he only way for you to understand is for us to have a private conversation about it. I have explained that discussing our cosmology is not considered an offense. Revealing our practices and cerimonies is an offense. I never discuss our practices and cerimonies to anyone outside of the tradition. What I have disclosed is diffuse and parts of the cosmology can be read by works of anthropological scholars who more often than not fail to understand the cosmology as we understand the cosmology. Our approach to the central Mesoamerican cosmology has unique features but I have spoken in features that have already been exposed in some way by Western or Colonial writers. I take great care in what I share. In three years of investigating I have found only one person that had any real knowledge that correlates to any mystical tradition that shares similar knowledge. People would be surprised to know what similarities exist in the highest teachings of mysticism in Pharonic Egypt, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism.
The differences in teaching methods is such in Western Scholasticism that I was discussing cosmology with a college professor of a particular expertise with the mound builder culture along the Mississippi. He also is Native American descent, Choctaw I believe.
In the burial practices of a certain mound culture they found people were buried along social organizations of directions. There were Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern organizations and people were buried according to their direction. He believed this was the result of a purely political organization. What he failed to understand was how the Mesoamerican calendar was used by most people to prognosticate their lives and fates religiously or spiritually. Direction is associated with each calendar day. This particular inference showed to me that the mound builder social organizations were never political only, every aspect of Native American life is based upon their spiritual beliefs in accordance with their cosmology. This was lost on the professor even though he was Native American.
Spiritual or religious states of being are the only normative states of being in Native American culture. The idea of secularism came to this continent with the European. Thereby the professor was incapable of instilling or imparting the true reality organization of that particular culture. The people under study were unnecessarily denuded of their humanity and their reality.
My mandate of providing a legal institution must allow discussions of our cosmology along with our ancient methods of reality organization to be established in a curriculum. There is enough cultural and ethnological information to be conveyed that a three year curriculum would still not necessarily disclose practices and cerimonies. What is key is successfully imparting the well kept reality orientation of our tradition. The reality orientation has always been the vehicle for further disclosure. No student in the past or present receives any knowledge unless the fertile ground of its continuance and growth are first fostered by proper reality organization. The elders are of the opinion that the vehicle of reality orientation will be present when we are successful instructors. This is where I need advice. I was taught in the old manner and I will be expected to teach in the new manner. This tradition has always been imparted to people that first viewed reality through our reality organization if they failed to view reality through the traditional reality organization they weren't asked to continue. It is in principle the only way the knowledge can be viewed.
My investigations with other Native American educators of anthropology has provided only a Western reality organization for their students at the end of their classes. We have to do better than that, we have to provide an exclusively Native American reality organization specific within the genre and context of the material of our tradition. This is elusive but not unheard of as it is till practiced in tribal traditions.
I watched PBS a week or so ago, they had a Masters Class for pianists under a Maestro. Even though I was unfamiliar with the Maestro, unfamiliar with the language of music, I could discern the ephemeral reality organization the Maestro was attempting to impart to his worthy student. He was attempting to impart something that had no linear counterpart between them and so he imparted his reality structure by reflections, metaphors and words that created shadows outlining something that they both could understand and see because they both spoke the same musical non-linear, verbal language. It was more art than musical science. The student's playing of the rarified score soon began to take on some of the heightened tonality and complexity of the Maestros playing of that rare music. The student began to take on the musical reality organization of the Maestro.
It is that boundary where the nonlinear, nonverbal meet the verbal boundary where our prescience and collective good will triumph over subjectivity to achieve a common ground and we can deliver metaphorically to the student that ability to play that rare music. In my studies abroad with the leaders of different powerful and arcane mystical traditions, it was this very question that I was asking. First I endeavored to see the depth of their knowledge in relation to ours and secondly how to they impart such ephemeral topics in a legal institution and how does it logically get disseminated. In many ways their knowledge used different languages, different metaphors, totally different iconography but the core cosmologies held much more in common and even complimented each other. This is not to say that they are interchangeable because they are not. One either studies one or the other but never both. One cannot fully explain any tradition but exclusively within its own integral original reality organization.
While attending lectures as a guest where 11 or 12 Rabbis were present learning from the head of the tradition, I correctly answered questions only because I had already addressed those spiritual issues in my own training in our tradition. I answered successfully on a specific issue but it did happen to be the correct answer. In the specific traditions investigated, food and behavior were modified to bring all participants into a collective consciousness. It was that collective consciousness that was a precursor to establishing a collective reality organization. They all participated in acknowledging the modern and they all accepted willingly the collective experience together that gave them their intellectual intimacy. It is the intellectual intimacy that allowed all of them to stay at the periphery or centered square in the spiritual reality that induced their collective leaps into their traditional knowledge.
The key of course is communication. I need clear communication, the tradition needs to be clear and the teacher translucent, it was the single greatest factor in favor of the successful transmission of other ancient traditions from one generation to the next. Although the student teacher relationship of the successful traditions I witnessed were more influenced by Middle Eastern or Asian teaching relationships rather than the English or European professorial austerity. If we can't find a middle ground so that our communication reflects our truths, intents and purposes then how can we be successful in interpreting each other's passion for service? I can't ask service of you if I am unwilling to be of service to you in return. So is their room for accommodation? I am still hoping for good communication knowing and expecting good will from each other. That is a basis for further communication and a good start.
"If you say I am lying then please, I would like to know because it is not my intent nor my desire."
In your emails to me you emphasized that my even revealing there was such a tradition as you claim to be part of could result in the deaths of yourself or others.
Then Barnaby found you'd been talking aobut your alleged tradition in many forums.
"If you would have gotten to know me as I first requested then perhaps you would have known a great deal more about me before this."
I offered to meet with you. You declined.
"You have Archie Fire Lame Deer and Leonard Crow Dog and myself in your frauds section. I can't answer for Archie Fire or Leonard Crow Dog but we don't sell cerimonies. We don't sell seminars. We don't publicize the particulars of our cerimonies and practices whatsoever."
Actually the late Archie Lame Deer *did* sell ceremonies in Germany for the last several decades of his life. He did sell seminars. He did publicize how to do sweats and other rituals.
Normally we would not bring him up since he has passed on and there would be no point, as we've done with other exploiters who've passed on. But his son is now selling ceremonies to Germans, as are all the European exploiters he "franchised".
For Crow Dog, we were asked questions about him and we specifically said he is *not* a fraud. He does have some practices that many, esp other Lakota, have questioned the rightness of doing.
"I have found people with real knowledge to exchange with the head Rabbi of the Brestlove Hassidim in Safad, Israel. I spent time discussing our tradition with His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupad, the Hindu mystic that brought the Krishna movement to the United States and translated the most read Bhagavad-Gita into English...I spent time exchanging traditional similarities with a Tibetan Shamanic traditionalist"
I have no idea what any of these have to do with any of the questions asked of you.
Outside of possibly the last I have no idea what these have to do with any indigenous traditions. While I agree very much with networking on similar issues, I've never cared much for the idea of trying to find similarities between very different traditions. It's too easily transformed into the pseudo shamanism ideas of people like Michael Harner, that it's OK to exploit any tribal tradition because somehow they're really all the same.
