Post by Blu on Dec 2, 2004 19:49:19 GMT -5
I sense a similar integration, a cosmology of heart and head, within the world view of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Over the past few years I have been privileged to explore some of these questions with friends from the Blackfoot, MicMaq, Iroquoian and Cree peoples. In every case I have been struck by their direct sense of relatedness to the universe.
For a traditional person matter and spirit, the immediate and transcendent, are equally present in the world that surrounds them. Indeed, their science and their spirituality remains intensely practical. They have no need to fragment and divide knowledge and experience, or to create an art that is somehow different from religion, a science that is separated from the sacred. No, the essence of their world view, it seems to me, lies in acknowledging direct relationship with all living things, and with the recognition that all things are possessed of animation and spirit - and this includes not only the insects, birds, fish, animals and plants but also the rocks and trees, winds and stars. Indeed, within such a universe, matter and spirit, mind and body have never become categorized or separated by thought.
But this sense of acknowledgement of the energies or spirits of the cosmos, of what is at one and the same time both transcendent yet immanent in matter, also brings with it the obligation to celebrate and renew the relationship between The People and these powers. The Sundance of the Blackfoot, and other plains Indians, for example, is both an act of sacrifice and a ceremony that renews their relationship to the whole order of creation. Likewise, the Waltersgame of the MicMaq - which to casual eyes appears to be an elaborate gambling game - is, in essence, a reconnection to the alliances that were once made between the ancestors of The People and the Keepers of the Animals and the other powers of nature. And, because in the Native American world view time is always returning into itself, it is always possible to make a direct connection to the primal moment of relationship and creation.
I have dwelt upon the cosmology of the Indigenous peoples of North America because I believe that it can both illuminate and connect us to something that is felt to missing within our modern Western way of life. Our lack of connection arises, I believe, from the way we have distanced ourselves from the cosmos and through tendency of our thought, and our Indo-European languages, to objectivity the world around us. Within the Algonquin family of languages, spoken by the MicMaq, Cree and Blackfoot, their strongly verbal base supports a vision of nature involving process and animation, our own noun-oriented languages, however, suggest a world of objects that can be analyzed through the processes of conceptualization and categorization.
www.paricenter.com/library/papers/peat25.php
For a traditional person matter and spirit, the immediate and transcendent, are equally present in the world that surrounds them. Indeed, their science and their spirituality remains intensely practical. They have no need to fragment and divide knowledge and experience, or to create an art that is somehow different from religion, a science that is separated from the sacred. No, the essence of their world view, it seems to me, lies in acknowledging direct relationship with all living things, and with the recognition that all things are possessed of animation and spirit - and this includes not only the insects, birds, fish, animals and plants but also the rocks and trees, winds and stars. Indeed, within such a universe, matter and spirit, mind and body have never become categorized or separated by thought.
But this sense of acknowledgement of the energies or spirits of the cosmos, of what is at one and the same time both transcendent yet immanent in matter, also brings with it the obligation to celebrate and renew the relationship between The People and these powers. The Sundance of the Blackfoot, and other plains Indians, for example, is both an act of sacrifice and a ceremony that renews their relationship to the whole order of creation. Likewise, the Waltersgame of the MicMaq - which to casual eyes appears to be an elaborate gambling game - is, in essence, a reconnection to the alliances that were once made between the ancestors of The People and the Keepers of the Animals and the other powers of nature. And, because in the Native American world view time is always returning into itself, it is always possible to make a direct connection to the primal moment of relationship and creation.
I have dwelt upon the cosmology of the Indigenous peoples of North America because I believe that it can both illuminate and connect us to something that is felt to missing within our modern Western way of life. Our lack of connection arises, I believe, from the way we have distanced ourselves from the cosmos and through tendency of our thought, and our Indo-European languages, to objectivity the world around us. Within the Algonquin family of languages, spoken by the MicMaq, Cree and Blackfoot, their strongly verbal base supports a vision of nature involving process and animation, our own noun-oriented languages, however, suggest a world of objects that can be analyzed through the processes of conceptualization and categorization.
www.paricenter.com/library/papers/peat25.php