Walking the Sacred Path

Walking the Sacred Path is something I ascribe too but fall off more often than not. I hope it’s something like the airplane that is off-course most of the time, but with correction, it hits the mark.

 The Sacred Path:  that phrase came up for me when I saw the movie Alpha, a movie I wouldn’t see until I found out that the wolf lived. Husband dear informed me that it did, so on Saturday we went to the movie. It was set 20,000 years ago and tells the supposed story of how man and the wolf joined forces. (The movie was not attended like the big crashes and booms movies but it was a delight, a joy and visually perfect.)

Sweetpea, “What, my great great great granddaddy was a wolf?”

 

 

In the movie, the hunters follow signs on rocks put there by their ancestors to point the way to the big game. They need a once-a-year hunt of big game to sustain the tribe through the winter. (Food, furs, oil, etc.)

I got to thinking that our ancestors have pointed a path for us as well. The people that went before left trails for us. They wrote what they had learned, and thought, and inserted elevating thoughts into the culture.

Mostly we don’t honor our ancestors, once dead they are gone, and for many that is best, for we lose biases and prejudices along with their passing, but there are the others. The writers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution are one. The Greeks who gave us astronomy, democracy, and the idea of a Republic from wince the Constitution was patterned.   We wrote “In God we Trust” on our coins, and e pluribus unum on our money. “Out of many, one.”

Is that not following the Sacred Path?

You know  I am talking about those who challenged convention and gave us an elevated life, Jesus, Aristotle, Leonardo de Vince, Copernicus, Gallelo, Steven Hawkins—those are some of the famous ones, and there are the unsung heroes we learn about more and more, like the three black women engineers and mathematicians who helped send a man to the moon. That fact was hidden for what, fifty years?

Following the Sacred Path, is more than meditation, prayer, or sounding pious, it is living the life we were meant to live. It is life, not perfect, but one of experience and learning, of vulnerabilities, and shame, and guilt, and striving to do better.

The path has been laid down for us, think about it, some of the things we hear about now were unheard of 50 years ago, near-death experiences, life on other planets, the teachings of the Far East, yes these have been around for those who searched the sacred writings, but now these teachings have entered mainstream. Think about all the years that the only book in the house was The Bible. (And without other sacred texts to guide the reader, that was  often miss-interpreted.)

Humans have discussed the concept of the soul for longer than I know, and all along they have tried to understand and explain it, but end up scratching their heads.

The book, The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav, propped up one leg of my desk for years until I finally read it. (Sorry Zukav.) When I did read it,  I wondered what took me so long. (What is it they say, “When the student is ready the teacher will appear?”)

Zukav has an analogy:  The soul is the Mothership (picture a schooner, not a spaceship) and the little boats around it are the personalities, of which we have many. The little ships will fall away, but not the mothership . The mothership is eternal.

Oprah said that Zukav’s book Seat of the Soul, changed the course of her show. First, she could not articulate the concept of the soul until she read his book, and second, she was afraid to talk about it, for then she would lose her audience.

You know how that turned out.

Now she has a show called Soul Sunday where she interviews voices for good, and has conversations that elevate the human spirit and heart.

“The soul, says Zukav, “is a powerful and purposeful…it existed before you born and will exist after you die.”

Our basic need to feel safe, valuable and loved has focused our attention outward. It has caused us to learn about the stars, the plants, the animals, and down into the sea.  But that outward look isn’t working anymore.  Now we, with exceptions, know how to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves, and that frees us up to pursue spiritual understanding.

Now we look to our lives, our homes, our friendships for a greater good—for spiritual growth.

I have often asked why we can build gigantic machines that build other gigantic machines (watch road builders), but we can’t solve poverty,  crime, the need for people to alter their consciousness with drugs, the presence of brutality, or the many mental conditions that limit us. Why are so many people on anti-depressants, and why are pharmaceuticals lining medicine cabinets?

We haven’t been following the mothership, or walking the sacred path. We haven’t got it that we are all connected, and that we will suffer as long as there is suffering in the world.

A bigger, smarter computer won’t fix us.

A better phone, car, refrigerator, won’t either. (Maybe a new garbage disposal.)

Most feel inadequate most of the time, embarrassed sometimes, and angry often.

Facing these fears is the path.

Feeling vulnerable is the path.

Being imperfect is the path.

Rising above all these inadequacies is the path.

Take advice from the people around us that have pieces of the puzzle to the path.

A Sacred Path

Watch out there are others on the path. That's just to keep your reflexes in good working order.

How did we “Yearning to breathe free” Americans become so Polarized?

Yesterday I picked up Brene’ Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, and used it as an oracle—that is, just opened it to a page and read. My eyes popped on a quote from her father regarding automatic weapons and big guns: “You want to shoot those kinds of guns? Great! Enlist and serve.”

I, like other people, knew Brown had a spiritual bent, and so I was surprised to see her writing about guns.

Brown grew up in a hunting household. (As did I. But I’m not a hunter, never will be unless I’m lost in the tundra and must hunt to survive.  Whoops, I lost my gun, guess I’ll have to use a stick. Oh oh, no sticks in the tundra. I’m in deep trouble.)

Brown’s father came from a family of six, and Brown has twenty-four first cousins. There were a lot of mouths to feed. Hunting and fishing were as practical and necessary as they were fun for most of them.  The kids weren’t allowed to shoot a gun until they could take it apart, clean it, and put it back together.

As a parent, she can see now that what was equally powerful was the combination of our family rules concerning hunting and guns.  You only shoot what’s covered on your hunting license. You absolutely could not shoot anything you didn’t plan to eat. These rules were non-negotiable.  

The children weren’t allowed to watch any violence on TV. Brown couldn’t watch a PG movie until she was fifteen years old. The idea of romanticizing violence was out of the question.

By fourteen Brown had decided she had not and would never shoot a deer, and that hunting trips were just long days in freezing blinds and cold nights in sleeping bags. It was over for her.

The return from the hunt, however, was like a birthday or a holiday. There were always family and friends visiting. There was nothing better than when the hunters came back from the hunt, and twenty or thirty people would pack into their house to process deer meat, make tamales, tell stories and laugh.

Sounds very tribal doesn’t it?

 The point to all this is that she watched the NRA go from being an organization that she associated with safety programs, merit badges, and charity skeet tournaments, to something she didn’t recognize.  

“Why were they positioning themselves as the people who represented families like ours while not putting any limits or parameters around responsible gun ownership.”

Brown casually mentioned to a group of people that her father and she were looking forward to teaching her son how to shoot skeet.

One woman  looked horrified and said, “I’m very surprised to hear that you’re a gun lover. You don’t strike me as the NRA type.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘gun lover or the NRA type,” Brown replied.

“If you’re teaching your son to shoot, then I’m assuming you support gun ownership and the NRA.”

Brown took a deep breath, didn’t lose her cool, and said, ” You’re one for two on your assumptions. I do support responsible gun ownership. I do not in any way support the NRA just because I support responsible gun ownership.”

“With all the school shootings—I don’t understand why you don’t support gun control,” the lady was adamant.

"No, no, and no."

The woman, and the group around her, may have felt betrayed by Brown’s answer on gun control, or her willingness to get into a tough conversation. But still, and most important, she didn’t betray herself.

Brown’s book, Braving the Wilderness, is her quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone.
  

According to Brown,  ”To know you can navigate the wilderness on your own—to know that you can stay true to your beliefs, trust yourself, and survive it—that is true belonging.”