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Religion: Eastern, Western, and Tribal
Religion: Eastern, Western, and Tribal
James David Audlin
* * *
An earlier version of the section, "Sacred Time and Sacred Place",
was previously published as "Sacred Place, Sacred Time" in \The
Eagle\, Vol. 8, No. 4 (July-August 1990). Copyright © 1990 by the
Eagle Wing Press, Inc. Used with permission.
* * *
Introduction
It has really been since my childhood that I have been interested
in the religions of the world. When I was around ten I found in a
used bookstore a wonderful translation of \The Upanishads\, the
Hindu scriptures which are the culmination of the extremely ancient
\Vedas\. I read this work with great joy; it breathed a freshness
and wisdom that it still exhales when I take it up. I brought it in
to the Sunday School to which my mother brought me and shared some
of it with my teacher. She was interested in the passages I read,
and saw, as I did, the clear parallel to Biblical teaching. She was
interested enough to borrow the book from me. Next week I arrived
in Sunday School to find we had a new teacher, a man who clearly
was going to brook no such deviation from Truth.
This did not keep me from pursuing this fascination with
religions. Spurred on by the belief, a belief I still hold, that
there is a certain inexpressible and almost insensible truth behind
the variant creeds of the world's religions, I found and read as
many books as I could. It was also around this time that I first
became familiar with the \Tao te Ching\ and the \Chuang-tse\,
primary scriptures of Taoism, several sutras of the Buddhist canon,
and the recorded teachings of Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk), the great
\wichasha wakan\ (holy man) of the Oglala Lakota (Western Sioux)
people.
Around the age of thirteen I first encountered the Native American
tradition in a direct manner, not through the mediation of books.
At that time I did not know that in small part my ancestry was
Native American, nor did I know anything about Native Americans
except the school-taught falsities that they were bloodthirsty
savages who worshipped false gods. But I was fortunate enough to be
introduced to another old Lakota \wichasha wakan\ named Wandering
Eagle. He liked my spirit, so he said, after we had talked for a
while, and he invited me to participate in a "sweat".
My only experience with worship at that point had been typical
libertarian Protestant Christianity: worship "from the eyebrows
up", as I call it: intellectual and private pietism only minimally
engaging of the rest of the self. This tradition taught and still
teaches a theology based on good versus evil: feelings, desires,
and the physical world (most especially wild nature and the human
body) as evil, and good being the suppression of these.
I came to the "sweat", having no idea what to expect, and found
quite the opposite. The \inipi\ ceremony (to use the Lakota word)
is, briefly, one in which people sit in a circle within an
\onikare\, a small hut of blankets or skins over a sapling
framework, naked and in pitch darkness, chanting and praying as
water is poured on hot rocks to make steam. When first Wandering
Eagle poured the water, and the steam exploded from the rock pit in
the center, my body was assaulted by the sudden heat and humidity.
I literally could not breathe. My ears were ringing as if I were
underwater. He began to chant in Lakota, and his voice buzzed
strangely in my ears. The darkness seemed filled with strange
floating lights. I was scared and close to panic, but I did not
want to show it. Somehow I managed to stay and bear this powerful
and overwhelming experience.
When at last the ceremony ended and the door was opened I crawled
out of the \onikare\ like a newborn child. I felt unsteady on my
feet, shaking like a newborn colt. The colors in the world looked
as if they had only just been created. For days after the feeling
that I had touched, or been touched by, something infinite, would
not leave me. This was surely not worship as up to then I had
experienced it!
My studies of various religions continued. I became part of a Zen
Buddhist group at a nearby university. Like so many Westerners, I
found Zen frustrating, disquieting, but not easy to put aside. The
experience of Zen centers around taking up the simple practice of
sitting in the half-lotus position, seeking the mind that is before
thinking, not categorizing or labelling, but experiencing directly
all things in their pure essence. The beginner may count breaths,
or work on a simple koon, such as, "What was your original face
before you were born?", and the more advanced student will seek to
walk the difficult path that leads to Nirvana, Enlightenment.
When I began my undergraduate studies I decided not only to major
in music, as I had planned, but also to major in Comparative
Religions. These studies have given me a good scholastic grounding
in the subject, but I have always felt that one can only really
\know\ a religion by experiencing it intensively, which cannot be
accomplished in a classroom. So I continued to worship with
Christians and Jews, to sit with Zen Buddhists, and to learn the
Native American tradition. Eventually I graduated from seminary and
was ordained into the United Church of Christ. That denomination is
more open than most to dialogue and mutual understanding, and has
largely welcomed me and encouraged my involvements.
In 1985 I took my precepts as a monk in the Chogye Zen Buddhist
tradition, of which Seung Sahn is the Zen Master. Continuing my
studies of the Native American tradition with Lakota-trained
Cherokees such as Running Deer, Grandmother Alloday Gatoga, and
Grandfather Chief Sings Alone, I was initiated into the Good
Medicine Society in 1989 and have been appointed the New England
Area Chief of the tribe in which I am enrolled, the Free Cherokees.
All this time I have continued to serve as a pastor of local
churches.
People ask how I can be involved in more than one religious
tradition. They usually think I cannot be sincerely faithful to one
if I am involved with another (as if I were having the religious
equivalent of an extramarital affair), or are worried that the
religious hierarchies will demand that I stop such involvement.
Neither is the case. While Christianity does generally demand its
adherents to be involved with it and no other faith, the
denomination with which I am affiliated, as I mentioned, is one
that encourages dialogue with other faith traditions, and finds me
to be a resource in its reachings out. And I believe that the truth
is greater than any one finite brain can know, greater than any one
human institution can codify, and even greater than all the finite
brains that have ever existed could imagine together.
Each religion is, from within, a universal: it is absolutely and
totally true as far as its adherents are concerned. But seen from
without, each religion is a finite entity. Religions seek to relate
the infinite with the finite (the human): the subject of study of a
religion, from within, is the infinite, studied by the finite (the
human adherent). From without, the study of the religion is the
finite (the religion), studied by the finite (the human scholar);
since there is no infinite in such study, religions necessarily
appear false from without. So A sees A's religion as true, but A
sees B's religion as false because A cannot see the infinite, the
truly sacred, in it, seeing only a cultural artifact. And C, who is
not religious, sees all religions as only cultural artifacts.(1)
I often compare the various religions to a spoked wheel. Each
spoke is utterly different in where it starts in the outer
circumference. In the same way, each religion starts in a unique
cultural context and has its own unique embodiments of faith, in
ceremony, scripture, and so on. To the adherent of a particular
religion, only \that\ religion, \that\ spoke, and no other, leads
straight and true to the center, and other religions/spokes appear
to be crooked and misleading.
But all these spokes, so widely separate in their beginnings, join
in their endings. At the center, there is only one spoke, or
perhaps no spoke at all. This center is indescribable, ineffable,
and finally wholly unknowable, at least in an intellectual manner.
The different spokes use different terms to describe this center,
terms such as "God", "Nirvana", "Tao", "Wakan-Tanka", but it is
truly beyond all naming and defining. In this center, all religions
are one. An old Jewish prayer, centered on the fact that so many
religions, including Judaism, can be traced to revelations
vouchsafed on a mountain top, says, "There are many mountains but
they point to the same heaven." Peter the Apostle teaches, "Truly I
perceive that God pays no attention to appearances, but in every
nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to
God." (Acts 10:34f.) And Lord Krsna teaches in the Bhagavad-Gita
(4:11), "Many are the paths of humanity, but they all in the end
come to Me." Many great Native American teachers, including Black
Elk, Sun Bear, Eli Gatoga, and Sings Alone have had visions
convincing them of the truth that we are all coming, if from
different starting points, to the same spiritual goal.
This center I have experienced in the sanctuary, the synagogue,
the mosque, the ashram, the onikare, the dharma room, and in many
other places. These experiences I know to be of the infinite
because, while I remember \that\ I have had these experiences, I
cannot truly remember \them\. Just as we cannot perfectly recall
our dreams, or the moment of sexual climax, but only \that\ we
experienced them, yet when they come again their is an
inexpressible recognition, so too our recollections of these
spiritual experiences are inaccurate and feeble. Yet we \know\ we
had them, and know them for what they are when they come again.
Robert Frost said that "the poetry is that which is lost in
translation"; similarly, the dream and the spiritual experience
cannot be "translated", recorded in the words of rational
discourse. Truly spiritual experiences, being touchings of the
infinite, cannot be properly described and cannot be proven. They
cannot be produced "on demand" any more than we can go to sleep,
"perchance to dream", or experience sexual climax "on demand".
There are rituals most of us go through at bedtime or when with a
lover to increase the likelihood, but such experiences are not, in
the scientific sense, "repeatable". Only the finite can be
described and proven, only the finite is "repeatable on demand".
One could posit a possible axiom regarding the experience by the
finite (the human) of the infinite (the sacred):
AXIOM: If it can be described or proven, or if it can always
be produced at will, the experience is not truly Sacred.
This axiom calls to mind the ancient teaching of Lao-tse: "The Tao
that can be named is not the eternal Tao." (trans. by James David
Audlin [unpublished]; cf. Lao Tzu)
In this paper I will share some of my reflections that have come
out of my intense and continuing participation in a great Western
religion, Christianity, a great Eastern religion, Buddhism, and a
great Tribal religion, the Native American religion.
Sacred Time and Sacred Place
Every religion looks to certain places as its holy centers. These
places serve as dynamos of spiritual energy, revitalizing the land
and living things. These holy centers were established as such
because of the archetypal acts of the religions' founders who there
first lived out the primal story which adherents ever since are to
emulate in ceremony. So a Muslim prays toward Mecca, a Christian
sanctuary used to be oriented toward Jerusalem (which is why the
entrance to a church is still often called the westwork), Hindus
look to "Mother Ganges", and Buddhists often go on pilgrimage to
the great Oriental temples. Religions have traditionally been "of
the land", accessible to the people; even when great monuments have
been erected on these sites, they remained "of the land". For a
Muslim to walk around the Qa`aba, for a Jew to pray at the Western
Wall, for a Christian to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
for a Native American to enter the Black Hills, is to experience a
validation of the reality of one's faith. In so doing, one does
what has been done since the very beginning of one's faith, one
enters oneself into the sacred story.
But now religions are more often seen as exportable, as
packageable, and people find themselves looking to holy places so
distant they will never see them. Separated from these places by
distance, their names are only names, and do not conjure up the
remembrance of real places. Thus the sacred stories associated with
these places lose a great deal of power for the adherents, having
no reality in their daily lives. Religions have sought, as they
grew outward into the world from their beginnings, to take the holy
places with them. So a synagogue or church is, as it were, a piece
of Jerusalem, and the revealing of the Torah or the serving of the
Eucharist is a reenactment of historical events. While liturgies of
this sort can be powerful and meaningful, they cannot but be only a
facsimile of the power and meaning of the Sacred Place itself.
For tribal religions, such as that of the Native Americans, there
are also sacred places in which primal events took place which give
shape and meaning to the encounter of finite human with infinite.
The most significant sacred story in the Native North American
tradition is of the coming of its revelator, its equivalent to
Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed. This is the only significant religion
which, to my knowledge, was founded by a female avatar. She is
known by different names to different tribes -- as Changing Woman
to the Dine (Navajo) and Mature Flowers to the Iroquois, to name
two others -- but in archetype she is the same persona. I will tell
her story as it is told by the Oglala Lakota people. But it must be
noted that, in written form, this is not truly the story. Like the
recollection of a dream, this that follows has nothing of the
energy of the \real\ story, but at best only implies it. This is a
story that is known in endless variations, for this is truly a
\living\ story; the following is only a sketch of one version.
In a time of great famine, Pte-san-winyan ("White Buffalo Cow
Woman" in Lakota) appeared to two boys out hunting. One of them,
seeing how beautiful she was, lusted for her and was consumed by
his own lust, leaving only a putrefied pile of ashes behind. The
other, seeing she was not only beautiful but \wakan\ (sacred,
mysterious, powerful), approached her with respect and took from
her her message that she would come to the whole tribe and give
them the means of their salvation. She appeared some time after his
return, and taught them that the famine was because they had no
center to their spiritual lives. She taught them to remember that
every step they took on \Ina Maka\ (Mother Earth) should be a
prayer, for the earth is composed of the dust of their ancestors,
and every living thing is their brother or sister. To help them
remember this, she gave them the \Chanupa Wakan\, the Sacred Pipe
(sometimes miscalled the peace pipe). Its construction is symbolic,
serving to remind one of the sanctity of all things. "With this
pipe," she told them, "you can pray with and for all things." She
also revealed to them the seven sacred ceremonies, of which the
\inipi\ is one. Because of her advent in the Black Hills of South
Dakota, that place is sacred to Native Americans. (Black Elk, 1961)
But all this continent, and not that place alone, is sacred to
these people. For on it walked their ancestors, and through it God
still teaches these people. So each tribe sees the land on which it
dwells as holy. But for the people who came westward to this
continent, who looked behind them for their spiritual beginnings,
this land was void. They saw no sacred places here, for they saw no
cathedrals; they saw only forests, lakes, mountains, deserts, and
plains. So the spiritual centers of the native peoples, the Black
Hills, Big Horn Medicine Wheel, Mount Shasta, Onondaga Lake, and
the Four Corners land of the Southwest, have been in these
invaders' eyes just land like any other, to be plundered at will.
The invaders, being out of sight of their spiritual centers, such
that they did not feel bound any longer by the sacred duty of
Christians to treat the earth as holy, and because they could not
see the sacredness of this land they invaded, trampled on these
holy sanctuaries just as once the Persians and Romans destroyed the
Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. The early European settlers thought
they were building here a New Jerusalem, but they only rebuilt the
"fleshpots of Egypt" they had left behind on an even greater scale.
(Niebuhr)
Others have tried since to create holy centers from scratch -- the
Oneida Community, Shaker villages, Arkosanti -- but all eventually
fail, for they do not partake of the wellsprings of spiritual power
in this Turtle Island, but imitate the holy places of other lands.
This Western culture erects huge monuments, attempting to
substitute physical splendor for sacredness, but which only dwarf
humanity, instead of exalting humanity as truly sacred sites do.
(Hughes). These edifices are usually quite cold and lifeless,
effectively killing the Spirits by entombing them.
Western people think of the formative sacred events of their
faiths as having happened a long time ago. The European concept of
time is linear, with a fixed past and inchoate future extending in
opposite directions from an infinitesimal and fleeting present
moment. Ideally, ceremonies are kept in such a way as to bring the
past into the present: the Seder or the Eucharist at best are not
remembrances of long-ago events with little import for us today,
but rituals which enable us to transcend linear time and be
spiritually present at these primary events. But it is difficult if
not impossible for most Western people to free themselves from
their submission to the mental constructs that result from the
concept of linear time.
For the Native people, on the other hand, their own sacred events,
being sacred, happen outside of secular time altogether: they
happen in the past, in the present, in the future, all as one
transcendant moment. Whenever the Chanupa Wakan, the Sacred Pipe,
is passed, it is again Pte-san-winyan who gives it to us, so that
we may find the center of holiness. Whenever we enter the \onikare\
we do not sweat alone, but with all our grandfathers and
grandmothers, with all life now about us in the \Cangleska Wakan\,
the Sacred Hoop, and with all our descendants as well.
Similarly, the holy days of the invading peoples are tied to the
seasonal patterns of another continent and another climate. Thus,
the great power of seeing the very earth and sky tell the sacred
stories is lost. The great power of nature itself participating in
the sacred rites is lost: instead of baptizing, for example, as
John the Baptist did, in a river, many Christians use only the
anemic token of faucet water in a basin. And commonly baptism,
\brit\ and \bris\, marriages, ordinations, and other rituals, are
held not at sacred times, but at times chosen for the convenience
of the participants. But the training I have been given in the
Native American tradition is that its ceremonies must always be
held in harmony with terrestrial and celestial events. As an
example, I have for years been keeping the \inipi\ ceremony on the
full moon; from that I have gained a sense of being in harmony with
heavenly things. Often I have joked with those who keep this
ceremony that somebody sooner or later is going to market a plastic
\onikare\ with snap-together plastic framework and a gas grill to
heat the rocks. But it is a sad joke, because it all too easily
could happen.
With the power of the invaders' spiritual centers diluted by
distance, and the power of the holy places of this Turtle Island
raped by greed and foreign law, people are not being cleansed of
their spiritual poisons, as regular pilgrimages at sacred times to
sacred places for the great ritual ceremonies otherwise would do.
Without a spiritual center to draw their spirits, they have only a
limited ability to withstand sliding from goodness into
dehumanizing extremes.
The Sacred Story
When any family gets together for special occasions, often there
is the telling of stories. In my family, even though every member
knows it, we still often recount the tale of how the first Audlin
came to live in the United States, settling in Oswego, New York
only because that was where a freak accident left him without any
luggage. Or we tell again stories about my eccentric
great-grandmother, or how my grandparents met, or what it was like
when we (whichever "we" is speaking) were children. These stories
are \alive\ for us: in their telling we cherish again in the
present moment the archetypal actions of our ancestors. These
stories, our shared \gnosis\, define us as a family, and keep us in
covenantal(2) relationship with each other. Families that do not
keep their stories alive tend to fall apart.
Story and covenant are inextricably linked. Stories (or any other
art form) cannot exist unless there is a covenantal relationship
between the storyteller and the listener(s) based on a common
semiotical structure and a common symbol-system. Nor can covenants
exist without stories: no married couple can thrive unless it
retells and renews the story of how the two met and married, etc.,
and shares it with the children. In the same way, a people or a
religion is defined as such by its living stories: Judaism by the
Exodus, Christianity by the Resurrection, Islam by the revelations
to Mohammed, Buddhism by Buddha's Enlightenment, the Native
American Religion by Pte-san-winyan's gift. If the story is
forgotten, or ceases to be alive, the covenant dies. While today
the stories of, say, the ancient Scandinavian or Hellenic gods are
known, they have lost their presentness, their aliveness. But once,
as is clear to any reader of \The Golden Ass\ of Lucius Apuleius or
the \Elder Edda\, these stories were once alive and laden with
great numinous power.
Sadly, modern Western society is forgetting its stories, or using
stories only to entertain. The stories that define a people as a
people are not told as often because people want now to be
entertained by something new, not by the "same old thing". Fewer
and fewer, as time goes by, want to hear about the great heroes and
heroines of a land, preferring instead to be given new stories.
But, as hunger outstrips the storymakers' inventiveness, the latter
are forced to use the shock effect of violence and horror to retain
interest.
Religions find themselves embarrassed by the vestiges still
remaining of the old faith that sacraments are the Primal Event as
experienced in the here and now. Progressive theologians dismiss
old notions of the Eucharist or the Seder as \really\ the Body and
Blood of Christ or \really\ the Exodus, and suggest instead that
these are simply remembrances of past events. With the old
sacraments stripped of their sanctity, there is a flood of "new"
liturgies seeking to replace the old.
In the same way, when a couple gets married these days, there
is all too often a need to make its wedding unique, to avoid the
"same old liturgy", and be even more ostentatious than everyone
else. By so doing, though, is not the covenantal Story lost? Would
it not be better that the couple be not so much Dick and Jane as
the archetypical Bride and Groom, reenacting the Hierogamy of the
Goddess and her Consort? Perhaps it is because the covenantal Story
is so assiduously avoided that so many marriages end up in divorce.
The arts in classical cultures have always been one of the most
important means of keeping these sacred stories alive: the arts
serve ideally as a lens to the infinite, as mantras, as ikons, both
mirrors reflecting the inner world of the soul and windows
revealing the outer world of the sacred. So arts in classical
tribal cultures are not merely to entertain, not \objects\ we
regard for their own sakes but are \sacred paths\ along which we
move toward the Great Mystery at the center of reality.
Nature: Chaos or Mystery
Chief Luther Standing Bear (1978) says: "Only to the white race
was nature a `wilderness' and only to them was the land `infested'
with `wild' animals and `savage' people. To us, it was tame." To
the Native American, the wilderness is not an enemy but a friend;
it is not chaos or meaningless noise, but redolent with meaning.
In their origins, the world's religions have all also found their
meaning in the context of Nature, the world as created by God, yet
untouched by human hands. It was in the wilderness that Yahweh was
to be found by the ancient Israelites, thus giving meaning to their
existence, and back to the wilderness they still go, at least
symbolically, in building \sukkot\. When Jesus spoke of sheep or
mustard plants, of fields white with the harvest or rivers of
\hydros zoon\ (a Greek phrase meaning both "running" and "living"
water), we may be sure that they were there at hand. It was in the
wilderness that the Angel Gabriel came to Mohammed and commanded
him "Qur!" (Recite!), and Ibn Khaldun points out in the
\Muqqadimah\ that since our human origins are in the desert, it is
only there that we can truly be perfect. Baba Nanak, the founder of
Sikhism, had his vision in a Punjabi forest, Buddha beneath the
Bodhi tree, and (to name a few) Moses, Mahavira, Zarathustra, St.
John-of-the-Cross, and Black Elk at the top of a sacred mountain.
It used to be that there was abundant mystery in a person's world,
that one could "...go from here eastwards and pass the fields we
know...with your face turned towards that light that beats from
fairyland, and that faintly illumines the dusk between sunset and
early stars, ...till you come to the frontier, which is made of
twilight, and come to the palace that is only told of in song."(3)
It used to be one could venture into the white spaces of maps where
cartographers "crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the
world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to
the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts
full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen
sea..."(4), when even if the spaces were fancifully filled in with
monsters the monsters signified the truth that "away" was difficult
to reach and both frightening and dangerous.
Meaning and mystery are complements; we cannot know one without
the other. Hence this mystery of the unknown gave \meaning\ to the
known world, and a sense of home and belonging to one's center of
the universe. But today the whole world is thoroughly known,
explored, examined, understood, and subdued. Everything is taken
apart and analyzed. People feel free in this "brave new world" to
move from place to place on identical highways past identical
restaurants and shopping centers. So since there is no more center
to the experiential world, and no more mystery lurking at the
horizon, there is no more meaning. With everything explained,
nothing is explained. A rare last bastion of real mystery is in
outer space, in the possibilities of contact with alien beings or
of travel into the future, hence science-fiction is the last gasp
of legend in modern society.
Western society sees nature, the wilderness, as chaos, to be
controlled and regularized. It wilfully misinterprets Yahweh's
command in the beginning of Genesis, that we take stewardship over
the earth, as a directive "to subdue" it. Eastern and tribal
societies similarly see nature as meaningful, as eloquent, as
homeward. A Native American (known as such not by mere ancestry but
by practice of the culture) will see an eagle flying north as an
essential, significant, and meaningful event. A European American,
if he or she notices the eagle at all, will probably see it as a
random event with no impact on her or his life. On the other hand,
the Dow Jones average will be more likely of great importance to
the European American but of little importance to the Native
American. To the Westerner nature (animals, plants, minerals, even
the earth itself, even the very substrate of space and time) are
raw materials whose value lie only in what they can provide to
civilization. Here even naturalists, those Westerners who seek to
preserve nature, fall down: they advocate the protection of forests
or endangered species on the basis of their aesthetic value to
civilization: even they value nature for what it provides to the
non-natural world of civilization, and not for what it \is\.
Tribal theology is shaped by what is called ascending or orectic
symbolism, in which nature, perceived as meaningful, informs the
shape of the cultural \Weltanschauung\. Western theology impresses
abstract concepts of theology \on\ nature in what is descending
symbolism. One may see an application of this in technology. The
basic question-of-technology is how humanity seeks integration with
the environment: either by changing the environment to accomodate
humanity, or humanity accomodating itself to the environment. Every
culture uses both accomodations to some extent, striking a
particular balance between humanity and nature. For this balance
religion provides (as noted in various ways by Berger, Boorstin,
and Bellah) a means of legitimation. When an innovation is
discovered, making possible a new balance-point between humanity
and environment, religion either forbids the innovation or embraces
it: "It is all right to master fire, because the gods so will it",
or, "It is all right to work in factories with punch-clocks,
because God demands obedience and says `work ennobles the soul',
`time is money', etc.
Western technology answers this basic question-of-technology
largely by changing the environment to accomodate humanity: tools
are used to achieve permanency of human constructs: it is humanity
saying "I AM", trying to defeat the last enemy, time and death,
filling earth and sky with buildings, bridges, satellites and and
aeroplanes, seeking (to paraphrase Tennyson) to batter against the
gates of heaven with storms of technology.
Tribal technology answers the same basic question by accomodating
humanity to the environment. The nature of nature itself teaches
the person who and what she or he is. The tribalist listens to the
environment in order to learn from it: one is surrounded not by a
"chaos to be subdued", but an eloquently meaningful resource that
can answer all needs, physical and spiritual. Anthropologists know
that tools from ancient classical tribal cultures are nearly
invisible: it is much harder to see a rock chipping tool than a
jackhammer. It is not difficult to find the holy places of both
West and East for they are imposing monuments, but the holy places
of a tribe are impossible to find, for they are equivalent to
nature itself. Is such tribal knowledge "primitive" -- that is,
"lesser"? No. The knowledge of tribalists, enabling them to
integrate themselves with their environment is as immense as the
knowledge of Westerners enabling them to change their environment
to accomodate people.
In these eastern woodlands where I have always lived, it used to
be rare to have a wide view of the landscape as one travelled,
because the trees beneath which one walked blocked the view. When
one did encounter such a wider vista one stopped and paused,
compelled by the rarity of any views and the uniqueness of this
particular view to observe it silently and well. These unexpected
views surprised the traveller with all the power of a theophany.
But the European settlers cut down the trees and built farms and
opened up these views. Now it seems that far from being unexpected
and powerful, these views have gone to the other extreme of being
made commonplace. They have been robbed of their power. Even in
regions with naturally open landscapes, such as deserts and
prairies, it used to be that one walked, only slowly encountering
the revelation of new vistas, travelling slowly enough to have time
to adjust to the "music" of the land traversed, to be truly
"there", to see and hear and enter into dialogue with one's
situation. But now we, as Westerners, clutch our artificial
familiarity about us: we live in cities where buildings, not trees,
block the view. We hurry along highways in sealed tin coffins with
manufactured environments that effectively separate us from
interacting with the land traversed. We mask the everchanging
landscape with a glut of sameness. And whenever we find ourselves
stranded beneath a too-wide sky with no immediate means of escape,
we find ourselves verging on panic.
There is a parallel between nature and dreaming: the Westerner
avoids sleep, seeing it as a waste of time, and subconsciously
fears it as an unwelcome harbinger of death. The Westerner commonly
forgets or fears dreams, seeing them as uncontrolled and chaotic,
as either meaningless "noise" or strangely disquieting. Rare and
wonderful are such exceptions as Ruthven Todd's \The Lost
Traveller\ and Samuel Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", but it must be
noted that even these survived the transition into waking life only
in fragmentary form. But both Easterner and tribalist sees dreams,
like nature, as meaningful. In every tribal tradition of which I am
aware, dreams are taken most seriously, as messages sent from the
ancestors or from God for our guidance.
It is my suspicion that somehow in Western theology the
anthropomorphizations of good and evil have been reversed. We are
told in Western theology that the supernatural Being who imposes
Order on the universe, who separates the waters above from the
waters below, who confines the dry land to its place and the ocean
to its place, who loves light and hates darkness, who commands us
(as it is mistranslated) to subdue the earth and fill it, is good.
We are told that the supernatural Being with horns and pitchfork is
evil. But the horned God we fear represents the world of Nature,
the "chaos" the other God tells us to subdue. The horns signify
wild animal, and the pitchfork the holy work of the farmer, whose
work is in the soil. This latter Being is a folk memory of Pan, the
satyr, the goat-man God.(5) The God of Order uses fear to ensure
regimentation and obedience to His (for He is always male) laws,
but the God of Nature encourages independence, encourages us to
take a sip at the inspiring wells of madness and dream.
Chronos and Kairos
Daniel J. Boorstin correctly notes (1971, p. 115) that time is no
longer an accurate measure of space. Today it can take the same
amount of time to drive 200 miles (by automobile), 2000 miles (by
aeroplane), or 2 miles (by subway). Time and space used to be
correlatives: the ancient Scandinavian measure, \doegr\, measured
both duration and distance in terms of half-days (because Vikings
rarely sailed at night), and another one, \rost\, was the duration
and distance between resting places in land travel, and was
consequently shorter over rough terrain.
In every classical tribal culture the sun served or serves not
only as a celestial timepiece, but also as a "compass", orienting
the observer in time and place. Such an observer knows the intimate
connectedness of where and when: that the sun rises in the east,
swings (at least in our latitudes) in a southerly arc through the
day, and sets in the west. So, with one glance at the sun, the
observer can know both the time and the celestial coordinates --
not as separate facts, but as one fact. Hence in the classical mind
space and time are essentially the same, and to travel in one is to
travel in the other. More than that, the sun, and the other
celestial bodies, orient one not only in time and place, but also
in spirit: in tribal societies equinoxes and solstices, lunar
phases and the round of constellations through the year, are all of
great spiritual meaning; in such societies one looks at the sky and
the earth and is always centered in space, time, and spirit.
Westerners have been known to sneer at tribal people for not
knowing how to tell time (i.e., to read Western clocks). But
tribalists have a Celestial Clock that many Westerners are unable
to read: most Westerners would be unable to know what time it is
from an observation of the sun or the stars.
Classical Greek philosophers differentiated between \chronos\,
which is ordinary clock time, and \kairos\, which is sacred time.
\Chronos\ is time such that two seconds or minutes or hours can be
laid down side by side and found to be of equal length. Yet
experience teaches us that time is not a constant regular flow, but
speeds up and slows down. Time races by when we are deeply and
powerfully engaged, for example, and drags by when we are bored.
Tribal culture traditionally lives exclusively in \kairos\. Even
Native Americans joke about "Indian time". "Indian time is
understood as inaccurate -- if a Native American friend of mine
says to come over for an \inipi\ ceremony at 7:30, I might well
come over at that time and find him not even at home! -- hence the
humor. But inaccurate it is not. It is very accurate in its own
way, just different. When my friend says to come over at 7:30, she
or he is making as close a guess as possible of when the \kairos\,
\The Right Time\, will be in European-style \chronos\ time.
The Shaman
R. D. Laing has correctly taught that societal definitions of
"sane" or "normal" and "mentally ill" are not sharply focused
objective categories, but subjective gradations with arbitrary
lines between that vary from culture to culture. The West says that
a person who talks with God or angels or animals (for example) is
mentally ill. Seeing such as "abnormal", it isolates such a person
from society at large and seeks to "cure" such an "illness". But
since it is in one's nature to have such qualities, such "cures"
(like "curing" left-handedness or homosexuality) is often
unsuccessful over the long term, and can lead to other problems
that are much more obviously physical or psychological dysfunction.
Western society did not always treat such persons in this way. The
saints and prophets who claimed to speak with God or angels, were
venerated for their natures, and their revelations treasured. Such
more recently nonconforming souls as William Blake managed to eke
out existence in the midst of disapproving society, and even be
valued by a wise few for their visions.
There also used to be a recognized need for the "village
oddity", the eccentric individual who did not fit in. The
Connecticut Shoreline where now I live used to have its
"Leatherman", for instance, and the little town of my childhood,
Theresa, in northern New York State, had a similar quaint,
harmless, independent person known as "Black Bart". The townspeople
chose not to associate with them, and they rarely bothered the
townspeople. But they served as a kind of psychological lightning
rod for oddness, entropy, and too sudden change. By providing a
view of its opposite, they enabled the townspeople to know and
value normality.
Today, however, normality is enforced on everyone: even though
such people are happy left as they are, rarely harming anyone, they
are forced to conform and/or are "put away", and told they are
"sick", which makes them unhappy and sometimes results in their
actually becoming chronically violent. Are they crazy? Such is an
emotionally charged and subjective word. They are different,
individualistic, and their being "put away" in modern times because
it galls and threatens ordinary people to see happy nonconformity
points to a sickness in Western culture, for there can be no
sameness without difference. It also points to the failure of
modern Western culture to recognize the reality of the numinous,
that those who can sense it are shunned; it means that one of the
few ways available by which we can truly hear the Divine, through
vision or dream, is shut down.
In the West, institutions seek above all to ensure their own
perpetuation. To justify their continuance, institutions must
encourage or even create need. But they must never satisfy that
need fully, or allow their clients to learn how to satisfy the need
without assistance of the institution. Institutions in the West,
therefore, naturally seek to become monopolies. Western religious
institutions are no exception. They claim to control the
uncontrollable, to be the sole dispensers of Truth. Instead of
encouraging persons to seek \their own\ direct, immediate
experience of the Sacred, they dispense \indirect\ revelation,
indoctrinating people with the untruth that there is revelation
only to be had through the religious institution. This indirect
revelation could be analogized to an inoculation: the institution
gives its adherents "dead" versions of revelation, lest they ever
find they could have the real living thing, within the institution
or not. And those who do claim direct revelation are either
censured (such as Luther and Pike) or "institutionalized" after
their deaths (many of the saints).
Zen Buddhism does have an institution, of sorts, but barely enough
to give some structural shape to a tradition that now is thriving
on every inhabited continent. Zen ultimately has nothing to teach.
The basic "technology" of Zen is so simple it may be learned in a
day. Its practice may lead immediately to Nirvana; it may also take
a lifetime. But Nirvana is the goal of every Zen Buddhist;
descriptions of others' achievements of Nirvana will not suffice,
and the simple practice of \za zen\ ("sitting Zen") are the means
used by neophyte and Zen Master.
The Native American religious tradition lacks an institution.
There are no holy books, no sanctuaries (other than the universe
itself), no ordained hierarchy, and no prescribed liturgies. To
take the previously mentioned \inipi\ ceremony, I have participated
in it with members of several tribes, and each time it was kept in
a different manner. Even the same worship leader will keep it
different ways at different times.
The \wichasha wakan\ (holy man) or \winyan wakan\ (holy woman) is
not institutionally recognized, but is known as such for having
fully committed his or her personal nature to the seeking of the
sacred. This person is not to be confused with the \wichasha\ or
\winyan pejuta\ (medicine man or woman). He or she and the
equivalent in other tribes worldwide is commonly called these days
by a Mongolian term, \shaman\. The shaman has two important aspects
to her or his work. First, the shaman knows the sacred times and
places, keeping track of temporal cycles and recognizing holy
sites, remembering the stories that interpret their holiness, and
preserving them for the tribe.
But second, the greater and more hidden work of the shaman is to
know where and when "to break the rules" creatively, to go against
the regular rhythm of time and space to perform a kind of spiritual
metasurgery. This latter is the purpose of creative asceticism --
asceticism not as in the West to "chastise the flesh", but to break
through to the spiritual plane and gather spiritual guidance for
the tribe, in the same way that lookouts gather advance information
on the physical plane. Different tribes use different means; among
these are fasting, sleep deprivation, psychoactive drugs, chanting,
dancing, sweating, drumming, solitude, physical pain, the gruesome,
the Quest, sexuality, mountain climbing, etc. But even such
breaking of the rules still follows the rules (just as an ambulance
driver knows when to speed or a surgeon knows when, where, and how
to insert the scalpel), is always undertaken for the good of all,
and with the greatest care.
It has been my experience that the shaman is often opposite to the
prevailing ways of time, nature, and the tribe. She or he walks
about at night when most people are asleep. During the spring,
summer, and autumn, when most people eat and work a lot, the shaman
does little if any of these things, and thus remains pretty much
constantly in a state of induced trance. In the winter, when most
people "hibernate", eating little and sleeping much, the shaman
eats a lot, sleeps little, and works, wandering far in the
dreamlike winter world, communing alone with the spirits, and
seeking those evasive herbs which grow only in the winter, and
watching the stars for signs of the solstice, and later the earth
for signs of spring. For the shaman, the bitter cold, lifelessness,
and silent solitude are means of creative asceticism by which he or
she can break through.
In regions unlike these latitudes with which I am familiar, I
believe this is still true. In cultures where the climate is
hotter, while everyone else hardly moves at all in the midst of a
torrid summer midday, the shaman is out for equivalent reasons, the
shimmering heat providing again that asceticism that enables one to
break through to the spiritual plane.
At the time of metataxis, such as between years or between
rulers,(6) when all human and spiritual rules are suspended, while
everyone else acts in extraordinary ways, the shaman is strangely
normal. But this normality is the "string on the kite" that keeps
all this \anarchia\ from spinning out of control such that normal
ways might reassert themselves as the new year or new reign begins.
The shaman walks safely, calmly, through madness and spirits,
perfectly normal, because these things are perfectly normal to her
or him.
Work and Worship
One important function of religion is to mediate between the
eternal and the common, the sacred and the secular. At its best
work and worship, one's ordinary life and one's spiritual life, are
conjoined.
Eastern and tribal religions generally assume human nature to be
basically good. People are told that to live out their truest
nature is what it is to be good. Goodness may not be the same for
one individual as it is for another, because individuals differ,
but goodness is usually affirmed as human nature.
Western religions often agree that humanity is good, but there
is a significant presence, particularly within Christianity, of
those who assume human nature to be basically evil. Western
religions commonly present goodness as a goal, as an ideal, that
does not vary from individual to individual, but is absolute.
Governments promote the ideal of the Model Citizen, and churches
(for example) encourage adherents to seek the ideal of the
Christlike. Yet such institutions often insist that such goodness
is virtually impossible to realize, and if it is to be realized at
all it can only be done within the structures of the institution.
Hence goodness is objectified and placed at a distance from the
person. Seeing goodness as a goal, and not as their nature,
individuals may not always strive for goodness, and may even give
up the striving. Thus, whether one seeks goodness or fails to seek
it, the institution has justified its necessity.
There are two kinds of law: prescriptive and descriptive.
Descriptive laws are laws of intrinsic nature, such as the law that
the planet Earth rotates on its axis in twenty-four hours and
revolves around the sun in three hundred sixty-five and one-quarter
days. Prescriptive law is law that assumes the possibility that it
may be broken: there is usually the expressed or implied presence
of sanctions should the law be broken.
Tribal law is commonly not prescriptive but descriptive. There is
no codification of absolutes, but each situation is treated as a
unique one. Of course in tribal societies there are transgressors;
in my experience the response is not so much an ascertaining of the
"objective truth" of what happened and the assigning of punishment
(objective truth not being a part of tribal understanding) as a
reestablishment of balance between parties; the worst that can be
done is that the person is expelled from the tribe.
Western justice is often based on "the Rule of Law". The Rule of
Law is based on the assumption that certain acts are always,
absolutely, evil or immoral: that killing, stealing, rape, etc. are
always wrong (except under certain extenuating circumstances; see
below). And behind this presumption is another presumption, that
actions can be taken out of their contexts -- out of the context of
the person, and whether the action is true to the person's true
nature, and out of the psychological and sociological contexts --
and laid side-by-side and compared, so such actions may be judged
according to the Rule of Law.
The Rule of Law, being arbitrary, constantly needs to be adjusted
in different situations. As a contractual authority it is, unlike
covenants, inflexible, so adjustments must be made to allow for
extenuations (e.g., murder in self-defense, or innocence based on
insanity, etc.) and to prevent people from finding new ways to
circumvent the Rule of Law. Being arbitrary, it must also be
adjusted when the government and/or the religious institution
require people to break the very laws it has insisted they keep,
such as in time of war. Being arbitrary, it must also be adjusted
to explain why it appears that God at times has done evil, has
broken the Rule of Law that supposedly God endorses.(7)
The Rule of Law is based on the presumption that human nature is
at best entropic (losing "energy", losing its pattern, its systemic
nature, and tending toward chaos) and at worst evil/selfish, unless
such nature is suppressed from above by the Rule of Law expressed
through (what Berger calls) "the Sacred Canopy" of civil and
religious authorities.
The question whether humanity's nature is truly good or evil being
put aside, surely still it can be seen that the Rule of Law \makes\
its subjects evil. The Rule of Law projects our goodness elsewhere,
as a virtually unreachable ideal, such that individuals, feeling
dissociated from goodness (and Law), frequently seek ways to
circumvent the Law. Those in power are further divided from those
they rule: they present themselves as perfect exemplars of the Law,
or as above the Law, while they try to keep the powerless from
circumventing or overthrowing "their" Rule of Law (for, being an
institution, the civil or religious rulers seek above all to ensure
the continuance of their institution) while the disenfranchised
either lose their essential nature to a non-intrinsic nature
imposed from above, or else seek new and newer ways to circumvent
or overthrow this tyranny of Law.
Buber speaks of two understandings of God, one, spoken of by the
orthodox religious, that is wholly Other, that is,
other-than-human, who imposes Will on us from above. The other,
spoken of by the mystic, is congruent with the individual. The
orthodox speak of "I and Thou", and the mystic speaks of "I am
Thou". While a few Christian mystics, such as Boehme, Eckhard,
Saint Theresa d'Avila, speak of the union of the soul with the
Divine, most Christians have avoided seeing unity between God and
individual, Brahma and atman, anywhere except in Jesus Christ.
Jesus said, "the Father [God] is in me and I am in the Father"
(John 10:38) and prayed to God in humanity's behalf "...that they
may be one [in God] just as we [Jesus and God] are one..." (John
17:22). But, though Jesus wanted all people to find such identity
with God, Christians have avoided saying it about anyone \except\
Jesus, freezing the thought and never applying it, and condemning
the heretics such as Eckhard who \did\ apply it.
But \avodah\ means both "work" and "worship" in Hebrew, and Saint
Benedict spoke of the twin virtues of \ora et labora\ ("praise and
labor"), and Cotton Mather spoke of the twin oars ***. Jesus Christ
sweated in the Garden of Gethsemane (according to Luke 22:44), his
sweat implying both work and worship as one. Native Americans sweat
in the \onikare\ in a similar conjunction of the two, and Jews and
Scandinavians may not consciously know it, but the sweat they sweat
in the \shvitzbad\ or the \sauna\ was originally a holy sweat, for
both traditions began as religious ceremonies. And in the sweat of
sexuality, when (though approaching the moment is probably the
human activity most regulated by custom and taboo) all rituals are
ignored in the explosion outward of what remains usually hidden
within the unconscious, we are all shamans: the work and the
holiness implied by the sweating of our bodies conjoin in a moment
not deliberately chosen but that \chooses us\, and that gives us a
small taste of life, death, and the life beyond. As William Blake
said (in "The Little Black Boy", \Songs of Innocence and
Experience), ***
"We are put on earth for a little space
In order to learn to bear the beams of love."
Footnotes
(1) This relationship between religions has been characterized in
another of my articles for JSBS as an example of "syzygy". A syzygy
is a relationship between universals such that one universal is a
finite member of the other universal. That is to say, each
universal encompasses infinity within, but is finite when perceived
from without. Cf. "Syzygy", James David Audlin, \The Journal of
Social and Biological Structures\, Vol. ____ No. _____.
(2) "Covenant" as a term may be opposed to "contract". A contract
is an agreement based on taking: A provides something to B as long
as B provides something else to A. Contracts are centered not on
persons but on the goods or services exchanged. Covenants are
centered on the persons, and are based on giving. An example of a
contract is employment. If A does not do the job, B will fire A and
hire someone who can do the job. If B does not pay A the wages
agreed upon, A will quit and work elsewhere. An example of a
covenant is marriage. A does not marry B because B is "the best
person for the job", but because B is the only person A could
possibly spend her or his life with. Furthermore, contracts are
inflexible and, if terms are broken, there are penalties, but
covenants are flexible and, even when apparently broken, should
still remain in effect. "Covenant", as a term, hearkens back to the
archetypical covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites; it
implies the presence of the Divine as a "guarantor of the loan",
making the level of mutual trust possible lacking which would
render a covenant only a contract.
(3)Dunsany, Lord. \The King of Elfland's Daughter\. New York:
Ballantine, 1969 (rpt. of 1924 ed.), pp. 2, 3.
(4)Plutarch. Trans. by John Dryden. \Theseus\.
(5)Cf. the chapter titled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" in \The
Wind in the Willows\, by Kenneth Grahame, with illustrations by
Arthur Rackham. New York: Heritage, 1968 (rpt. of 1940 ed.). This
passage is a rare example in Western literature of a positive
portrayal of the Horned God.
(6) Cf. "Syzygy", James David Audlin, \The Journal of Social and
Biological Structures\, Vol. ______ No. ______.
(7) This is the reason why Western people are frustrated when it
appears that God has done, condoned, or allowed "evil", that which
is outside the Rule of Law. Within the perspective of Western
theology, it might be suggested that God, being God, can, of
course, do \anything\, and, no matter what it is, and even if it
would be evil for anyone else (i.e., for any finite being), the
action is good. Stated another way, it is not that God is incapable
of doing evil, but that evil is incapable of being done by God.
"Good" = "do-able by God". If then we would do good, we must do
Godly things.
Bibliography
Audlin, James David. "Syzygy". \The Journal of Social and
Biological Structures\. Vol. ____, No. ____ (date).
Black Elk. As told to John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow). \Black
Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala
Sioux\. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1961
(rpt. of 1932 ed.).
Black Elk. Recorded and edited by Joseph Epes Brown. \The Sacred
Pipe: Being Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the
Oglala Sioux\. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press,
1953.
Boorstin, Daniel J. \The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America\. New York: Atheneum, 1971.
Hughes, Robert. \The Shock of the New\. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Lao Tzu (Lao-tse). Trans. D. C. Lau. \Tao te Ching\. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963.
Niebuhr, H. Richard. \The Kingdom of God in America\. New York:
Harper & Row, 1937.
Standing Bear, Luther. \Land of the Spotted Eagle\. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1978 (rpt. of 1933 ed.)
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