Why Is the World So Beautiful?
Everything Is Alive
Our original instructions are to listen to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness.
—Lakota elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse
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RELATIONSHIPS WITH SPIRITS
I am perplexed by how many politically progressive people are adamantly materialist. They are rigidly and belligerently "skeptical" of spirituality, even in the face of the fact that relationship with spirits has been a key element in virtually all Indigenous cultures.
I'm especially puzzled by the dogmatic materialism clung to by some environmentalists. They don't seem to understand that Indigenous peoples' loving relationship with the earth is inherently spiritual.
Robert Moss says, "Indigenous and ancestral shamans know that we are all connected to the world of the animal powers, and that by recognizing and nurturing our relation with animal spirits, we find and follow the natural path of our energies.
"Yet many of us have lost this primal connection, or know it only as a superficial wannabe symbolic thing that we look up in books and medicine cards without feeding and living every day."
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Words by Gary Snyder
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WHY DO PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD BUT NOT IN FAIRIES?
A reader asked me, “Why do so many people believe in God but don’t believe in fairies?”
Here’s one response: Most people in Western culture don’t have much of a relationship, let alone an intimate connection, with The Other Real World: the Dreamtime, the astral plane, the realm of the ancestors, the-place-we-all-come-from-and-to-where-we-will-return.
Those who do have such a relationship are far more likely to be on conversational terms with fairies and other denizens of The Other Real World.
Another factor in the absence of communion between humans and fairies is that many humans spend minimal time in the natural world, where The Other Real World is especially accessible to our waking awareness.
A third factor is the rationalists’ inability to apprehend or appreciate the exotic intelligence of non-human beings. They don’t believe there are other modes of acumen, so beings like fairies who command other modes are invisible.
Here’s another reason religious people may “believe” in God but not in fairies. For many, God is an abstract concept they took on through parental and social conditioning rather than through a visceral connection with the live and in-person Divine Intelligence. Their abstract concept obstructs the visceral connection. They don’t know God. They think God.
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OUR NON-HUMAN KIN
According to "The Pluralism Project" in the article "Native American Religious and Cultural Freedom," the animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most Indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even 'religion'); the term is an anthropological construct."
Psychotherapist Danil Foor writes: "Animist values and practices emphasize relating well with the rest of life.
"These other-than-human kin include mountains and rivers; the elders who are animals, plants, and fungi; the spirits of places and things; planets and stars; deities and unseen kin; and many others whose lives and bodies are entangled with our own.
"Learning to navigate these other kinds of relationships is not only a fundamental life skill but also supportive of personal transformation, a source of great joy and intimacy, and the foundation of healthy culture."
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Art by Andrew Brandou
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SPIRIT IS EVERYWHERE, THANK GODDESS!
Witch Priestess Amanda Yates Garcia writes:
In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, ecological philosopher David Abram talks about how Western anthropologists misunderstood what Indigenous oral cultures meant by “spirits.”
In the West, we have this idea that spirit is somehow separate from nature and the material world. Spirit shines in heaven or is tortured in hell, our spirit is something separate from our body.
But in Indigenous/oral cultures, spirit is in everything; it is not, and can never be, disembodied.
Stones, mountains, trees, and oceans have spirits.
And spirits are people, more-than-human people, and people have will and agency. People can speak and listen and are always in relationship.
This ocean speaks, its voice is the wave, the clicking of the sand, and the singing of the whales.
It sees with a thousand eyes, hermit crabs and surfers and sharks. It welcomes, it casts out, it is sanguine and attacks.
We are not alone. We are surrounded by spirits that we are already in relation with, if we can get out of our own heads and show up enough to notice.
Amanda Yates Garcia is here:
and here:
https://www.instagram.com/oracleofla/
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ANIMISM IS THE ANTIDOTE TO COLONIALISM
"There is a Thai saying: Because we were never colonized, we never lost our animism, our sense that everything is alive if we have manners to collaborate. Animism is the antidote to colonialism."
—Caroline Casey ~ Coyote Network News
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REMEMBERING OTHERWORLDLY EVENTS
The essay below is by Gloria Anzaldúa, scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.
"We're not supposed to remember otherworldly events. We're supposed to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the soul's presence and of the spirit's presence. We've been taught that the spirit is outside our bodies, or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God. We're supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has spirit inside it.
"Like many Indians and Mexicans, I did not deem my psychic experiences real. I denied their occurrences and let my inner senses atrophy. I allowed white rationality to tell me what the existence of the 'other world' was mere pagan superstition.
“I accepted their reality, the 'official' reality of the rational, reasoning mode which is connected with external reality, the upper world, and is considered the most developed consciousness—the consciousness of duality.
"The other mode of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination.
“Its work is labeled 'fiction,' make-believe, wish-fulfillment. White anthropologists claim that Indians have 'primitive' and therefore deficient minds, that we cannot think in the higher mode of consciousness—rationality.
“They are fascinated by what they call the 'magical' mind, the 'savage' mind, the participation mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality.
"In trying to become 'objective,' Western culture made 'objects' of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing 'touch' with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence."
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ANIMISM IS NORMATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Animism is Normative Consciousness. Far from being an abstract "belief system," animism is the default way that human beings experience reality.
More about this in a podcast by Josh Schrei:
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Art by Ruslan Shtefan
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THE LIVING PSYCHE
"A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead.
“A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche."
—James Hillman, The Essential James Hillman: Blue Fire
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FRIENDS FROM THE OTHER SIDE
Guest Editorial by Tsuiiva Adsweila:
When I was very young and living on the reservation, I could see spirits and converse with tarusuhi, fairies.
What white people call "angels" and "spirits" were my friends. Talking animals showed me secret joys. My dolls were stand-ins for invisible creatures that were very real.
Adventures in my dreams were related to the events of the daytime. My fantasy experiences were real.
My mother Tsesmaviska loved the world I lived in, and she often joined in. As I did, she could see Omosima the Raven and Immojaassi the Red Bear. She loved my friends Amendosa the Hoot Owl and Wahvi-ho the Horned Owl. She treated the Thunder twins, Stroni and Zawanista, as my sisters, and Marhosti the Wind Song Boy as my brother.
All the rest, too: Ghilwaumee the Buzzard; Koosyalla the Turtle; Mooma the Bat; Hiahlisur the Grasshopper; Dusta-Moon the Spider; Tsahaya the Raccoon.
Of all my memories of my mother, my favorites are the parties we had with my whole entourage. She was never less than fully engaged with our conversations and play.
I was forever traumatized when my mother died. I was only six years old. That was 11 months after my father abandoned us. Within a year after mom passed, white, well-to-do American parents in Oklahoma adopted me. They were kind to me, and I grew to love them.
But they were not receptive to my magical companions. Nor were my new grandparents and aunts and uncles. As I grew up, they all told me that my dream world and friends were meaningless, and even worse, were unhealthy for me.
At first, the discouragement came as mockery. Later it became impatient and intolerant scolding, even outright ridicule. "OK, dear, it's time to grow up. Say goodbye to those pretend characters. They are getting in the way of your real life."
I will always be hurt by the memory of my white mother telling me, "Omosima and Immojaassi have always been dead. They have never been real."
By the time I was in fifth grade, I had begun to half-internalize those white adults' sickening ideas about the mysterious other realm, and was becoming alienated from the characters I had known and loved since my earliest childhood.
More and more, my love for my old friends was worn away, broken and crushed by seemingly caring relatives who manipulated and twisted me; who brainwashed me to believe that only the outer world was true, that only the things I perceived with my senses existed—and all else was fake, illusionary, nonsensical.
Now, years later, having received a fine American education but also having worked hard to recover my connections with my original allies, I know how stupid and dangerous white people's delusions are. I shudder to contemplate their poisonous dogmas.
A caveat: Analytical faculties are crucial to every well-functioning human being. The ability to perceive the material world with objectivity and accuracy is indispensable. I am glad I have had the privilege of developing these capacities in myself.
But the notion that they alone are enough to be a complete human being is preposterous. Most indigenous people I have met, from the Iban Dayak of Indonesia to the Alutiiq of Alaska to the Ovimbundu of Angola, know this.
The fact that much of white culture regards the other world as quaint and irrelevant at best, and foolish and deleterious at worst, is the root of devastating ignorance. The entire Western experiment has chosen to live half-lives.
Luckily for me, I have learned to go both ways: be smart in the way white people value, while also drawing sustenance from other kinds of intelligence and other realism of the living world.
Thank you my darlings, for not abandoning me: Omosima the Raven and Immojaassi the Red Bear; Amendosa the Hoot Owl and Wahvi-ho the Horned Owl; the Thunder twins, Stroni and Zawanista; Marhosti the Wind Song Boy; Ghilwaumee the Buzzard; Koosyalla the Turtle; Mooma the Bat; Hiahlisur the Grasshopper; Dusta-Moon the Spider; and Tsahaya the Raccoon.
It's wonderful to be together with all of you!
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WHY IS THE WORLD SO BEAUTIFUL?
Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “As a scientist, I have been trained to refer to our relatives, the plants and the animals, the water and the Earth herself, as ‘it.’
“In Potawatomi languages, we characterize the world into those who are alive and the things which are not. So we speak a grammar of animacy. And that’s because in the beautiful verb-based language, a language based on being and changing and agency, the whole world is alive.”
Kimmerer says she was driven to study botany because of the central question in her heart: “Why is the world so beautiful?”
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Photo by Rob MacInnis. Words by Anatole France.
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FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
Modern post-industrial societies tend to produce un-sane populations—multitudes of people who are unbalanced in their adaptation to the destructive stress of daily existence. One of the symptoms of this un-sanity is the loss of contact betweenthe waking ego and the depths of the self, a contact that requires involvement in dream experiences and information.
Cultures generally resist change, and modern materialist societies are no different in this respect. Devaluation of dreaming and other spiritually efficacious experiences is part of the foundation of “false consciousness” required by capitalist/materialist political economies.
Materialist cultures require that the focus of awareness be upon the material conditions of life and away from involvement with the inner being which is the only road to spiritual maturation.
—anthropologist Charles D. Laughlin
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning August 3
Copyright 2023 by Rob Brezsny
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In 1811, Leo scientist Amedeo Avogadro (1776–1856) formulated a previously unknown principle about the properties of molecules. Unfortunately, his revolutionary idea wasn't acknowledged and implemented until 1911, 100 years later. Today his well-proven theory is called Avogadro's law. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, Leo, you will experience your equivalent of his 1911 event in the coming months. You will receive your proper due. Your potential contributions will no longer be mere potential. Congratulations in advance!
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Israeli poet Yona Wallach mourned the fact that her soul felt far too big for her, as if she were always wearing the clothes of a giant on her small body. I suspect you may be experiencing a comparable feeling right now, Virgo. If so, what can you do about it? The solution is NOT to shrink your soul. Instead, I hope you will expand your sense of who you are so your soul fits better. How might you do that? Here’s a suggestion to get you started: Spend time summoning memories from throughout your past. Watch the story of your life unfurl like a movie.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Nineteenth-century Libran physician James Salisbury had strong ideas about the proper ingredients of a healthy diet. Vegetables were toxic, he believed. He created Salisbury steak, a dish made of ground beef and onions, and advised everyone to eat it three times a day. Best to wash it down with copious amounts of hot water and coffee, he said. I bring his kooky ideas to your attention in hopes of inspiring you to purge all bunkum and nonsense from your life—not just in relation to health issues, but everything. It's a favorable time to find out what's genuinely good and true for you. Do the necessary research and investigation.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): "I’m amazed that anyone gets along!" marvels self-help author Sark. She says it's astonishing that love ever works at all, given our "idiosyncrasies, unconscious projections, re-stimulations from the past, and the relationship history of our partners." I share her wonderment. On the other hand, I am optimistic about your chances to cultivate interesting intimacy during the coming months. From an astrological perspective, you are primed to be extra wise and lucky about togetherness. If you send out a big welcome for the lessons of affection, collaboration, and synergy, those lessons will come in abundance.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Please don’t make any of the following statements in the next three weeks: 1. “I took a shower with my clothes on.” 2. “I prefer to work on solving a trivial little problem rather than an interesting dilemma that means a lot to me.” 3. “I regard melancholy as a noble emotion that inspires my best work.” On the other hand, Sagittarius, I invite you to make declarations like the following: 1. “I will not run away from the prospect of greater intimacy—even if it’s scary to get closer to a person I care for.” 2. “I will have fun exploring the possibilities of achieving more liberty and justice for myself.” 3. “I will seek to learn interesting new truths about life from people who are unlike me.”
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Champions of the capitalist faith celebrate the fact that we consumers have over 100,000 brand names we can purchase. They say it’s proof of our marvelous freedom of choice. Here’s how I respond to their cheerleading: Yeah, I guess we should be glad we have the privilege of deciding which of 50 kinds of shampoo is best for us. But I also want to suggest that the profusion of these relatively inconsequential options may distract us from the fact that certain of our other choices are more limited. In the coming weeks, Capricorn, I invite you to ruminate about how you can expand your array of more important choices.
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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): My best friend in college was an Aquarius, as is my favorite cousin. Two ex-girlfriends are Aquarians, and so was my dad. The talented singer with whom I sang duets for years was an Aquarius. So I have intimate knowledge of the Aquarian nature. And in honor of your unbirthday—the time halfway between your last birthday and your next—I will tell you what I love most about you. No human is totally comfortable with change, but you are more so than others. To my delight, you are inclined to ignore the rule books and think differently. Is anyone better than you at coordinating your energies with a group's? I don’t think so. And you’re eager to see the big picture, which means you’re less likely to get distracted by minor imperfections and transitory frustrations. Finally, you have a knack for seeing patterns that others find hard to discern. I adore you!
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Is the first sip always the best? Do you inevitably draw the most vivid enjoyment from the initial swig of coffee or beer? Similarly, are the first few bites of food the most delectable, and after that your taste buds get diminishing returns? Maybe these descriptions are often accurate, but I believe they will be less so for you in the coming weeks. There's a good chance that flavors will be best later in the drink or the meal. And that is a good metaphor for other activities, as well. The further you go into every experience, the greater the pleasure and satisfaction will be—and the more interesting the learning.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Emotions are not inconvenient distractions from reason and logic. They are key to the rigorous functioning of our rational minds. Neurologist Antonio Damasio proved this conclusively in his book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. The French philosopher's famous formula—"I think, therefore I am"—offers an inadequate suggestion about how our intelligence works best. This is always true, but it will be especially crucial for you to keep in mind during the coming weeks. Here's your mantra, courtesy of another French philosopher, Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The famous Taurus TV star Jay Leno once did a good deed for me. I was driving my Honda Accord on a freeway in Los Angeles when he drove up beside me in his classic Lamborghini. Using hand signals, he conveyed to me the fact that my trunk was open, and stuff was flying out. I waved in a gesture of thanks and pulled over onto the shoulder. I found that two books and a sweater were missing, but my laptop and briefcase remained. Hooray for Jay! In that spirit, Taurus, and in accordance with current astrological omens, I invite you to go out of your way to help and support strangers and friends alike. I believe it will lead to unexpected benefits.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): "Did you learn how to think or how to believe?" When my friend Amelie was nine years old, her father teased her with this query upon her return home from a day at school. It was a pivotal moment in her life. She began to develop an eagerness to question all she was told and taught. She cultivated a rebellious curiosity that kept her in a chronic state of delighted fascination. Being bored became virtually impossible. The whole world was her classroom. Can you guess her sign? Gemini! I invite you to make her your role model in the coming weeks.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the coming weeks, I advise you not to wear garments like a transparent Gianfranco Ferre black mesh shirt with a faux-tiger fur vest and a coral-snake jacket that shimmers with bright harlequin hues. Why? Because you will have most success by being down-to-earth, straightforward, and in service to the fundamentals. I’m not implying you should be demure and reserved, however. On the contrary: I hope you will be bold and vivid as you present yourself with simple grace and lucid authenticity.
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Homework: Make up a fantastic story about your future self, then go make it happen. Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
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You are doing important work. Very important work for the times we are in. Astrology has become an important guide for me. Thank you!
I try to remember to feel sorry for those who deny our interconnections with everything. I am hoping that death leads to a complete acceptance of this principle.