Native America and the Cosmos

This is a video produced by the PBS on the similarity of beliefs shared by the first peoples of these two continents, which we now refer to as North and South America, and the fact that they shared the implements of their belief system over a much wider expanse of territory than previously thought.  A ceremonial set of buildings in Chaco canyon appears to have been a center of shared learning and to have served as a location for the collective expression of important rites.

I'm not certain how long native peoples have lived here.  In this video, the narrator repeatedly says 13,000 years, but I suspect indigenous people have been here much, much longer than archeologists currently believe.  Their own creation myths present them as having originated here.  Isn't it just hubris on our part to think we know better?

To live in balance with the Earth and the powers that be in the Cosmos appears to be the core of the Native orientation to life.  Unfortunately, we of European descent lost that sensibility and acute awareness several thousand years ago. We perhaps last had a cultural expression of it in the builders of stone megaliths, circles, and barrow mounds of the British Isles and on the European continent.  That knowledge all but disappeared in the West.

The monoculture which has spread over the entire globe, almost completely eclipsing all forms of indigenous life, is plainly sick at heart and soul, and is increasingly unhinged intellectually and emotionally.  We can't forever treat the planet as though it is merely a stockpile of resources to satisfy our every want or need.  We lack the balance that the indigenous peoples wisely sought to achieve.  We objectify everything, including ourselves.  We proceed from an assumption of lack, which breeds contempt, competition, and strife amongst us.  As it turns out, we have more to learn from the indigenous approach to life than they have to learn from us.  We are a spiritually bankrupt civilization.  A people gone badly astray.  It necessarily follows, then, that everything we do will go awry.  Balance, as always, is the key.

On another tack, in all Native traditions, there is an emphasis upon the six directions -- north, south, east, west, up and down.  I have often wondered, when I've heard of this orientation, "What about the seventh direction? -- within?"  I wonder if the direction "up" in native cosmology refers only to the literal heavenly cosmos above us, or whether it also refers to the vertical ascension that can take place within the sphere of human consciousness?  What I call the "horizontal" universe --the one we currently inhabit -- also has its hidden vertical dimensions.

With our obsessive energy, we have circumscribed the earth, plumbed subatomic realms, stretched our minds and our thoughts into interstellar space and back to the origins of time -- but we still have not yet plumbed ourselves.  We are a microcosm of the macrocosm.  It literally took the entire evolution of the Universe to produce a human being, that is, a form of self-reflective consciousness.  What if that is the "program" of the Universe?  What if that program involves the further expansion and evolution of our consciousness, as an intrinsic expression of the basic drive of the Universe's evolutionary impetus?

Well, I have strayed far from the subject matter of this video and I apologize.  It's just more recreational thinking on my part, and perhaps a personal indulgence, so I will cease and desist and simply present this first video, as is.  I invite you to listen with an open mind, though.  We all have much to learn.