Spirituality an indigenous perspective

The following article is one chapter of a book project of mine, so consider it a sneak peek.

 

Societies all over the world have had a multitude of world views and philosophies. These ways of looking at the world and our place in it are what defines us and the type of society we as a collective are creating. The way we look at ourselves in relation to the world is what gives us purpose and direction in life. The spirituality of a culture is in that sense what drives societal development and activity. It can best be described as the collective spirit of a culture.

This spirit is what shapes and directs our life and thinking about the world from a very young age. What we see, hear, think and even our emotions are shaped by this spirit. After a certain age it solidifies and permeates every fiber of who we are and think we are. This life long conditioning makes it hard for us to grasp other and unfamiliar ways of perceiving reality. To do that we must take a step back and look at our situation from a far to shake ourselves free from this cultural mold. So in order to understand and have a meaningful discussion about spirituality it is therefore necessary to look at the collective spirit from a historical viewpoint.

For us as humans it is very hard to see behind our cultural and spiritual conditioning. To do this is a little bit like forgetting ourselves and who we are for a while, that is where history can be a useful tool. Through the mists of time we can look at people long gone, to whom we do not have any emotional ties, and see the pattern of our cultural conditioning. Much of what we think of as self evident and clear cut is in many cases just that, cultural conditioning.

An often made mistake when talking about spirituality is to view it as something separate, a stand alone phenomena detached from the rest of life. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Collective spirituality and the resulting cultural spirit has very deep roots not just on the personal level but also on the societal level. It affects everything from interaction with one’s immediate surroundings to how big collective decisions are made. It even affects aspects of culture and society that we normally would not connect to spirituality. Almost any activity that humans do are affected by how we perceive reality and our place in it. This includes economics, politics and certainly our relationship to the natural world. When manifested in a large group it can almost seem as though it is an actual spirit directing the waves of consciousness. Be as it might but it affects us all, whether we know it or not.

What then has been the cultural and collective spirit of Western culture? This will to a large extent be relevant to most parts of the world today as Western culture has been the domineering force on both the cultural and economic global stage for a long time. The spirit that has driven Western culture to all corners of the globe has had a powerful wind in its sails for a long time and exported its influence far and wide. Even though many of us think of modern society as secular and rational it is far from any of those things. Even though the linguistic window dressing within society has changed significantly over the last century and a half, the roots of Western culture are deeply embedded in Christianity.

As already stated, a culture’s spirituality functions as a signpost and guiding light for the collective, albeit unconsciously. So the outcome of cultural activity depends on the spiritual input to a substantial degree. Whatever virtues or vices displayed by the collective are to a greater or lesser extent a product of the group spirit. The Western world is as we know founded upon Christianity and is deeply interconnected with that way of looking at the world.

Western society’s influence on our contemporary world can hardly be overstated so the predicaments of our modern era globally, all have their roots in the spiritual soil of what is loosely defined as the Western world. One of the greatest predicaments of our time is as we know environmental. The way modern society treats the natural world is, as far as we know, historically and culturally quite unique. It is an environmental form of burning the candle in both ends that is worrying to put it mildly. Natural resources are treated and used as though we had an infinite supply and landscapes are being forever destroyed on a mass scale for short term profit. It is as though people have gone mad, but there is a method to the madness as we shall see.

This apparent madness is not madness, of course, even though it can very well seem like it. This strange behavior of acting like there is no tomorrow or future generations to consider actually have a philosophical and spiritual background. To blame it all on Christianity would be far to simplified, there is more to this than that. It can, however, be said that a religious tradition which states that Man shall have dominion over the earth and the animals is unlikely to be compatible with environmentalism. That statement alone ensures that the pecking order between humans and nature is set right off the bat. To add to that, the Christian mythology is very human centered with few or very negative portrayals of animals. Christian creation is all centered around God creating humans in his own image, the rest of creation plays a definitive side role.

What is also very significant to this story is eschatology which is one of the key elements of Christian faith and world view. Eschatology can simply be described as the study of the last days. It is a word derived from ancient Greek and translates roughly to; The last story or narrative. It is of course the study of the end of the world as perceived by Christianity. This is one of the core features of Christianity which explains that there is a beginning and a definitive and final end after which the world is no more. With that kind of world view it is hard to see why the world and nature would be worth preserving at all.

All religions of course have their upsides and downsides, Christianity happens to be one that is not centered around preservation and regeneration of the natural world. Many other religions, present and extinct, have had this concept much more woven into the spiritual framework. It certainly is possible that Christianity could have inspired to a different kind of society than the present one, but then certain historical circumstances would have had to play out a little different. What hit Christianity and the Western world from the 16^th century and on ward with the reformation, would unfortunately lead to a complete disenchantment of not only the world but even religion itself.

Even though Christianity from its early development had a fundamentally hierarchical framework, with Humans on top and nature below, this did not really manifest until the reformation.

The late and very influential psychologist Carl Jung wrote in the middle of the 20^th century with great insight about contemporary western society and the driving spiritual force behind it. Jung saw the problems associated with the disenchantment of the western world clearer than probably anyone of his contemporaries. His writings about how the reformation in the 16^th century began the long slow erosion of western society’s spiritual fabric and the implications of that are very enlightening. Jung saw how western society with the reformation, by demystifying and desymbolising religion, started its descent into meaningless materialist reductionism and how it ultimately would lead to existential nihilism.

The reformation itself was of course set in motion by Martin Luther in 1517 but others would take his legacy and lead the Western societal project into the Enlightenment. One of the leaders in this new way of looking at the world was René Descartes, he was one of the initiatory figures of the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, which picked up speed from the 17^th century. In 1647, Descartes launched his theory that the body is merely a mechanical instrument. Consciousness, Descartes stated, is completely derived from the soul which was located somewhere in the pineal gland. He also stated that only humans have souls and thus he embarked on a series of extremely cruel experiments where he would dissect and dismember live dogs in front of large audiences

When the dogs were crying out in pain, Descartes explained their reactions as a malfunctioning machine that makes squeaking noises. A crying dog, Descartes explained, is no different from a whining gear that needs oil.” He explained that since animals do not posses reason they were incapable of experiencing pain. In the 17^th  century philosophers like Descartes  equated soul with reason and so gave rise to the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Even though very prominent, Descartes was just one of many famous philosophers of this era but he embodies the spirit of it very well.

This way of thinking naturally led to a view of the whole of nature as a soulless machine. If reason is required for the existence of soul then only humans have souls. What naturally follows is that everything else in nature is soulless and have no more inherent right to existence than the benefit it can provide to humans. Nature and animals therefore were turned into resources that can be exploited freely to enrich the human existence. Descarte’s ideas also referred to as Cartesian separation of mind and body actually spoke to the Christian ideas about Man having dominion over the natural world but at the same time it laid the groundwork for a materialist world view and, in the end, atheism.

With this separation of mind and body Descartes had opened the doors to a kind of logic that would come to be defining for the Age of Reason. Although it is hard to fathom, Descartes was a religious man and he probably did not foresee that his theories eventually would come to include humans. This is however the expected result of the kind of limitless logic that the Enlightenment led to. If the world and everything in it is a machine then there are no boundaries governed by a higher set of principles and therefore this logic will follow a straight line into infinity.

This kind of infinite logic based on pure reason is what birthed modern reductionist materialism. This is a theory of reality that view everything as a machine, even humans. Human consciousness according to reductionist materialists is nothing but an illusion, an epiphenomenon of the brain. In their view, humans just think that they are conscious but in reality we are just mindless machines propelled by unconscious processes in the brain. This philosophy has in the last century turned from theory to dogma in large parts of science and education. It is a bleak and depressing world view that very well reflects the way modern society is interacting with the natural world.

If there is no soul in the world whatsoever, then both humans and nature are turned into commodities. The only value any living or non-living thing has in a given situation is its utility or lack thereof. We have seen this in action countless times over the last two centuries, when there is profit to be gained there are no ethics or morals regarding the natural world. This pillage of nature could be seen as just human greed and shortsightedness if it were not for the systematic and unrelentless nature of this since the start of the industrial revolution. For this type of activity to define a whole culture it has to be part of the shared mythology, or spirit if you will.

Even though reductionist materialism claims to be atheistic, it strangely enough still retains some of the core features of Christianity. The notion of Man having dominion over the Earth is certainly a part of modern secular society but even the eschatological thinking of Christianity is still a key part of the secular world view. This kind of religiously influenced thinking can be seen in the idea that there is only two options, either we repent and regret our sins or the world will end in fire and smoke. In that regard there is a striking resemblance between certain scientists and religious scholars of times past. People like to think that they are free and rational in the modern age but the spiritual conditioning goes deeper than certainly secular scientists care to admit.

 

It is hard to say if this kind of thinking was built in to the Western cultural project from the start or if it could have turned out differently at some point. What is clear is that a religion which gives dominion over the Earth and the animals to humans is not the best spiritual framework for environmental conservation. In that kind of philosophical context it is entirely up to the practitioners to chose wisely. It can also be argued that the reformation and its implications could have turned out differently and sent humanity on a different path. The reformation was however a response to the corruption and greed of the professional religious class at the time, therefore it might not be the defining turning point but merely an unavoidable continuation of the societal arc set in motion by the general spirit in culture at large.

Life as a whole can not really be described otherwise than as a spiritual journey. Try as they might, materialist scientists can not provide better answers to the fundamental questions of life than the manifold of spiritual traditions of the world. The scientific project of measuring all of reality that started in the 17^th century in order to provide answers to humanity’s biggest questions has at best resulted in educated guesses. Moreover, if the meaning and value of everything is attributed to whatever we can measure and weigh it removes all form of intrinsic meaning and soul from the world. The end goal of such a project seems to be disenchantment and a vast void of pointlessness, the complete opposite of spirituality. Spirituality and science were actually intertwined and two sides of the same coin for many centuries in the Western world and it was not until the Enlightenment that the two was separated, for good or for worse it seems.

Spirituality is sometimes used vaguely to describe almost anything non physical but there are some useful and practical definitions. Spirituality in the Saami understanding of the word is the practice of living as if the world and everything in it is enchanted. Religion on the other hand is mindlessly following a set of beliefs that are not to be questioned or argued with, words forever turned into stone. To a surprising degree this also involves science which have some very rigid sets of beliefs. Spirituality, in its turn, is as explained a way of living with purpose and enchantment. A truly spiritual way of life is a personal commitment to the divine and our place within the cosmic order.

This kind of outlook on the world and life in general reinforces eternal and lasting values from one generation to the next. Eternal values are based upon the inherent human sense of what is right and what is wrong, it even speaks to our sense of beauty and aesthetics. The values and beliefs that inform our everyday lives also give rise to art and literature inspired and born out of this world view. When there are no eternal values the art and creativity reflects this is in pointless and rootless trends that live for a little while before being replaced by the next craze. When this is the norm that permeates society it is easy to think that this is all there is, that art and culture is fleeting trends not connected to anything lasting. Most societies and culture throughout history did not perceive the world like this. Spirituality, the spirit of a society, is in everything.

The late and highly respected Native American scholar Vine Deloria wrote with insight about The Spirituality of Place. This means that there is a spiritual bond between the land and us humans living on it. It is a far Cry from the Abrahamic religions that see the world as secondary to Heaven and God who exists in another realm separate from ours. Spirituality of place is a central theme for many or most indigenous people’s spirituality. It is the recognition of the sacredness of the Earth and the importance of it for not just us but to many coming generations. With this kind of underlying world view you are unlikely to destroy the land that you are living on. Nature’s sacredness is woven into the cultural fabric and is fundamental to life.

In the Saami world view there are spirits living everywhere, the mountains, rivers and forests are all inhabited. These are not just seen as a mythological manifestation of nature but as actual living beings that need to be respected. They live in all of nature but especially in some places that are considered sacred in the Saami culture. These places can be seen as dwelling places for the spirits where one has to be careful not to offend or enrage the spirits. This informs a way of interacting with the natural world that do not see humans and nature as separate but as interdependent and parts of the same system.

We as humans need to utilize nature’s resources such as firewood, animals and fish but we have to do so in a respectful and regenerative way. The notion of regeneration is built into the the very essence of Saami spirituality via ritual and giving thanks for what is given. There are many different rituals for keeping the balance between what is taken from nature and what is given in exchange. If something is taken then something has to be given, this reinforces the understanding of the eternal balance of life. This balance will be upheld no matter what we as humans might think of our place in the great wheel of life. We can chose to be active and conscious participants in this exchange or we can ignore reality and wait for the balance to shift anyway. The potential blow back from such a shift can prove to be catastrophic and very unpleasant to state it mildly. The very nature of Saami, and many other indigenous spiritual systems, is to actively participate to keep the balance and harmony between us and nature.

This kind of philosophy is in stark contrast to contemporary culture. In modern society it seems as though nothing was learned from the last two centuries. The same large scale industrial principles that brought us into our environmental mess are presented as the solution to the imagined climate Armageddon facing us. It is the same eschatological religious thinking all over again. These suggested large scale solutions are unlikely to save anything but certain to devastate vast parts of our last untouched wilderness. Mines and windmill parks will continue the centuries long process of environmental destruction that the industrial revolution has brought, and nothing will be gained. One last stroke of madness before reality finally hits home.           

In the Indigenous world view the land is all important and needs to be protected at all costs. It is inhabited and alive and the home of not just us and the animals but to countless spiritual forces that can be our allies and friends. This feeling of urgency to protect the land should not be a concern just to indigenous peoples but to all of humanity, it is our collective spiritual home.

                                                                                                                           

There is no word for nature in Saami language because we can not live outside of nature, we are always in it and always dependent on it. All is not lost and when all is said and done the Earth will still be here, the important question is what kind of Earth we give on to our descendants. There is still time and there is still a place for nature based spirituality. With a new understanding and closeness to the beating heart of the Earth can be born anew a type of spirituality that speaks to the land and breathes with the wind. New bonds of mutual understanding and respect can be tied between us and the eternal Mother Earth. Spirituality is to be part of the wheel of life, closely connected to life and death. With feet on the ground and your hands in the fertile dirt of nature where old life is turned into new, this is where the spirituality we need can be born and nurtured.