Indigenous Change - Essay

Indigenous Change

To effect real, lasting change in one’s behavior, science has shown that a person has to involve the subconscious. Speaking metaphorically, our subconscious is like the ocean currents, which are fundamental forces of the earth that are unaffected by storms that may rage on the surface. Even a hurricane will not change the current because the current is put in place by things that are more fundamentally powerful, like tides, ocean temperatures and the tilt of the planet itself.  It doesn’t matter how strong the storm; the seas themselves may feature swells that are 80 feet high in the extreme latitudes, but the currents move on. The currents may increase or decrease the nature of the swells in terms of wave height and steepness, but the storm of the moment does not have the capacity change anything about the current

Many of us seek to walk in greater spiritual light. In other words, we wish for greater enlightenment. So we sign up for the latest retreat or class and/or resolve to practice more consistently and with a greater degree of devotion, whatever that may look like for us. In doing so, the Universe does what the Universe always does; it gives us encouragement early on (ever hear of beginners luck?) and tests shortly follow so that we can develop the strength we asked for. Generally speaking, our prayers are answered with tests in accordance with our requests and the law of resistance, which says that strength is gained through opposition. This law applies to everything, from the muscles in our bodies to political issues (a complex manifestation of this law because it involves other souls, karma, etc.) to our spiritual health. Significantly, this law is in keeping with the medicine wheel teachings of many indigenous nations wherein an idea springs up as the rising sun and springtime of the East, followed by the abundance of the summertime South wherein we had better be laying up treasured faith borne of early experience because the storms of the West and the dark winter of the North are coming. What most of us find is that the retreats and classes or even peak spiritual experiences help for a time – maybe all the way through the Southern summer - but the tests generally push us back to a point just above square one. It’s not as if there was no benefit in our increasing the consistency of our meditation or prayers back there in the Springtime, it’s just that the rest of our lives overtook our resolve and seemed to eat much of the benefit away. So we come to another point in life, weeks or months later, where we are inspired to increase the pace of our enlightenment and we remember that we’ve been here before and wonder why we are unable to keep our commitments to ourselves in a spiritual manner. But we are good, earnest people and want to do better so we start again and fail, and start and fail, and start and fail, each time getting benefit and getting stronger and better and more skilled in some ways but without the real, fundamental shift we know is possible, even as a hurricane may rage on the surface of the ocean as the current marches on.

There is a simple reason this fundamental shift eludes us. It is because we are not considering the power of our current-like subconscious because all we see is the storm of the moment, manifesting as egoic desire. It’s not that egoic desire is inherently bad. In fact, it is a common error to think of ego as the enemy. It’s not. Ego simply is, as in “is a fact of earthly human existence”. We can’t move through this life without one or many. Where we get into trouble is when we forget that it is rather something to be observed, considered and exchanged as conditions warrant instead of obeying it simply because it exists in the moment. For instance, we may hear a motivational speaker and say to ourselves, “I can do better. I can” – insert phrase here – “be happier, more successful, more organized, more disciplined.” And you’re right. This is within your power. But this is likely a storm of the moment, an egoic desire in most instances, as worthy and good as the desire is. After that desire manifests and is latched on to, for most of us most of the time, unless we involve our subconscious, our resolve withers in the face of the tests of the West and North and we arrive back in the East again the next time we are inspired to increase the pace of our enlightenment equipped with memories and more wisdom, but still largely starting over. This is because our subconscious involves things like cultural, generational and/ or early childhood trauma, spiritual disturbances or even karma carried from parallel or previous lifetimes, if you believe in that sort of thing (or of course if they exist, even if you don’t). We don’t change the effect of such forces by listening to the latest Deepak Chopra or Tony Robbins CD, although these may be keys to inspiration for us. We have to involve our bodies. Our wondrous bodies are truly underutilized, mistreated and misunderstood receptacles for our eternal souls. They are indicators of our health in ways we are only beginning to understand in Western culture. Regarding the healing of our Soul wounds, the body is a critical tool. This is because the subconscious only “takes notice” when we involve our bodies to help our Souls face those inner demons, those wounded parts of ourselves. Stories abound of cancer victims experiencing a fundamental spiritual shift after the body was in mortal danger. Survivors of life trauma including losing a parent or friend or suffering a serious accident can have the same experience. For instance, I have a friend that completely shifted his focus to his family away from his successful surgical practice after he nearly died from a biking accident on the way to work one day. He still has a massively successful practice, but his focus is not the practice and anyone that knows him can see that. And he is twice the man he was before the accident.

So do we have to wait for a near-death experience or the death of a loved one to be a better person?

No. But for us to make the jump that we as a species have to make in order to survive, it has to involve a shift that is greater than we have the power to make with our own resolve. “Oh,” you may say, “he’s talking about a spiritual change. He’s talking about being born again.” Well, yes and no. A spiritual change, yes. But the largely Christian term “born again” is so overused and misused that it is essentially a useless term now, charged as it is with emotion and ideas that are conceptually inconsistent with it. So how do we make this shift in such a way that it can stand up to the storms that always follow a resolve to increase the pace of our enlightenment?

I think the indigenous cultures had it about right. In very general terms, a recognized spiritual leader among a native culture, rather s/he be a shaman, medicine person, holy person, etc., would throughout the year act as intercessor for a supplicant or group of supplicants in ceremonies that were recognized as sacred. In the case of the shamanic traditions of the Andes, many of these were as simple as the despacho ceremony, wherein one creates in essence an elaborate care package for Pachamama (Mother Earth) and buries it ceremonially. But it’s important to point out that all spiritual paths have their ceremonies. From the Christian communion to the five pillars of Islam to the yogic traditions and more, there are dedicated sacred practices that seem to have at least some power to change the course of the supplicant’s lives, to change the way they think and show devotion to Deity.

However, I submit that there is a class of indigenous ceremony that has more power to put us face-to-face with our wounds, motivations and understanding of the nature of reality than any other: the ceremonial ordeal.  The ceremonial ordeal allows the collective and individual participants to introduce physical discomfort as a way to supplicate Creator, undercut ego and allow them to get to the reasons that underlie their actions. If their intent is pure, this can have an almost inconceivable effect on the participant and her community. In the case of the sweat lodge, a ceremonial ordeal found among many indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions the world over, the body is physically purified with steam arising from superheated stones in a small enclosure. Since the purification is done in a spiritual context with the shaman leading the ceremony with appointed sacred songs and the accoutrements of his practice, the purification does not stop at the body but tells the individual and collective subconscious that the person is “serious” about his request for the increase in spiritual power or cleanliness. This is especially true considering the discomfort that is involved in a very warm or extended sweat lodge. To the extent that it is “set apart” for that purpose, the ceremony that involves bodily and spiritual discomfort is an effective way for a person to change the subconscious “currents” of his life within his own time frame; in other words, without a life event outside his control causing the change. During the Sun Dance, for instance, the participants are literally brought to death’s door. They suffer in acute ways for their “prayer”, which is generally to be a prayer for the earth, the community and the individual in that order. For the Sun Dancers themselves, it is the equivalent of being involved in a semi-controlled train wreck. The intercessor creates through ordained ceremony a “container” for this to happen in a more-or-less safe place. As it is pulled to a close, the subconscious seems to drink in the worthy hopes and prayers of the supplicant and allows him to change in ways that simple resolve can never touch. The person is fundamentally changed. Metaphorically speaking, his planet has reversed it’s spin or his moon has fled his orbit, entirely rewriting his currents... or at least a portion of them.  

As I mentioned above, religion has some power to change us (most indigenous spirituality lacks dogma and is therefore more accurately classified as spirituality rather than religion). That’s why there are so many good people in religions around the world. But in order to be palatable and marketable to the masses, religions have watered themselves down. Any religious order is strongest when it requires nearly incomprehensible levels of sacrifice among its adherents. In the LDS faith for instance, most will say that the Church was collectively at its most dedicated when her pioneers were dragging handcarts across the plains, dying by exposure, starvation, disease and attack. But people now are not interested in that kind of privation. So they settle for communion, for instance – which has the potential to be a powerful experience as it is to be communion with God – but which is so easy that unless the person can get into a deep meditative trance where the subconscious is reached, it lacks power to change the individual. And a visit to any church house on any given Sunday will reveal that people are not in a deep, meditative trance during communion. They are fidgety and restless, only slightly less distracted than they are on any other day of the week, largely (but not completely) going through the motions of adherence, but without the power they could have if they were sacrificing their bodily comfort for it. Fasting can work within any religious context, but people generally quit before it gets the attention of the subconscious because we have become soft. We don’t understand what it even means to suffer any more, at least within the “temporarily dominant culture” that we define as Western culture. So we drift; we grow in feints and starts and stops, thinking we are religious enough, even as a species we are killing ourselves and our planet because we cannot evolve in this manner. And evolve we must, because our technology has such power that unless it is wielded with deep wisdom, we will kill ourselves and everything around us with it.

My advice is that we return to indigenous ceremonial ordeal as a way to heal ourselves and our planet. I think it is possible to do this and still keep one’s religion, if that is important to an individual. This is beyond my intended scope of this essay, but in other words, I believe that a young Christian man can deepen his relationship with Jesus through a vision quest run by a Blackfeet holy man. It’s not that such a ceremony cannot be intercessed by his pastor, but as it is not in the tradition of the pastor, he would have to make up the ceremony. It could be done. That must be how all spiritual ceremony originally started. But why risk it? I submit that if the pastor cares deeply for the soul of this young man, he will make needed peace with the holy man and allow his charge to leave his direct involvement for purposes of the growth of his young soul. Afterwards, the pastor could and should process the experience with him. This can be done within the parameters of the pastor’s and youth’s more conventional Christianity where it fits. And where it does not, the young man – and the pastor - will find he has greater capacity for compassion and understanding of those that are different from himself and that his soul has grown outside the traditional spoken word. For the young man, he will find that he has greater power to change the course of his life because within the extremity of his physical condition, within the ceremony itself, his subconscious has taken notice. The suffering of the fast during the vision quest for instance, because it is part of the ceremony, made it so. He is more enlightened, prepared for the storms of the West and North, and has increased his ability to receive truth from sources outside his religion, but that still support it in ways that are largely beyond his ability to describe.

In this essay, I have been speaking in the third person. But I have to add my personal experience to these words. I was a proclaimed and committed but fairly conventional Christian for 43 years. After an abrupt break from the religion that had been a part of my family for well over a century, I found myself in a sweat lodge. The experience changed my life in ways for which I am grateful beyond description. Eventually I was led by dreams and no mere coincidence to the Sun Dance tree. I recently completed my own four year commitment and am now a recognized Lakota Sun Dancer. My spiritual name is Protector (“AH-way AHN-ka” is the Laokota pronunciation). In this past year as I have completed my commitment I have been overjoyed to find that my capacity to relate to the Christ principle and to Jesus in particular has grown in strength and dimension. I know him now in ways that I only envied before. I attribute this to the fact that truth is truth and that it flows by different names through all people. It took a willingness to let go of what I thought I knew about Creator to find him. Of course it has to be this way; a Being such as this cannot be described in words but can only be known through the heart (The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao). And more to the point of this essay, as I have participated in indigenous rites of the Andes and the Northern Plains peoples, I have found my capacity to heal from my own wounds increased exponentially. I will be forever grateful to the brave Lakota men and women that protected their ceremonies from the insane political authorities that attempted to squash them from existence.      

In conclusion, I feel strongly that a return to indigenous ceremony, including the ordeal, is how we as a species can grow in such a way that we can be worthy of our technology, of our lives and of the generations that preceded and that follow us. By effecting this sea-change, this reversal of our current-like subconscious, we can save and heal our lives and the planet.