The Sacred and the Thinking

Today's blog post is my answer to an assignment a bunch of us are doing with Derrick Jensen.

Deal with it. :)

Do you treat all parts of the earth as sacred? Are there any you treat as sacrifice zones (the places beneath the concrete on which you drive, for example, or do you treat that as sacred too)? What does it mean to treat a place as sacred?

It’s not just that parts of the Earth are sacred – that is, holy of purpose and of being – it’s that it’s all sacred. It’s not a web so much as it’s all One Thing.

To me, it’s all conscious, all alive, all participating in the singular being that is the cosmos. Sure, some parts seem to be more accessible to some other parts – land designated ‘sacred’ for example. Which may only be a reflection of our own propensity for separating things out from each other. Perhaps such land has been communicated with by humans for longer than other parts, and is thus heard more clearly.

But it’s all holy, holy, holy. We are all not only made of the same stuff, we are the same stuff.

So I don’t treat some places as more sacred than others. I do, however, interact more with some places than others. While realising that it’s the whole I’m interacting with (just another part of Me), there are certain dimensional locations in which I hear the rest of Me more clearly. I might like to slap the label ‘sacred’ on such places, but frankly I find it more appropriate to call them ‘clearer’. Or ‘louder’ if you will.

In places where Earth can be heard more clearly, usually through longer practice, I do think I have an obligation to see that Her voice is not muffled, Her consciousness not put at a greater remove.

But even through twenty feet of concrete and steel, I feel and I hear. Once you open to Her voice, it’s damned difficult to shut out.



Please discuss the quote "The more talking and thinking, the farther from the truth." Do you believe this? Why or why not?

Possibly – almost certainly - this is what’s going on with us in civilisation. Talking is translating the symbols you create from thinking so that other people can understand them. But frequently the translation is so imperfect – or has to be put through so many layers – that it’s impossible to convey what you meant when you first had the thought.

I know this plagues me. For example, I frequently know, without a shadow of a doubt, why we are here, now, incarnate in the cosmos. It makes perfect sense to me and satisfies completely my ‘need to know’. But do you think I can translate that knowledge into words? Hear that hollow laugh.

I think many knowings are of the same sort- absolutely impossible to put into external symbols, although some writers make a great effort and a few even come close to conveying what that knowing was in the first place. But I’m not so good at it.

I do remember several times, while I was studying physics at university, that I’d wrestle with a problem for long hours and get no closer to resolving it. I’d be going round in circles with the logic. Then I’d go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the entire problem solved- often several pages of equations and ‘proof’, neatly lined up in my brain. This happens more frequently than scientists care to admit, in my opinion.

Frederic Kekule dreaming of the Benzene ring, Francis Crick seeing the DNA structure in a vision - there’s more, I feel sure, apart from personal experience and what friends and colleagues have told me. This is not use of the much-touted, logical brain. This is knowing beyond thinking. Yet we’re reluctant to ever admit to such visions – scientific society will be laughing at us!

Since taking up my shamanic calling, I’ve slowly been opening to these other ways of knowing, and I find them superior to linear,’ left brain’ cogitation. They bring me into relationship with the rest of the cosmos, rather than removing bits of it for study under a microscope or dissection through calculus.

Pic: The Dolmen Wow. I feel I need to check this lot out.