Appropriate Destruction

From a shamanic perspective, all creation is based on some form of destruction. In order to create something new, something old first must be destroyed. The old form is taken apart and from its energetic source, something new arises. Nature offers the best examples of this constant destruction in the form of seasonal changes. As each season gives way to the next, something is destroyed in the process. Fall kills off the green leaves and lays the landscape bare. Winter kills off the insects and weakest animals. Spring destroys the snowpack and brings floods. Summer bakes the land, drying up the streams and plants. Everywhere in nature are examples of great destruction that reform the land, creating a new canvas for change. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, erupting volcanoes, and withering droughts destroy the landscape as it was, clearing the way for new life, new forms, new possibilities.
 

Shamans acknowledge the awesome power of transformation that comes with destruction and seek to harness that power. One powerful universal shamanic motif of appropriate destruction is the dismemberment of the apprentice during the initiation as a shaman. The individual dies a symbolic death and is then restored and brought back to life. Completing this restorative rite is precisely the task of the shaman. As anthropologist Joan Halifax explains in her book Shamanic Voices, "The shaman is a healed healer who has retrieved the broken pieces of his or her body and psyche and, through a personal rite of transformation, has integrated many planes of life experience: the body and the spirit, the ordinary and non-ordinary, the individual and the community, nature and supernature, the mythic and the historical, the past, the present and the future."
 

The viewpoint emerging from the shamanic community suggests the times we live in have a theme of planetary and cosmological initiation. Shamanic initiation is most often precipitated by physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual events that force the ego into submission. Who we believe ourselves to be is not who we truly are. No matter how many years one has been developing their consciousness, no one is exempt from this shamanic death-and-rebirth. This is a shamanic initiation on the grandest cosmological scale.
 

The times we find ourselves in are like a great river in flood. We can try to hold on to the shore to save ourselves from being swept along with the current. But this is a futile effort, for nothing can resist the great tide of change that is sweeping through and forever altering life as we have known it for millennia. Instead, we are being challenged to let go and go with the flow. We are being given the opportunity to surrender to the current of change so that new dreams and visions can emerge.
 

The cure for dismemberment is appropriate destruction. An appropriate destruction measure for anyone would be to get rid of anything that does not contribute to personal growth and learning. This would include the elimination of unnecessary possessions, ideas, habits and limiting beliefs that no longer serve you. Situations, careers or relationships that no longer resonate with you will eventually fall away from your life. When you clear out the old, you make way for the new.

Pre-Columbian Council Circle Discovered in Kansas

Archaeologists using new drone-sensing technology have found evidence of an enormous, horseshoe-shaped trench hidden beneath a Kansas ranch. The rounded earthwork, which may be part of the largest pre-Hispanic settlement north of Mexico, appears to be what's known as a council circle. To date, researchers have identified five such structures across 22 sites in the area. Ancestors of the modern Wichita and Affiliated Tribes lived in what is now southeastern Kansas between about 900 and 1650 A.D. They lived in grass-roofed pit houses; hunted bison; and farmed crops like squash, beans and corn.
 

Over time, erosion filled the newly discovered earthwork with topsoil, concealing it from view. But modern sensors can detect subtle differences in temperature and foliage between the filled trench and the earth around it. The researchers located the ditch through a combination of drone surveying and LiDAR, infrared and thermal imaging.
 

Relic hunters who looted the region in the 1800s gave council circles their name, but the earthworks' actual purpose remains unclear. Researchers have previously posited that the structures served as the site of ritual ceremonies, housed community elites or offered protection from invaders. Archaeologists now suggest that sites including the just-detailed trench were part of Etzanoa, a population center dubbed the "Great Settlement" by Spanish conquistadors.
 

Spanish colonizers first encountered Etzanoa in the 1590s, when an unauthorized group traveled north in search of Quivira, a mythical city of gold. Though the expedition ended violently, one survivor managed to return and inform the Spanish of what he'd seen. In 1601, conquistador Juan de Onate marched to the settlement, captured a resident and tortured him until he revealed the city's name.
 

Archaeologists first excavated the site of the newly discovered council circle more than 60 years ago. But by 1967, they felt that they had discovered all of the mounds and earthworks located along Walnut River. Thanks to new technology, contemporary researchers have proven these predecessors wrong. Led by Dartmouth anthropologist Jesse Casana, the study's authors used nighttime thermal imaging to measure how daytime heat dissipated from the soil. The ancient ditch, which measures roughly 165 feet in diameter and 6.5 feet thick, is filled with looser soil than the tightly packed prairie around it; as a result, it holds more moisture and radiates less heat at night.
 

Casana and his colleagues identified the ditch as a cooler, darker horseshoe shape in a warm landscape. They then followed up during the day with photography and infrared imaging. The team also reviewed previous aerial and satellite images, spotting the circular formation in photos taken in June 2015 and July 2017. Researchers plan to continue exploring the site with remote-sensing techniques, which will hopefully enable them to develop precise targets for future excavations.
 

This article first appeared in the September 2020 issue of Smithsonian Magazine

Out of the Darkness, Light

From Hitler's Rischstag Fire to 9/11, history is beset with instances of governments using terrorist attacks to justify invasions or suspend civil liberties indefinitely. The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on February 27, 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's government stated that Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the culprit, and it attributed the fire to communist agitators. A German court decided later that year that Van der Lubbe had acted alone, as he had claimed. The day after the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed. The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, restrictions on civil liberties began to grow. The attack spawned wars to export democracy abroad, while degrading it at home. Our military actions, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria, have reflected increased investments in the military, accompanied by diminished attention to political change, economic development and institution-building -- the essential prerequisites for democratic freedoms. Fear of terrorism has justified excessive and persistent suspension of good governance, ultimately creating more fertile ground for terrorists. Our leaders have nurtured a crisis of "domestic terrorism" within U.S. borders, perpetrated not by foreigners, but by U.S. citizens.

The question is not, "is it happening?" but, "why is it happening?" To fully comprehend the "why" of it, we must first understand the meaning of the Latin phrase "ordo ab chao" or "order out of chaos." The  expression "order out of chaos" or more accurately translated, "out of chaos, order" is the idea that the order of the world emerges out of chaos or the undifferentiated. The term is often used to capture a fundamental dimension of evolutionary change within nature. It has become popular in contemporary times to identify chaos as a precondition for transformation, rebirth and creativity.

However, to our political leaders and their inner circles, chaos is a way of getting power and keeping it. That is, if you can create just the right crisis or chaos, you will necessarily get a citizen outcry for the kind of solution or order that you wanted to have all along. It really is a "shock and awe" military strategy based on achieving rapid dominance over an adversary by the initial imposition of overwhelming force and firepower. Politicians engage in shock and awe politics in order to stun their opponents into inaction.

The idea that the order of the world emerges out of chaos is actually not new at all. It was preceded by more ancient principles such as "lux in tenebris," or "light out of darkness." Light out of darkness is an expression of an ancient wisdom about the relationship of complementary opposites in nature. In the eastern tradition of Taoism, light and darkness are represented by yin and yang, each of which contains the seed of its opposite within it as expressed in the ancient Chinese symbol (T'ai Chi Tu) of the yin-yang. The two teardrop figures within the circle illustrate the balance between the dark yin and the light yang. The black vibration of yin is dark, passive, feminine, nurturing, intuitive, and corresponds to earth or matter. The white vibration of yang is light, active, masculine, creative, expansive, and corresponds to heaven or spirit. Yin and yang pulsate within all things and in unison, they are the moving force of nature and all its manifestations.

Various mystery traditions such as Hermeticism had similar concepts such as "As above, so below" and "As within, so without." In Hermeticism, the phrase "As above so below" can be taken to indicate that earthly matters reflect the operation of the Cosmos. In other words, the human experience is a microcosm of the macrocosm we call the universe. Each human being is a hologram of the Cosmos, a weaving together of universal information from a particular point of view. Essentially, we are the universe experiencing itself in human form.

The idea that "As within, so without" can be found in the world's indigenous shamanic traditions. In the shaman's world, all human experience is self-generated -- our inner thoughts actually create what we see and experience. Everything that we perceive began with a thought. The structure of our universe is thought, mind and consciousness. Consciousness determines the form of our experience. The shaman traverses the inner planes of consciousness in order to change and shape experience. It is an inward spiritual journey of rapture in which the shaman interacts with the inner world, thereby influencing the outer world.

Shamanic rites involve many technologies for inducing altered states of consciousness. These vary from drum and dance to ingesting sacred plants. Practitioners enter trance states in order to perceive and interact with the inner world of the self. The essence of shamanism is the experience of direct revelation from within. Shamanism is about remembering, exploring and developing the true self. Shamanism places emphasis on the individual, of breaking free and discovering one's own uniqueness in order to bring something new back to the community. The goal is inner transformation; not outer.

Those who presently call the shots and pull the strings on the world stage only use "order out of chaos" to create favorable circumstances for themselves; to gain and sustain the same authoritarian power relations. For the power elite, external order is the goal. To achieve their goals, they first create the conditions for chaos/disorder to bring about order. The controlled chaos we are witnessing in society today is the direct result of the coordinated efforts by some to turn people against each other. This is a classic "divide and conquer" strategy.

A highly centralized government relies mainly on lies, fear and economic prosperity to maintain equilibrium. Allegiance is achieved through various means of socialization and indoctrination. Political propaganda emphasizes material and technical development while suppressing access to personal revelation and spiritual experience. Citizens are discouraged from thinking for themselves and required to follow the laws of secular authorities regardless of the discrepancy between what is legal and what is considered to be moral, ethical and right. The individual is left morally and spiritually impaired; their soul abandoned in darkness and chaos while urged to acquiesce to the needs of the collective.

This imbalance is reaching such heights that the pendulum of change will soon begin swinging back in the opposite direction. The movement for external transformation will reach a psychological extinction -- meaning there just won't be a situation chaotic enough or carrot sweet enough to keep people hoping external transformation and order will bring salvation without a shift in the internal direction. People will begin to realize the limits of external order when their internal worlds are in chaos, thus discovering the seed of the one in the other… out of the darkness, light!

Decolonizing Indigenous Cultural Protection

In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux and legions of their allies protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would carry Bakken crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, crossing underneath Lake Oahe, the reservation's water source. Tribal members opposed the pipeline over fears of water pollution and climate impacts; it also crossed their ancestral lands, and they argued that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had not adequately surveyed the burial grounds in its path. But because the pipeline wasn't on tribal lands or under tribal jurisdiction, there were few legal options. As Indian law attorneys Hillary Hoffmann and Monte Mills write in their new book, A Third Way: Decolonizing the Laws of Indigenous Cultural Protection, after almost 200 years of treaties, court cases and federal infringement, "The tribe had lost almost every source of legal authority to regulate or stop it." The pipeline was ultimately constructed, though its legality is still in court over potential environmental violations.

The battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline exemplifies how difficult it can be for tribal nations to assert their sovereignty within the existing legal structure to protect culturally important land, water, wildlife and ancestral objects. Over the last decade, however, Hoffmann and Mills argue that a new era of Indian law has emerged that protects Indigenous cultures based on Indigenous value systems. This "third way" -- neither solely Indigenous nor European, but rather both -- shows tribal nations working within those legal constraints in novel ways, or changing them altogether, to better reflect their values. This could mean different outcomes in future cultural protection conflicts.

In A Third Way, Hillary Hoffmann and Monte Mills share what they've learned over their combined 31 years of teaching Indian law and working with tribal nations. They explore the myriad ways Indigenous people are decolonizing laws around cultural protection. The book details the history, context, and future of the ongoing legal fight to protect indigenous cultures. At the federal level, this fight is shaped by the assumptions that led to current federal cultural protection laws, which many tribes and their allies are now reframing to better meet their cultural and sovereign priorities. At the state level, centuries of antipathy toward tribes are beginning to give way to collaborative and cooperative efforts that better reflect indigenous interests. Most critically, tribes themselves are building laws and legal structures that reflect and invigorate their own cultural values. Taken together, and evidenced by the recent worldwide support for indigenous cultural movements, events of the last decade signal a new era for indigenous cultural protection. I highly recommend this important book to anyone interested in the legal reforms that will guide progress toward protecting indigenous cultures.

A Message From the Dalai Lama

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, spoke about how love and altruism can help get us through the pandemic. In dire times, the Dalai Lama's life story is one that is worth repeating. The adversities include being taken away from his parents as a child and placed in an old palace, where he had to relearn nearly all of the knowledge he had garnered in his previous incarnation as the 13th Dalai Lama. Then, at age 15, being required to confront Chinese officials who were invading his country and would soon seize control over it. Later, at age 23, his holiness was forced to disguise himself and flee Tibet under the cover of night, spending the next few weeks crossing dangerous stretches of the Himalayas before arriving in India, where he has lived in exile for the past 61 years.
 

Through it all, his role as spiritual leader of the Tibetan people was to act with equanimity. That he did so -- and continues to do so -- has made him an international beacon of light and hope to millions. When asked what advice he had for people who are struggling through the pandemic, he replied: "Now this pandemic is very serious. Very sad. We're just so afraid. That's not useful. We must attack it -- specialists, scientists, doctors, I very much appreciate. If the problem can [be] overcome, then no need to worry; make effort to overcome. If no way to overcome the problem, there's no use too much worry."
 

When asked how he kept himself from worrying, his holiness responded: "Through training how to tackle destructive emotion, and how to develop positive emotion. This is very important. All destructive emotion [is] based on appearances, not reason, so we cannot meditate on anger, hatred, fear. But positive emotions such as compassion, altruism, or enthusiasm are based on reality, on reason, so we can train [them] through meditation. Ignore seeing, ignore hearing, pay more attention [to] your mind. Only the human brain has the ability to concentrate on a point and analyze."
 

The album "Inner World" was released July 6 when the Dalai Lama celebrated his 85th birthday. His first musical album is a sacred offering of mantras and teachings set to music. His holiness chants key Buddhist mantras and delivers his insights that trace much of the world's pressing concerns to the spiritual malaise characterizing life in the new century. In short, much of the world's problems owe much to its neglect of the soul: the "Inner World."
 

Toward the end of the record, his holiness says that whether believer or nonbeliever, "we are the same human beings (who want) a happy life, a peaceful life." This could be attained only by inner conversion. "We have to make every effort to promote through education about inner values," he concludes.
 

The Dalai Lama's renewed calls for "inner values" are peaceful and nonviolent exhortations that are addressed as much to modern mankind as to Communist China, which has been enslaving Tibet for nearly 70 years now.