The West

  In this culture, we like to use the term ‘ Born Again ‘ to describe someone who has accepted Jesus as their savior. Another one of those distortions for which the church is famous. This is what the term actually means in the spiritual sense.

  In the South on the Medicine Wheel, the model we believe to be true tells us that our happiness in this life is connected to and dependent on things outside of ourselves being the way we think they need to be. It is all about getting what we want and not getting what we don’t want until one day we encounter an experience that does not fit the model and this experience is so compelling that we cannot simply pretend it did not happen. But acknowledging it changes everything because we are confronted with a reality where this happiness we desire has its roots not in those things outside of ourselves but rather within ourselves. We are born again in the sense that before this occurrence, our lives were about altering our physical circumstances through whatever means we had so that they looked a way we thought they needed to look. And after this occurrence, our lives are about trying to make sense of an experience that should not have been possible and the search for a new model that could explain this impossibility. Instead of spending all of our time and energy trying to alter our circumstances so that we can have another moment of being in this place we long to be, we spend it trying to make sense of a life we thought we understood but, in light of our glimpse into another reality, apparently did not actually understand at all.

  The West is a place where all of our time and energy not devoted to our physical survival is spent in search of new perspectives on a journey that is inner directed as opposed to the outer directed journey dictated by a now discredited model of what this life should entail.

  Fortunately, we are not the first to find ourselves in this predicament and some others who have successfully traveled this path have left behind clues and guides that we can work with to further our own journey. The East has given us the I Ching, Buddhas eight fold path, Ramana Maharshi’s jnana yoga, stories like the Ramayana from the Hindu tradition and many other tales of saints, teachers and poets, that are available for us to contemplate as we immerse ourselves in this new way of seeing things. Even in the West, we have The Gospels According to Thomas from the Christian tradition and a wealth of scientific knowledge such as e=mc2, to help us understand the true nature of this world. We may find some or all of this useful in our journey along with techniques like yoga and meditation for developing the presence of mind and one pointedness we will need to contemplate the deeper questions, up to and including ‘ who am I ?’

  But before we can get to that final question, we need to ask the simpler ones concerning the nature of the forces at work in the world around us. We are born with brains that are wired in such a way that there develops within us a real sense that we are separate and distinct from all else in this place we find ourselves. We come to identify this distinct self with a body that appears to do what we tell it to do and can be used to influence the world around us, and thereby the illusion of free will is born. It all seems so real. If I do not like where I am, then I can simply take myself somewhere else. And if somewhere else is no better than where I am, then I have made the wrong choice. I still have the power to make things different, I just need to find the right choice that will take me there. It never occurs to us that the right choice is the right choice because it moves us in the direction that the energies in the situation are already moving. We continue to be entrapped in the illusion because occasionally attempts to alter our circumstances actually succeed and our belief in our separateness is unquestionable.

  And the first step in transcending this illusion is to begin to notice how things actually work in the world around us. To do this, we must first create within us the place of the witness whose only job is to pay attention in an unattached way to the events in our lives, and we must accept the possibility that everything we thought we knew about any of this might be wrong. Both meditation and yoga are very useful in creating this witness. From this new perspective, we can begin to notice our own interactions in these events and become transformed by what we come to know about the energies at work.

  Here is an example of how it works. There is a hexagram in the I Ching called Youthful Folly. It is a situation defined by acting foolishly out of the lack of experience that being young entails. There is a line that talks about a situation where the fool is so entangled in his empty imaginings that he cannot hear any advice from those around him and the I Ching advises leaving him to his folly as this is his only path forward. Now imagine this fool is someone you care about and you know beyond any doubt that if he continues in his folly, the consequences he will suffer will cause him great pain. As a being of free will, your first impulse will be to keep him from doing this foolish thing by any means available. But since he can’t hear you, he will do the foolish thing anyway. And the only thing you will have accomplished is to alienate him in such a way that when he suffers the consequences, he will not be open to any help you might have given in helping him understand the foolishness of his actions. If you have been observing all of this from the place of the witness, then you begin to see that there were no real choices to be made here. Apparent choices are, of course, being made, and while it seems that we can make whatever choice we want to make, there is in fact only one choice open to us and that is the choice who we are at that moment in time would choose. And when this choice is made, its effect on the world around us is not in our control. The effect is totally dependent on whether or not our actions were in sync with the forces at work in any given situation. In the youthful folly example, we can’t choose to not to care about the fate of the fool because that is who we are at that moment in time. And we cannot keep the person we care about from being the fool because that is who they are at that moment in time.

  This is the work we do in the West on the Medicine Wheel. We study the maps and read the stories, listen to the teachers and practice the techniques, and we do all of this in preparation for a life devoted to connecting the dots and to experiencing all the transcendent places we encounter as the veils are lifted. And if we are fortunate and our time doesn’t run out, we will finally come to know without any doubt that we are not the doer we thought we were when we were in the South on the Wheel. And this realization will lead us to the final question with which we will need to struggle on our journey around the Wheel. If I am not the doer possessed of free will that I thought I was then who am I?

  We do not need to discuss here all of the myriad paths that can be taken in this journey because there are many paths up the mountain and it does not matter which one you take as long as it leads to the top. And we do not need to be concerned with making wrong choices because, if the journey is real, then the choice will either further the journey or not in which case we will either continue or search for another way.