To be born a human being means to be enmeshed in a great mystery. Most of us do not give much thought to this mystery, at least until the moment of death, because we find ourselves in a wondrous playground the exploration of which takes up all of our time and energy. And when the exploration becomes too familiar and tedious, there is still the problem of maintaining our physical forms. And yet, for some of us, there are moments in our lives when we can’t help but wonder about this place in which we find ourselves. Someone close to us is dying and we are faced with our own mortality. A love that we thought would last forever disappears leaving only charred remains in its wake. Something touches us that is so beautiful it leaves us confused and bewildered at its passing. These moments leave us with questions that are not easily dealt with and mostly we tend to look for the answers in religious dogma. But truth is not to be found there, only rules to be unquestionably obeyed. And we are asked to have faith that something is true because it is written in a book even though there is nothing in our experience of this world that would suggest it is true.
As the consequences of our ignorance of the truth become more severe and our ability to comprehend the questions increases, many of us find ourselves unwilling to accept anything less than personal experiential knowledge of the truth. And for this we do not need answers, but rather the means by which we can attain these truths. We need methods and tools and maps.
And there are a great many from which to choose. So many that choosing among them becomes a daunting task. So we choose those that we are drawn to, and if we are lucky, we come away with a piece of the puzzle. And we need these pieces, but without knowing what the puzzle looks like, trying to put the pieces together becomes a tedious and frustrating endeavor. It is like trying to get from here to there without having any knowledge of where there is in relationship to here. Without a map to guide us, the options become infinite and the likelihood of actually finding there becomes minuscule.
What the Medicine Wheel, as it is presented here, represents is a map that will allow us to understand where here is and where there is and what the journey will look like that will take us from here to there. But before we can talk about this, we need to develop some common ground. We need to look at this thing we call life. Specifically, we need to talk about the human condition.
What defines human beings as distinct from all other life forms on this planet is our ability to be self-aware. In other words, we experience ourselves as separate and distinct from the physical world in which we find ourselves. We look out upon the world from our vantage point of the human body and know we are looking. Of course this ability is taken for granted because we are born with it, but this sense of separateness is the common ground that defines the human condition. It is unique to us because no other organism has evolved the physiology needed to support it. There are those who would argue that we cannot know if other species are self aware but this is not supported by the existing neurosciences dealing with the brain. And we need only observe how a self-aware species, i.e. human beings, behave with respect to their environment and each other to conclude that there are no other species that exhibit these characteristics.
Those wanting to see other species as self aware do so because they feel that to separate them from humans in this way somehow denigrates them but this is simply not the case. It’s as if we were to look at a flower and think that it is the only important part of the plant whereas it is actually just the culmination of a growing process that results in this beautiful bloom. The flower is, in fact, no more important than any other part of the plant, but we value it because it excites the senses and makes the world a better place to be. We are, metaphorically speaking, the flower the earth is trying to create and therefore not anymore important than all the other things that comprise the material world, that not only supports us, but is us.
Life for us is the moment to moment experience of that from which we are separate. We do not know to whom the experience is happening, but we can make some general statements about the nature of these experiences. They only occur during the periods that we are awake and conscious. They seem to be connected in a way that implies cause and effect and therefore we come to believe that what we do can alter the experience. They involve the senses, thereby indicating the body as the means by which we are connected to the world around us. And lastly, they seem to come in two flavors, desirable and undesirable. In other words, while we are awake our bodies allow us to experience the creation as it unfolds before us and to even alter the experience through our interactions with this creation. We wake up in the morning and experience life. What keeps it interesting is that every moment is different and every body is a distinct receptor for every moment. At this level where energy has slowed down causing matter to crystallize and evolve, there exists within the realm of experience infinite variety. And to experience this variety is partly what we are here to do.
For the lack of a better word, we will refer to this realm as the worldly realm. This is the realm of the senses. It is colors and sounds and textures and smells. The wonderful world of sensations. This is where most of us spend our time. It is the only realm we experience and therefore believe in. We spend all of our time doing one of three things. We are either enjoying the experience, trying to avoid an unpleasant experience, or attempting to manipulate our circumstances in such a way that a desirable experience will become available to us. The human body is a wondrous mechanism. It not only connects us to the world but, even more wondrous, it allows us to know that we are connected. But there is an apparent downside. Experiences, for reasons we will consider later, are not always desirable and we are not always able to manipulate our circumstances. And even once desirable experiences loose their appeal when visited too often. And then there is the problem of mortality. The damn things wear out and the closer they get to being worn out, the less useful they become as a means to experiencing the sensual realms.
Luckily for us, there is something else at work here. As it turns out, the body is not only a means by which we can experience the sensual realms, but also a means by which we can experience what we will call the spiritual realms. These are realms that include but transcend the Worldly Realm. They can best be described as experiences encompassing the healing of separateness. We will not go into them at this point, except to say that we have all tasted of them in our lifetimes. Whenever we experience circumstances being exactly the way we want them to be, we get a taste. Being in love is a taste. For a brief moment, the separateness subsides.
Spiritual realms are real and attainable. These experiences do not originate from that which is outside of ourselves but rather from a change in perspective relative to all that is outside of ourselves. These experiences are rooted in changes in the brain as a result of our seeing the world in a profoundly different way. They are not easily talked about because there are no experiences in the worldly realm to which they can be compared. For example, it is possible to describe unconditional love as a concept but impossible to communicate what that actually feels like. These experiences cannot be attained by putting ourselves in a certain place at a certain time because they require a change in what is happening within rather than without this body with which we are identifying. But they represent the other reason that we are here, which is to experience the death of separateness and ultimately the realization of who it is that is having these experiences.
At this point in time, we find that most people feel that the spirit realms and the sensual realms are mutually exclusive. Thanks, in large part, to bible-based religions, we think that the spiritual requires a negation of the sensual. But this is like telling a physicist that the only way that he can know quantum mechanics is by turning his back on the material world. It is only by observing the material world that these mechanisms can be known. In the same way, the spirit realms can only be known through a true understanding of the worldly realm. Evolution has created a being capable of experiencing these realms. We are that being and the mechanisms needed are already in place. This model of the Medicine Wheel is offered in the hope that it will quicken the process. We are at a point in time where we must begin to evolve spiritually or suffer the consequences of a planet depleted of resources by a populace addicted to worldly experiences. We can either evolve or go the way of the dinosaurs. The choice is ours.
For those unfamiliar with the Native American medicine wheel, it looks like a circle with the south at the bottom followed by, in a clockwise direction, the west, the north at the top and the east. The Medicine Wheel presented here shares these characteristics but is of my own creation. And one more thing, movement around the wheel can only be in one direction and that is from south to east in a clockwise direction. As with evolution, there is only moving forwards towards whatever end awaits us.
