| I’ve been away for a while, thinking long thoughts. Traveling helps this process, and that is where I have been, traveling. I am looking as I often do at the template under the known, the back story, that source behind the struggle of colonizer and colonized, the one that impels the search for some means to direct, profound and lasting experience of the soul, to the power of knowing. |  |
I think of Julian Janes and our more recent and louder guides who try to map this territory, of those whose search has taken them into dark territory. I think of those tribes that still have the thread, of Papa and Aunt Molly; I think of those people hidden on the mountain side and in the desert valleys who still hold an older structure and functioning of the psyche..
Many years ago when I began working with American Indians from big rural reservations a woman from the Blackfeet Tribe told me I would meet a few clients who did not have the same defense structure that most people have, that I would meet consciousness that were not part of my education. She was right. I met people more like Papa and Aunt Molly – direct access to all dimensions, no barriers, people puzzled by how convoluted and troubled the minds of the world, how difficult to see the obvious. In people like this change was immediate where change was desirable. No need for Freud or even Jung, no Rogerian techniques necessary.
I am thinking of an Indian man who said, “We don’t need Christianity; we didn’t kill our God.” No reconciliation necessary. Another man said that Christians had to be scattered around the earth so the religion could remember itself to the people; a sort of reverse missionizing. Certainly the Christianity I knew as a child is not the one I experienced when we left our rural home, when we entered a culture that had lost a way of experiencing soul, the direct power of a well fed spirit – nothing to long for as it is already here.
Yes, in my travels preparing for the next book, something came. I entered ecstasy and wrote rapidly for a few hours, gathered medicine and prayed – grateful to be met by experience like Papa’s and Aunt Molly’s. Soon I will begin the book. Or maybe the book has already begun.
Many years ago when I began working with American Indians from big rural reservations a woman from the Blackfeet Tribe told me I would meet a few clients who did not have the same defense structure that most people have, that I would meet consciousness that were not part of my education. She was right. I met people more like Papa and Aunt Molly – direct access to all dimensions, no barriers, people puzzled by how convoluted and troubled the minds of the world, how difficult to see the obvious. In people like this change was immediate where change was desirable. No need for Freud or even Jung, no Rogerian techniques necessary.
I am thinking of an Indian man who said, “We don’t need Christianity; we didn’t kill our God.” No reconciliation necessary. Another man said that Christians had to be scattered around the earth so the religion could remember itself to the people; a sort of reverse missionizing. Certainly the Christianity I knew as a child is not the one I experienced when we left our rural home, when we entered a culture that had lost a way of experiencing soul, the direct power of a well fed spirit – nothing to long for as it is already here.
Yes, in my travels preparing for the next book, something came. I entered ecstasy and wrote rapidly for a few hours, gathered medicine and prayed – grateful to be met by experience like Papa’s and Aunt Molly’s. Soon I will begin the book. Or maybe the book has already begun.
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