead the high-pitched cries
from warrior alliances in flights of geese
were painting changing vectors towards the northern verge.

And I fell underground beneath the measured currents
of those steady drifts. Emerging from their passage,
I perceived the sun and moon on equal terms
in bright opposing skies. That’s when I saw the skeleton.
Bleached white by light and clean of any residue
of life, it waited in the shadows. Whether it
belonged to some coyote, deer, or washed-up seal,
it waited for the sand I dusted on its bones.
I wait for spring to tell me things it used to know.

~Son Rivers 2006

Fourth Psalm: Indescribably Delicious

Fourth Psalm: Indescribably Delicious

Somewhere past the seaweed
where the ocean bends
into the mouth of a river,
I discover myself
staring at a dance
of hawks. The wind is great
and skies are minimal
with mid-November sun.

Two hawks are circulating
in their blood of time
with shadowy wings and vital
eyes and feathers made
from filaments of light.
I raise my arms and sense
a rousing draft beneath
my disbelief begin

to lift my spirit towards
some height of no return.
I breeze past all ironies
and deconstructions built
by random architects
of immaterial
material until
I reach a place I can’t describe.

~Son Rivers 2005

Arden and Wall's Epistle to the Journey

Arden and Wall's Epistle to the Journey

1. You don't take the journey. The journey takes you.

2. Life… is not an entertainment. Life is a task, a holy task.

3. There's a path you follow and there's a set of Original Instructions for following that path. Our journey, our life's work, has been an unfolding of those Instructions….

4. It can be hard to find and difficult to follow, at times even dangerous to your being, both physical and spiritual.

5. Unless it's your path, it's pointless to follow. But if it is your path, then, alas, it's pointless to follow any other.

6. We cannot tell you where this path leads. Perhaps only to itself. It may be simply an endlessly-looping circle of meaning that is self-evident only to those who travel along it.

7. Indeed, that could be a definition for any belief system… metaphorical constructions devised to explain the inexplicable, to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless, to make humanly accessible the fathomless Mystery….

8. Every path has its signs, its signposts. If you can't read them, or refuse to acknowledge them, they're certainly not going to help you find your way. Those signs are as much within yourself as they are "out there."

9. Dismiss them with a skeptical sneer and, in the end, you're left with the ashes of your own disbelief. But open your eyes to their possible meaning, to their soul-charging poetry, and you may suddenly find yourself "on the wind…."

10. They come when they come, and when they do they're always intensely personal and specific…. Sometimes they're hopeful, sometimes foreboding; sometimes they're harbingers, sometimes confirmations, sometimes warnings, sometimes seemingly cosmic jokes.

11. For any and all such "signs" we make no claims beyond the ordinary. Indeed, we've learned that the ordinary is, at times, the most visionary state of all.

12. The ordinary, this very passing moment, this holy unstoppable Now, is the entry-point, the gateway, to… the Great Reality.

13. Wisdom isn't something you believe. It's something you do. The Instructions for doing it may not come to you until the last possible and least expected moment--sometimes just as you've abandoned all hope and stopped trying.

14. You can't think your way to the Truth. Truth, like Beauty, isn't something you think, it's something you feel. Just as you can't think the wind, you can only feel it.

~Harvey Arden and Steve Wall

Deloria's Epistle To the Land and People

Epistle Four: To the Land and People

1. If the spatial dimension of religion is considered…. Something is observed or experienced by a community, and the symbols and sequences of the mythology are given together in an event that appears so much out of the ordinary experiential sequence as to impress itself upon the collective memories of the community for a sufficiently long duration of time. … The symbols are always representations of the concrete and the place always has a precise location.

2. It is quite possible, therefore, that as we look for the origin of peoples, we must discover religious experiences; as we look for the origins of religions, we must discover nations of people, and whichever way we look, it is to the lands on which the people reside and which the religions arise that is important.

3. In a sense, then, religion must relate to land, and it must dominate and structure society. It must not be separated from a particular piece of land and a particular community, and it must not be determined by culture.

4. If we were to subject the topic of the sacredness of lands to a western rational analysis, fully recognizing that such an analysis is merely for our convenience in discussion and does not represent the nature of reality, we would probably find four major categories of description. Some of these categories certainly are overlapping in the sense that different individuals and groups have already sorted out their own beliefs so that they would not accept the classification of certain sites in the categories in which Indians would place them. Nevertheless, it is the principle of respect for the sacred that is important.

a. The first and most familiar sacred lands are those places to which we attribute a sacredness, because the location is a site where, within our own history, regardless of our group, something of great importance took place. Unfortunately, many of these places are related to instances of human violence; Gettysburg National Cemetery is a good example of this kind of sacred land. … Wounded Knee, South Dakota, is such a place for many Indians. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. might be an example of a location with a nonviolent background.

b. A second classification of sacred lands has a deeper, more profound sense of the sacred. … After the death of Moses, Joshua led the Hebrews across the River Jordan into the Holy Land. … In comparing this sacred site with Gettysburg, we must understand a fundamental difference. Gettysburg is made sacred by the actions of men. …In the crossing of the River Jordan, the sacred appeared in the lives of human beings; the sacred appeared in an otherwise secular situation. … Thus Buffalo Gap in the southeastern edge of the Black Hills of South Dakota marks the location where the buffalo emerged each spring to begin the ceremonial year of the Plains Indians. … In the religious world of most tribes, birds, animals and plants compose the “other peoples” of creation and, depending on the ceremony, various of these peoples participate in human activities. If Jews and Christians see the action of a single deity at sacred places and in churches and synagogues, traditional Indian people see considerably more activity as the whole of creation becomes an active participant in ceremonial life.

c. The third kind of sacred lands are places of overwhelming Holiness where Higher Powers, on their own initiative, have revealed themselves to human beings. … Prior to his trip to Egypt, Moses spent his time herding his father-in-law’s sheep on and near Mount Horeb. One day he took the flock to the far side of the mountain, and to his amazement he saw a bush burning with fire but not being consumed. Approaching this spot with the usual curiosity of a person accustomed to the outdoor life, Moses was startled when the Lord spoke to him from the bush, warning, “Draw not hither; put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereupon thou standest is holy ground.” … This tradition tells us that there are, on this earth, some places of inherent sacredness, sites that are Holy in and of themselves. Human societies come and go on this earth and any prolonged occupation of a geographical region will produce shrines and sacred sites discerned by the occupying people. …This phenomenon is world-wide and all religions find that these places regenerate people and fill them with spiritual powers. In the western hemisphere these places, with some few exceptions, are known only by American Indians.

d. The second and third categories of sacred lands result from revelations of the Holy at certain locations. The ceremonies that belong to these sacred sites involve a process of continuous revelation and provide the people with the necessary information to enable them to maintain a balance in their relationships with the earth and other forms of life. Because there are higher spiritual powers who are in communication with human beings, there has to be a fourth category of sacred lands. Human beings must always be ready to receive new revelations at new locations. If this possibility did not exist, all deities and spirits would be dead.

5. The transition from traditional Western/Christian categories to tribal and non-Western categories of religious experience is not then a matter of learning new facts about life, the world, human history, or adopting new symbols and garments. It is primarily a matter of participation in terms of the real factors of existence—living on the land, living within a specific community, and having religious people with special powers within that community.

6. Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land?

~Vine Deloria Jr.

Chronicles According to Hartmann

Chronicles According to Hartmann

1. It was done first by the Celts, who conquered and consolidated most of the tribal people of Europe 3000 years ago. It was then done more thoroughly by Julius Caesar of the pre-Christian Romans 2000 years ago. And it was absolutely finished by the iron-fisted “Christian” Romans 1000 years ago as their new Church sought out and destroyed all the ancient places, banned the old rituals, and tortured and murdered people who practiced the ancient European tribal religions.

2. The few elders who tried to preserve the Old Ways were called “witches” and “pagans” and “heathens,” and imprisoned, tortured, hung, beheaded, impaled, or burned alive. Their sacred groves of trees were burned, and if their children went into the forest to pray they were arrested and executed. God was taken from the natural world and put into the box of a church, and Nature was no longer regarded as sacred but, instead, as evil and dangerous, something to be subdued and dominated.

3. And so [they]… were stripped of their tribes, of their languages, of their ways, of their medicine, of their rituals, of their elders. And it was done by a people who, themselves, had had it done to them…by another people who had had it done to them — all the way back to the first “eruption of human insanity”: the City/State of Ur (now called Baghdad) and its king, Gilgamesh or his predecessor, 5000 to 7000 years ago.

4. And what each of these collapsed civilizations forced on the people they conquered — to replace the old Earth-connected, Creator-centered path — was a religion that was organized in the same way the dominator kingdoms were. At the top was one or more angry gods, who demanded that the people work for them and offer their crops, children, and lives to them. Under the god(s) were the bureaucrats who could deliver people’s requests to the deity: these bureaucrats (called “priests”) also had to be paid by the people, and until recently held the absolute power of life or death over the people (and still claim the power to bestow or withhold “eternal” life or death). And then, of course, at the bottom were the people, groaning and oppressed by their Church

5. Humans have been on this planet for millions of years, and fully modern humans… for at least 200,000 years. If they had not found ways to live that worked, we would not be here. The tribal and clan ways of life are the pinnacle of a multi-million-year evolutionary process that kept the human race in delicate and appropriate balance with the animal and plant and mineral kingdoms.

6. Until, of course, Gilgamesh and his friends created the first successful dominator culture…. This new cultural experiment rose up, wiped out three million years of trial-and-error learning, and replaced it with theft and fear and violence. And then it collapsed, because it wasn’t based on a solid foundation of knowledge, understanding, love, compassion, and respect for all life.

7. But it was soon replaced by another insane attempt at domination, and then another, and another — each extending the reach of the dominators, the Younger Cultures, a bit further out of the Middle East and toward Europe.

8. Until eventually it reached the Celtic people, who first conquered the tribal peoples of Europe, and then were replaced by the Romans, and then replaced by the Roman Official Church. (Keep in mind that the Pope signed the original and earliest land deeds giving Europeans “ownership” of the lands of North and South America….) As the Church faded in power during a time we call the Renaissance, it was replaced by the European and then American corporate kingdoms, which rule most of the world today.

9. All are dominators, Younger Cultures. All are cultural experiments. None have three-million-years of trial-and-error experience, and the little experience these Younger dominator Cultures do have shows that they have always eventually self-destructed, usually within 200 to 1000 years.

10. And so those few who have in their hearts the understanding of the loss of their ancestors’ ways 2000 years ago, the loss of their native cultures, are empty and longing and in pain. They are afflicted with a sickness of the spirit, the same as if half their blood had left their bodies. They are slaves to the corporate dominators — the modern-day kings of the world — and they intuitively know they are slaves.

11. And yet they yearn for freedom and crave the wisdom of cooperative tribal ways, which is now only found in the few remaining ancient and native cultures.

12. So, our wise elders, I thank you for sharing your wisdom and culture with my White sisters and brothers. As you say, they cannot become Indians. They cannot learn the language and do the ceremonies of your people. They will never get it right: it is not in their blood or their upbringing…. But they can — and must — learn from you, both from your teachings and the examples of your lives.

13. They must create their own way, their own tribes, their own clans, and their own rituals and laws. To do this, they must learn the true history of what was done to their people over the past three thousand years, and try to recover what they can of their original culture. They must learn from other cultures who still have ten-thousand-year-long memories — like yours — and use those lessons about what works and what doesn’t to live in harmony with the Earth and other peoples. As they acquire this wisdom, they may be able to rebuild the foundations and assumptions of “modern” culture into something that will work and is sustainable.

14. And they must do it soon, because they are the people of the culture with thousands of atomic bombs, millions of deadly microbes, billions of lethal weapons. For the first time in the five billion years of the life of Mother Earth, one culture has the power to lay waste the entire planet...by accident.

~Thom Hartmann

First Revelations of Blue Heron

The Revelations of Blue Heron

A voice cries out inside your wilderness,
below the surface of appliances
and tools for finer productivity,
above the arcs and citrus in your life,
and pointing out a great blue heron deep
inside the state of quarks and recreation,
it unites you in its constellation.

(Dear Skye, well as you know I’m unemployed.
Yes, that’s disheartening, but not a matter
of blood or consequence. I still retain
the main essentials, breath, Chianti, bread,
and something quintessentially quixotic,
certainly unscientific. My soul
you say? Well, that or something as biotic.)

Four hawks are busy soaring over sailboats,
interpreting the winds, defining sky
and cirrus clouds—and seriously uncertain
which direction wings will take them short-term.
But long-term, they are winging south, unaided
by anything but a universal motion.
Watching them, I sometimes get a great notion.

I believe in raw belief, the ungrown green
locomotive channeling the crash
and cymbals of Apollo, as inciting
Dionysus doesn’t die, but rises
above white pines, to rocket towards our June
of universe and native pumpkin zen—
and sit within that burnt bend of this pen.

When all right angles change to crooked lines
and every petrochemical essential
turns to sap, all roads will exit Rome.
Then Michelangelo will paint the desert
green with oak trees, white with birch trees, red
with maple trees ascending past the fall.
The choir shall chant a forest through the wall.

Walking through woods awash with end of summer
sales and inventory clearances,
I listen to the intercom inside
these Pentecostal aisles and hear the blue
light special echoing the price of life
is fine, is isinglass and isometric,
Isaac, Dorothy, Evangeline.

The branches of an ash tree turn alive
foreshadowing some presence in the woods
whose movement recreates a doe from leaves
and realization of this perfect earth,
where love instills the river with a clear
infinity of blue deliverance
beside true concentration in a deer.

Creation runs downriver, waves of vision
endlessly rolling galaxies and charm
quarks, sun and grass, Adam and Spider Woman...
We’re sitting on the riverbank, abstracted,
building castles in the sediment
—when tripping, falling in the stream, we see
the sight of hawks, or some such prophecy.

In an unseasonable understanding a lifetime ago,
I walked an equinox alone but with
one voice that guided me through solar flares
to somewhere near a weightless stone within
the waters of an oblique world, to seek
the great blue heron—who leaving me its stance,
flared time-worn wings and recommenced this dance.

The winds are waves and the dunes are waves and the sea
is waves. The clouds are waves in a sky of waves,
and seagulls are wings of waves in a world of waves.
My blood is a wave flowing from the wavelength
of my heart; my breath is a wave passing through
the waveform of my lungs. And I know my soul
is just a waver in the mystery of the whole

Spretnak's Epistle To the Postmodernists

Epistle Three: To the Postmodernists

The impetus to find other ways of being has spawned ecological postmodernism. The impetus to reveal the card ticks behind the “obvious truth” of rationalist modernity has spawned deconstructive postmodernism. The cultural explosion of the latter in so many fields at this time can be regarded as a wake for the shocking passing of the seemingly stable, objectivist, mechanistic, rationalistic worldview. Apparently it is an Irish-style wake with lots of whiskey, food, and verbal virtuosity. Some folks are quite intoxicated and natter on too loudly and too long (do we really need yet another university press announcing a postmodern series that will “expose” everything in human experience as mere self-referential discursive constructions?). Other deconstructive-postmodern mourners are full of rudeness and exaggeration. Still others churn out boring, sterile art, enshrining the futility of it all. In the corner some rowdies chant mockingly, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” They smash their glasses and shout that there never was a center. Arrogant and peevish behavior does not hide their fear of living without the smug certainties of objectivist, scientistic delineations of reality. As deconstructive postmodernists continue to “bust up” the furniture at this wake, I suggest that we remember that in the grieving period after a shocking death, just as in the minutes or hours before a birth, all rules are suspended. No one expects coherence. Odd responses are overlooked, and angry outbursts are absorbed. An event of deep transition creates its own rules.

Those who can move beyond cynicism and postures of despair can see that our loss of a determinate, rigidly objective sense of reality is our liberation. Instead of alien manipulators, we now come to understand ourselves as participants in the unfolding universe. Instead of being locked into the tedious debate about whether the universe acts in a thoroughly random manner or strictly according to a master plan of linear development, we can apprehend that the universe offers itself an unimaginable range of possibilities and an intricate play of tendencies from which it fashions its ongoing story. It is a sacred story not of determinism but of creativity, allurement, relation, and engagement—all arising and passing away in lifetimes of a microsecond or longer arcs of billions of years.

We, self-reflexive manifestations of the universe, have the capabilities to enhance the conditions for differentiation, subjectivity, and communion in the Earth community. For these existential possibilities the universe has provided the guidance and inspiration we need: the core teachings of the wisdom traditions. Through their practices, their emphasis on process, we can become sensitive to profound dimensions of mind, nature, the body, and community. The fallacies underlying destructive institutions and practices—including the fatalist view that hostile indifference in so many realms is “just human nature”—then become obvious.

The acute suffering of the Earth community instills urgency in this work. The conceptual liberation of the postmodern moment engenders possibilities. The cosmological grounds us in the sacred whole.

~Charlene Spretnak

Third Psalm: Cresting Creation

Third Psalm: Cresting Creation

i.

A spruce tree points
the way while waves
of topographic contours break
against
my digital imagination.

Geologic layers build upon
the monitor. The right hand
touches some contrasting
consciousness and clouds
of visionary water build

an altar in the sky. The rain
in coming days will sound
its holy holy
holy on
the rising ground.

ii.

The consciousness of all
Creation isn’t
metaphysical, some
speculation,

philosophical
conceit or cirrus
cloud reflected in
my sweating glass

of lemonade, but rock
hard mineral
or vegetable
or animated water-

fall descending
in a galaxy of sentient
enlightened
splash.

Deloria's Epistle To Evangelists and Plastic Shamans

Epistle Two: To All Evangelists and Plastic Shamans

In the western tradition, revelation has generally been interpreted as the communication to human beings of a divine plan, the release of new information and insights when the deity has perceived that mankind has reached the fullness of time and can now understand additional knowledge about the ultimate nature of our world. Thus, what has been the manifestation of deity in a particular local situation is mistaken for a truth applicable to all times and places, a truth so powerful that it must be impressed upon peoples who have no connection to the event or to the cultural complex in which it originally made sense. The recounting of the event becomes its major value and both metaphysics and ethics are believed to be contained in the description of the event. Ultimately the religion becomes a matter of imposing the ethical perspective derived from reprocessing the religious experience on foreign cultures and not in following whatever moral dictates might have been gleaned from the experience.

The question that the so-called world religions have not satisfactorily resolved is whether or not religious experience can be distilled from its original cultural context and become an abstract principle that is applicable to all peoples in different places and at different times. The persistent emergence of religious movements and the zeal with which they are pursued would seem to suggest that cultural context, time, and place are the major elements of revelation and the content is illusory. If not illusory, it is subject to so many cultural qualifications that it is not suitable for transmission to other societies without doing severe damage to both the message of revelation and the society which receives it.

American Indians and other tribal peoples did not take this path in interpreting revelations and religious experiences. The structure of their religious traditions is taken directly from the world around them, from their relationships with other forms of life. Context is therefore all-important for both practice and the understanding of reality. The places where revelations were experienced were remembered and set aside as locations where, through rituals and ceremonials, the people could once again communicate with the spirits. Thousands of years of occupancy on their lands taught tribal peoples the sacred landscapes for which they were responsible and gradually the structure of ceremonial reality became clear. It was not what people believed to be true that was important but what they experienced as true. Hence revelation was seen as a continuous process of adjustment to the natural surroundings and not as a specific message valid for all times and places.

~Vine Deloria Jr. (emphasis added)

Hutton's Epistle To Pagans of Ancient British Isles

Epistle One: To the Pagans of the Ancient British Isles

But there remains a great deal we do not know about the religion of pagan Celts of these islands. In this respect they are like figures perceived through a mist and heard very faintly. We have no real idea, for example, whether their ceremonies were intended to ask the deities for favors, or to thank them for the continuing order of things, or both. We do not know what they believed about the afterlife, whether all religious activity had to be mediated through priests or rulers, or of what their ceremonies or prayers consisted. We do not know whether their religion had a mysterious element, requiring initiation. We do not know whether it embodied a system of ethics. All this is hardly surprising, in view of the fact that our evidence consists of badly remembered portions of mythological tales, based on a paganism which had disappeared before most (or probably all) of them were composed, joined with an archaeological record which is actually rather less rich than that for the previous millennia and which sometimes contradicts the literary sources. What the two types of evidence together do suggest is an intensely localized faith which few generalizations can be made.

...

What, then, after so many pages, can be said about the pagan religions of the ancient British Isles? First, that we know very little about them. An immense quality of recent work has served to show that most of what we had formerly believed that we knew is either wrong or unprovable. In fact, the only groups about which we can speak with any confidence are those of the Roman Britain, some aspects of which remain a mystery and which may obscure, rather than reveal, the nature of the native cults. Second, that part of a tremendous diversity derives from our discovery of a tremendous diversity of ritual practice and architecture, over both space and time, which may reflect an equal diversity of belief and which almost defies generalization. The peoples of our remote past have emerged as more creative, more dynamic, more fascinating and more baffling. Third, that the old religions of these islands perished a very long time ago, and absolutely. They fell before Christianity both because of tricks of fortune and because they were not well equipped to resist the new faith, but they left an enormous and varied cultural legacy. And partly because of ignorance of them and partly because of our different needs and circumstances, they are lost to us forever.

~Ronald Hutton

Second Psalm: O Chocorua

Second Psalm: O Chocorua

O Chocorua,
guardian of the mountain
world and Baptist
of my daughter, rock
incessant peak
and calendar-prolific
profile, mythic
origin and hiking boot,

hear my plea.
Protect this earth
from one god, most
unnatural and myopic
robot, some invention
of the Holy Roman
Empire and its bishop,
rook, or pawn of Peter,

Paul, and not a Mary
there among them.
Bring your thunder
from the west and brew
dark coffee. Pour
your northern dreams.
Arising from the east
comes visionary

sugar, and the south,
O the south,
I hear the many
legions of that legend
far beneath our equinox
preparing cake
and melting emperors
into ice cream.

Exodus of Jesus Gnosis

Chapter Two: Jesus Gnosis

1. In the time that breathes within the book we call the Old Testament, there were great Prophets warning their people that the dominating ways of a Younger Culture were contaminating the ancient mysteries of Israel.

2. In the time of Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, a prophet came to walk the earth, in continuation of that tradition, and in foundation of a further teaching, a mystic way to knowing God. His name was Jesus.

3. Three books relate his story as prophet and teacher, calling him Anointed One, calling him King. But still they knew him to be a man. These authors are known to us as Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

4. Another version, a different interpretation, developed through the first century, stating that Jesus was not just a man, but God, and only through this Christ was salvation possible. These believers we know as the followers of Peter.

5. Countering this new reading were followers of the apostle Thomas. They believed in sundry ways and wrote in a wealth of books that the prophet Jesus taught all that God is within each, a knowledge known as gnosticism.

6. But a fourth book known now as the Gospel of John was written in direct negation of the followers of Thomas and in complete affirmation of the school of Peter saying Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Lord God. So says Elaine Pagels.

7. In addition, the character of Thomas was slandered in that Gospel of John not once but three times, an early version of a modern political smear campaign. This is the one and only gospel to speak of the character that history knows as the Doubting Thomas.

8. In time, that school of Peter, passing on through the author and apostle John the Evangelist, through John’s student Polycarp, the bishop of the church at Smyrna, now in Turkey, was led by Irenaius, Polycarp’s student and the second bishop of the church at Lugdunum in Gaul, who lived to see the third century of Christianity arrive.

9. Irenaius’ desire was to create an orthodox Christianity, refuting all mystical and Gnostic ways as schismatic heresies, writing the five-volume treatise ‘On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis.’

10. He vigorously suggested that a four formed divinely inspired gospel be canonized, consisting of the synoptic books of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, but underpinned by the Logos theology of John.

11. In the fourth century, Christianity became legalized under the Roman Emperor Constantine,

12. who ordered all bishops to come together in The First Council of Nicaea, in 325 AD, the first ecumenical conference of bishops of the Christian Church, to quell the disorder arising from schisms, and establish an orthodox religion,

13. where the Nicene creed was established, saying Jesus is "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” "begotten, not made," and "of one substance with the Father,"

14. thereby endorsing the arguments of Irenaius and validating the Gospel of John.

15. Anyone who refused to endorse the Creed faced exile.

16. Soon after, all heretical books were ordered to be destroyed,

17. and more than 16 centuries of orthodox domination and persecution of heresies would endure.

18. In 1945, the complete Gospel of Thomas, along with 51 other Gnostic books, was discovered in Nag Hammadi.

19. The Gnostic prophecies of the mystical holy man Jesus still live:

20. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you

."

First Psalm: Eagle Vision

Psalm One: Eagle Vision

Dead leaves
aren’t dead. Again.
November amber
psyche falling wind
encircles once
and future oaks.
Again. White pines,
the bark of present
tense is seeming
always now. Again.
No objects when
I breathe the abstract
atmosphere of famous
photosynthesis
the cellular solution not
an apple near me now.
Again. The afterglow
of ash trees singe
my lungs. Again.
The shadow of the sun
enlightens salience.
Again. No edges just
a meeting of the senses
touch a visionary
sweetness sounds
like essence. And again.
The spin of eagles,
mountain laurel.
And again. The river
falls on elemental
breezes alphabet
omega Merrimack
and relativity
with walking ending
in the cerebellum
where once more again
that wholly blending.

Genesis of the Bicameral Mind

Chapter One: Bicameral Mind

1. In the beginning was the bicameral brain but it was of one mind. So says Julian Jaynes.

2. And it was in the Iliad of deep hallucination. No introspection. No subjectivity.

3. The gods were their only consciousness, residing in their secret mind, and Achilles and Agamemnon heard and saw visions as the grass is surely green of Athena and Thetis.

4. Like Moses and the burning bush. Like voices truly living in the numinous halls of their right brain.

5. Like schizophrenics, acid heads, or religious mystics of today.

6. In time, forming great theocracies, they avoided killer chaos, with “lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so" on and so on to idol kings and queens and gods and goddesses.

7. But the odyssey of new migrations, natural disasters, and unnatural conquests led to younger societies of much social complexity requiring intensive education,

8. cutting the cord, the corpus callosum, the holy bridge between the left brain and the right brain,

9. as the Babylonian ‘Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’ says, “My god has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me,”

10. and made us all in the image of that wily coyote Odysseus on a different kind of long strange trip,

11. left with just the profane lonely old left brain we have with us today.

12. Unless we can reconstruct that major work of inter-state suspension span between the brain's two separate but equal hemispheres and vacation once again on visionary Mt. Olympus.