The journey begins in the South, the place of the world, of illusion and of forgetfulness. It is here that the one becomes two. The One or what we call God creates the means by which it becomes possible for the One to experience itself. A body connected to the world by the senses. Through the miracle of self-awareness, the whole world becomes known to us. We find ourselves immersed in a constantly changing physical reality that allows us to experience a seemingly infinite variety of sensations. We need only observe a young child at play in order to reconnect ourselves to the incredible joyousness that comes with this miracle. To discover and experience all that the world has to offer is a part of why we incarnate and the primary motivating factor for the child. But the state of innocence that the child is born into is soon broken by an increasing awareness that not all experiences are joyful or desirable. This playground in which we find ourselves seems to have a dark side. In order to understand why this is so, we need to take a closer look at the process of incarnating.
There is a price to pay for taking form as a self conscious being. In order for the One to experience itself, the One must forget who it is so that there can be two, an experiencer and that which is experienced. This forgetting and the birth of self-awareness are one and the same event. It is Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden. The One becomes two and a being is born that experiences itself as separate from everything not itself. The illusion of a separate self is created and the journey around the Medicine Wheel begins. It is a journey that will eventually lead to the disillusion of this separateness and bring us back to the realization of who we really are. But in the beginning, we are born with no knowledge of who we are or where it is we find ourselves. There is only the body and, through the body, the world of the senses.
When we are born, the brain is not sufficiently developed to support the quality of self-awareness. This is necessary because a brain large enough to support self-awareness would be too large to pass through the mothers pelvis. Once out of the womb, children will continue to grow and mature until the organs are fully developed and he or she can function alone. During this period of development, the child is like any other animal except for the potential for self-awareness that is present in the brain. Some day we will be able to pinpoint the age at which the child begins to develop self-awareness and even the age at which it is fully developed. But for now, we need only imagine the child slowly over time becoming aware of itself as the center of the universe and separate from that universe. We are indeed made in the image of God.
What the child awakens to is the world of experience made possible by the five senses. Everything is new and unknown. We do not identify with anything and therefore live in a state of complete innocence. Even our limbs and organs are simply more unexplored territory. But as the child develops, this soon begins to change. Change begins because we start to notice that our body seems to be a kind of constant in an ever changing world. It’s always with us, from the moment we awake in the morning to the moment we fall asleep at night, and our experience of the world around us seems to be connected to the movement of this body relative to its surroundings. But, more importantly, we seem to be inextricably connected to those sensations that originate from within the body itself. And so we begin to identify with the body. This process is an unavoidable consequence of incarnating and, as we shall see, eventually results in the creation of the ego and a whole world of illusion and suffering.
When we identify with the body, we are identifying with an organism that has, over time, evolved certain mechanisms that enable it to survive in a constantly changing environment. The sensation of hunger is an example of such a mechanism. If an organism is to survive, it must somehow be motivated to consume food when its energy supply is depleted. This is accomplished by connecting this state of depleted energy with a sensation that we would call ‘unpleasant’. We learn that these hunger pains are alleviated by the consumption of food, and so we begin to search for this food when these pains arise. These unpleasant sensations are connected to many life threatening events such as exposure to extremes of hot and cold, broken limbs or damaged organs, and trauma to the nerves in the envelope we call skin.
In an organism that is not self-aware, these sensations simply evoke a reaction which hopefully alleviates the sensation. The response is instinctual and hard wired into the brain. Self-aware organisms, i.e. human beings, also react to these sensations in that way but our awareness of a distinction between ourselves and all that is not ourselves , along with our identification with the body, causes the experience to be different in a very important way. We experience the reaction as originating within ourselves. The child as it develops notices not only that some sensations are unpleasant but also that if it manipulates the body in certain ways, it can alleviate these sensations. Crying when hungry seems to produce food and changing body positions seems to alleviate gas pains. And so we learn that through manipulation of those things external to ourselves, we can apparently summon pleasurable sensations or cause unpleasant sensations to end. In other words, from our limited perspective it seems as though we are in control of what the body does and therefore, through manipulation of the body, are also capable of determining the kinds of experiences that we will have in this life.
And thereby the ego develops and simultaneously, the illusion of free will. Our identification with with a ‘doer’ makes it appear as though we have the power to alter our circumstances. But along with this illusion, there is born an experience whose function is the ultimate awakening of the individual to the reality of who they truly are and we call this experience suffering. In other words, the illusion of separateness that is created through the process of incarnating contains within itself the means by which we are brought back into the reality of Oneness.
The understanding of the origin and significance of suffering is key to understanding and using the Medicine Wheel. Suffering is simply our experience of things not being the way we would like them to be. It’s the natural consequence of self-awareness and the illusion of free will. And, as we shall see, it’s the means by which we free ourselves from the illusion of separateness. Its origin can be traced back to those first moments in childhood when we begin to identify with the body and, as a consequence, begin to distinguish between those experiences that are desirable and those that are undesirable. But before we consider the experience of suffering, we need to consider its polar opposite, the experience of pleasure.
Why is there pleasure in the world? When we are in the South on the Medicine Wheel, all of our actions come from either trying to obtain that which we think will bring us pleasure or avoiding that which we think will bring us pain and suffering. It could be argued that extricating ourselves from a painful experience is pleasurable and while this is undeniably true, we do not seek out pain in order to experience the pleasure of it no longer being there. The pleasure we are referring to here is the way it feels when we have attained something we have strongly desired. This desired thing can take the form of any material thing or place or event , but what does not change is the nature of the experience we encounter when the desired thing is attained. And what is this experience that can originate from so many different sources? Of course we have many different names for it, happy, satisfied, joyful,content, etc. but naming it does not mean we know what it is. And because we notice that it only seems to show up when we attain these things that are in the world, we come to believe that altering our physical circumstances in certain appropriate ways is the only means to attaining the pleasure we seek.
This believing that the pleasure we seek is connected to our physical circumstances being a certain way defines who we are in the South. Every action we take is an attempt to alter these circumstances in ways that we believe will bring us this experience of pleasure. And in so doing, we come to know all the different sensations the world has to offer in any given lifetime. New and different sights, colors, sounds, feelings, tastes, all allowing us to experience this place we long to be. But this search for these experiences takes all of our time and energy, because attaining what we desire only gives us moments of pleasure that fade as the new thing becomes familiar , and we are left searching for another new and better thing to rekindle this feeling we desire above all else.
And there are global consequences to this behavior. Because we cannot seem to control our numbers, we are consuming the planet and destroying ecosystems in this search for the next pleasurable moment. And there is no convincing someone that attaining this new pleasurable thing is not good for the survival of the ecosystem we depend on if he, in truth, believes that his happiness is dependent on attaining this thing.
But believing that fulfilling ones desire for things of this world is where happiness resides is just a trick of perspective. It comes into being because our being in this place we desire to be is always a result of our physical circumstances conforming to a way we think they need to be. And so it is only natural to connect one to the other even though the actual experience is taking place within our bodies and not physically connected to that which is outside of the body. Cause and effect is assumed because the model of how this works that we have come to believe in always seems to apply to the events of our lives. But what also seems to be true is that suffering in our lives is somehow unavoidable no matter how often we are able to alter our physical circumstances. As the Buddha taught, all life is suffering. We suffer when we don’t get what we want, we suffer when we get what we don’t want and we suffer when we get what we want because it is in time and therefore subject to change.
In light of all this, to continue to believe in our model means we have nothing to look forward to in this life other than moments of being happy and endless days of using all of our time and energy to alter our circumstances in ways that will maximize the happy and minimize the suffering. And at this point in our evolution, this is how most of us will live our lives. The only experiences we will ever have will be those defined by our place in the South on the Medicine Wheel. But there are other places on the Wheel and some of us are born with the potential to access these places and are fortunate enough to find ourselves in situations where this potential can actually be realized.
If you are one of these individuals, you will know because, at some point in your life, you will encounter an experience that invalidates the model you believe to be true. You will find yourself in the place you long to be and it will not be connected to the circumstances of the moment. For some of us, it will come upon us suddenly and entirely unexpected. We will be doing something very ordinary and suddenly everything in our world will blossom into a psychedelic wonderland in which colors are more vibrant and sounds are clearer and objects become precious and alive. The experience will leave us in the same manner in which it arrived but we will be left forever changed by this experience, and other places on the Wheel will become accessible to us. Or perhaps we will have an encounter with an entheogen and find ourselves in this place knowing that simply changing the chemistry in our brains has brought about the experience. This experience is especially valuable because it is telling us that this place is connected not to that which is outside of ourselves, but rather a change in the chemistry that is happening within us. However the experience manifests in our lives, the result is the same. We are confronted with a powerful and compelling experience that is unlike any we have encountered before, that cannot be understood or explained using any of the models we have for making sense of the world.
If we are unfortunate enough to have neither a way to make sense of the experience nor any help from the world we live in, then we will likely intellectually dismiss it as an aberration or medical issue and go on with our lives as if it never happened. But, of course, it did happen and we cannot erase that reality from our minds and we cannot help comparing, on some level, the ordinary experiences of our lives to the extraordinary experience we once had. And if our lives are totally consumed with the details of a life lived in the South on the Wheel, then we will eventually be done with it, never knowing any other realities even exist. However, if we are fortunate enough to have been exposed to models and maps that deal with these kinds of experiences or have access to those who can help us make sense of it all, then movement around the Wheel becomes a possibility and a door opens that takes us into the West on the Wheel.
As with all things in life, we are dealing here with degrees of change when these experiences are encountered. We are all born with bodies that have different potential to connect to the material world in which we are born. As human beings, we spend our lives searching for those endeavors in which we can excel and avoiding those in which we cannot excel. Our brains, being part of this organism, also exhibit limited potential. Simply put, evolution is still at work producing more individuals with the potential to have and make sense of these experiences because our survival is dependent on this happening.
In the meantime, some of us are born with brains that are already wired in this way so that there is never any question as to what our lives will be about. But more of us are born wired just enough to bring about these experiences given the right circumstances but not enough to, by itself, put us on this journey of awakening. Creating a world where those of us in this situation will have access to needed support and maps and tools is part of the work needing to be done. And now into the West.
