I saw the cross as the whole pattern organizing one’s relationship to the spirit world. Like Jesus, one should be stretched
across all polarities, including good and evil. In this way, Jesus accepted our sins rather than negating or destroying them.
Healing, too, is not about eradication of evil, sin, sickness, illness, or pathology. It is about embracing sickness as a corner of the cross one carries. Accepting it as part of this sacred whole carries with it a resignation of one’s individual will and surrender to the greater purpose of the Greater Spirit. Healing involves the re-contextualization of a person into the sacred context, placing them in the middle of the four corners of the cross. Within the sacred, holy, or whole of the cross, a person becomes healed, that is, made one with the Great One.

Here, the particular outcome of one’s life is less relevant. One is ready to live and ready to die. At this point in the center of the universe, it is always a good day to die and a good day to live. page 110

[Credo Mutwa] spoke of the stupidity and dangers of psychiatric nomenclature and the necessity to always cooperate with the symptom.

Naming a problem feeds its power, he said. In his culture, problems aren’t even discussed. This would empower them and make them more difficult to alleviate. A new breed of healers will be required for the troubles and plagues that increasingly confront us. These healers will be disconnected from the medieval cruelties of psychiatry and medical-minded psychologists with their lobotomizations of the connections between mind, body and spirit. Armed with the understandings of ecology and relationship, these systemic-minded healers will utilize (rather than attack) people’s symptoms and problems and help them move forward with their lives without psychiatric testing, assessment, diagnosis, medication, hospitalization, and economic ruin.

In the world of killer plagues, these healers will teach people how to die. They will show how death is a door to life. Only in learning how to die can people learn to live. To accept death is to walk the spiritual path. This same path is the only route toward life and the survival of our whole ecosystem.

AIDS may not have come to extinguish the human race, but to help save it. If it helps teach us how to die through turning us toward spirituality, it is a blessing. Of this we can be certain: the future, if there is to be one, can only be realized if we become spiritual. Conquering nature through consuming, curing and taming it, has been the very process of our own destruction. Accepting our humble part in nature through cooperating with other living creatures and accepting the mysteries of the wild will be our only healing.

The new breed of healer will reject the seductions and lies of convenient recipes and schools of therapy cooked up by modernist hucksters. They will submit themselves to the wisdom of the old ways. Spirituality, rather than economics and professionalism, will organize their practice.

Stewardship, service, and sacrifice rather than exploitive profit, pseudoethical guidelines, and self-serving guilds will characterize their contributions. These new healers will not be professionals. They will be human beings.

The forthcoming age of healing will de-emphasize curing and accentuate healing, the making whole of one’s place in the universe. In this new healing age of wholeness, all the directions will intersect. The bringing together of different spiritual traditions can wait no longer. In the sacred center point, the cross and the dance become inseparable. Here one is healed to move and moved to heal, becoming nothing and everything. Here one finds the fire of shaken spirits. Page 126-7

The great traditions of shamanism, with their emphasis upon direct communion with the spirit world, teach us that the boundaries imposed by religious institutions and their texts are artificial. Siberian shamans may commune with the Virgin Mary, Native American medicine people may converse with Christ, and Christian shamans may fly with the eagle. There is a sacred circle connecting everything that is holy. Independent of which tradition one enters, the ascents and descents of an impeccable spiritual journey will always lead one to that center point of great stillness. There the strongest medicine of earth, love, will break our hearts and open our minds to be free of our own self-imposed limitations. There we surrender and die to be reborn to the hope that a meaningful life is made through the action of being a good steward. We truly receive all we need when we give all we have. That is all we need to know.p. 161

An Evocation of Mystery

The black snake must re-enter the belly of the body that has Christ-Eagle in its heart. Only in this spiritually whole body can the middle point between good and evil be found. Here one does not indulge in either evil or good. Indulgence is possible only if there exists a “self” available to indulge. Being good or evil implies the presence of such a pursuing agent. The experience of evil or good feeds the realization of the reality of this self. The death of self leads to a complete absence, a place of nothingness. Here there is no entity or identity that can indulge in good or bad.

The loss of self occurs when one is stretched across all sides of spiritual opposites. This crucifixion on the cross of all opposites leads to the death of self and the birth of being, spiritually, in the center of nothingness. To give everything away — property, ideas, longings, and even one’s life as one knows it — is to find that there never was a self to begin with. The emptiness of one’s core had simply become filled with the litter of concretized ideas. When all that garbage is disposed of, there is no self to be found. The idea of a self was an illusion. believed in because it was assumed all the stuff must have belonged to someone, namely one’s self.

The re-birth of being in nothingness makes all spiritual gifts possible. In this middle spot of the cross of opposites, the energy of life and death may move as freely as the leaves blowing with the wind. Here the natural world enters, not the world of decaying garbage. The winged ones, the green ones, the four-leggeds, mountains, streams and clouds may fill this emptiness. In this way the outer natural world fills the space of one’s inner world. Dreams are the guide to this new way of filling the internal emptiness. What one is shown or told in dream must be found in the natural world.

When it is found, the outer and the inner become one. In this way our inner ecology unites with the outer ecology making the distinction between the two possible. When this takes place we move more toward a oneness with the whole natural world. We become all of our relatives. Knowing that the inside is one with the outside enables us to be in the outside with complete awareness. In this way we surrender our limited mind to become a part of a Greater Mind. This Greater Mind constitutes the mind of healing.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (Pagels, p. 124), Jesus discusses this: ”When you make the two one and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same…then you will enter (the kingdom).”

Through sacrifice and the death of the unnatural world we empty ourselves of our self. The natural world is then reborn into us through our dreams. In dream time we set forth on journeys to bring the outer into the inner. The passages across this boundary are the passages into shamanic experience and healing. This boundary or crack between the inner and outer world becomes deeper and wider with every crossing until one day the space in the crack has become the whole. This whole space or emptiness that once separated the inner from the outer becomes the complete emptiness that now embraces the whole natural world.

Coming home to the heart of this great, holy emptiness requires our fullest surrender and participation in shaking out the spirits. The spirits are the guides directing us across the inner and outer interfaces. They exist in the midpoints and provide a “medium” for the processes of transformation. The spirits also cross the interfaces and return over and over again to the Center of the Great Circle embodying everything and nothing. We must help them, as they help us, in being shaken out and moved toward the Center of the Great Circle of Healing. p 163

My own experience of the spiritual world begins with my feeling spiritual energy or vital life force. I refer to this energy as “spirit” or “spirits.” It’s called “prana” in India, “mana” in Hawaii and Indonesia, “ki” or “seiki” in Japan, “chi” in China, “num,” “ngai,” “nye,” “nzmbi,” and ”voodoo” in Africa, “maxpe” by the Crow, “wakan” by the Dakota, “upa” by the Hidatsa, “manitou” by the Algonquian, “jojo” by the Australians, “petara” by the Dajak of Indonesia, “tandi” by the Batak of Sumatra, “hasini” by the Malagasy, “baraka” by Sufis, “yesod” by Jewish cabalists, “ruach” by the Hebrews, and “the Holy Spirit” by Christians. I believe these different names refer to the same source of spirit that is open to all, regardless of knowledge, background, color, culture, gender, or religion.

When one receives spirit, whether in the form of a vision, a song, an idea, a dance, or whatever, one is obligated to act. To fail to transform it, is to risk having its energy degenerate into unhealthy forms. Edgar Cayce gave a reading in which he said, “to know, and not to do, becomes sin.” Evil is stagnating, untransformed spiritual energy. Good can be made from evil when its energy is transformed. P 170

Humor brings us back to who we are — fools, idiots, and buffoons. Our experience of the gods takes place because we remove our selves to allow the spirits to use us.

When we return, the gods leave and our body is again inherited by a spiritual idiot. Once, upon hearing a remark about his prodigious spiritual gifts, Edgar Cayce commented that when he’s conscious, he’s merely a below average human being. This humility is not an exercise in being modest about our greatness, it is a realization of our being nothing. P 171

The wild is one of our greatest healing and teaching resources. // In the wild, the meaning of any particular piece of action is minimized by the larger, more encompassing dance of interrelatedness performed by all living organisms.

Here the whole context of one’s experience more easily becomes the focus, rather than the isolated experience. In the wild all participants are more easily realized as small, rather inconsequential players in the whole. The wild, like a sweat, levels one to the ground. If one fully accepts this leveling to insignificance, an abandonment of self takes place and unity with the wild is possible. One accents one’s part in nature and thereby becomes one with nature.

In the wild, being impotent with fear or being outrageously macho are the same. Both ways of being exaggerate and focus on the importance of self. The courage to both act for life as well as accept one’s possible immediate death is a more accurate description of how one should fit into nature.

Nature is not a stage on which we perform. It is a body of which we are a part. Our hand is not an independent actor performing on the stage of the rest of our body. It is a part of our whole body. Speaking of them as separate is insane.

Using our hand as if it were separate from the rest of us is potentially dangerous. To reconcile our relationship with nature requires acting upon the recognition that we are not separate from it. The hand which is us must be reconnected to the body of nature. p 172

Healing is fundamentally about connecting hands and other parts back to their bodies. It is not about alleviating or curing localized pains and discomforts, although that may be a consequence. Healing, the process of making whole again, is a way of leading people back to contexts which connect them. It should be no surprise that wilderness areas are often the most appropriate locales for healing, p 173

Throughout all cultures of the world, people have found different wavs to activate and utilize the flow of life energy to help others be restored and renewed. A fully developed spiritual life moves with these flows of energy, striving to have every breath of life be realized as a full participation in the vibratory movements of spirit.

It follows that all sources of vibration and movement have potential for healing. The creation of difference and the rhythmic movement across the border of a difference constitutes a vibration. Any given vibration may move through other differences creating a flow of vibrations. The major pathways of such a current move through stations and centers where focusing, amplifying, and transforming take place. Healing. from this vantage point, involves creating differences, creating vibrations (movements across the sides of a difference), and opening up currents of vibration. p 174

For me, love for another without any purposeful glorification of self and without fear of evil constitutes the lens focusing spiritual energy for healing. Love untainted by fear, control, judgment, possession, and expectation is raw, vibratory, life energy, the energy that fills another with life.

It transcends ideologies and social structures and is available everywhere. It is not bought, earned, deserved, or achieved, but free for those who sincerely ask.

From this perspective the life energy available for healing is free from being owned (or possessed) by any religion or spiritual practice. Life energy may arise in a classroom, a camping trip, in a concert, play, sporting event, conversation, quiet meditation and sometimes even in a church!

It’s hard for some religious people to accept that the spirits don’t exclusively reside in religious structures. They are free to roam wherever sincere hearts call. It is as possible for the spirits to reside in the music of a jazz saxophonist in a sleezy bar as it is for the spirits to be absent in a high mass at a cathedral.

When religious worship services and sermons get into judgmental trips or displays of piety, the spirits quickly vanish and the church immediately feels like it has lost its soul. At such a time, the most spiritual thing to do may be to ignite a rippling of belly laughs. Then, the holy spirits may decide to return. When the spirits return, they are available to move people. Connection with the flowing currents of spiritual energy connects one more to all of life. In this connection to the great current, river, and ocean of life’s vital force, we are healed. Here one is moved vibrated. and even shaken by the tides of a great ocean of healing. p 175

Improvisation

Medicine men – the herb healers as well as our holy men — all have their own personal ways of acting according to their visions. The Great Spirit wants people to be different. Following one’s own visions and listening to what the spirits tell you are the main teachings one needs.

When we attune (or heal) ourselves to our rightful place (no more and no less than that of any other living creature), we become fully connected and related to all our relatives. Here we are able to commune and learn from all creatures. p 176

Getting our being to where it belongs requires freeing ourselves from the contrivances and manipulations of abstraction and thought. Naked mind is different from dressed mind and the former enables us to directly encounter the naked minds of all creatures. As Joan Halifax says, “For the shaman the world of creatures is the uncontrived, the uncooked, the raw: it is the realm where thought does not interfere.”

The purpose of the trials and tribulations of spiritual journeys is to help trip one into falling into this raw, naked, natural way of being. Richard Baker-roshi: ”Enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes you accident-prone.”

Something has to break inside of you; and then that which is discovered within is found to be raw and absolutely naked. It is a mind that some people know who leave no tracks on their way. It is rare, and it is cultivated in the wilderness. p 177

Note: Lakota “Big Race” involves the stars: Castor, Pollux, Procyon, Sirius, Rigel, Pleiades and Capella