Hopefully, I’m getting you to read lots of the books from the reading list on my website. I’d like to point to one now that’s actually a novel, written as a story, and it has the best – I don’t want to say best worst – description of dropping the veil that I’ve ever heard.
I’m not talking dropping the veil and going into Enlightenment; I’m talking about when the veil drops across a person’s consciousness. This is the book ‘Indian Horse’ by Richard Wagamese.
I read everything on my Kindle, so it’s on my phone. That’s why I get through so many books! I actually recommend this because you can get a lot more reading done through Kindle on your phone, since you always have your phone with you, right? Get off YouTube videos for a while and read some books.
Anyway, ‘Indian Horse’ by Richard Wagamese, is a story about a young boy living the natural life we’re always talking about. At the end of Chapter 11, you get to the place where he’s been thrown into the Indian School. The horrors are insane and he relates a poignant vision of the gray fog falling across his eyes.
What’s so interesting is that he had lived through tons of hardships previously to being captured and being sent into the school, but none of those hardships broke him. It was the insane cruelty of the Indian schools and just the ‘doesn’t make sense’ crack to his worldview that caused the confusion to descend.
Read that book, at least to the end of Chapter 11, and you’ll get a sense of what it takes to unhook a person from the natural worldview. It’s both a poignant story of the strength of human beings in the evolved nest, and a clear feeing of the veil dropping. This strong evolved nest is who we are supposed to be.
Hopefully, that’ll give you an idea of we can piece ourselves back together.
It also gives a view of something that I’m going to be talking about next – how and why we can’t, as white people, steal the native worldview and try to use it to make ourselves feel better. Everything goes in a timeline, and the programs that our culture used to conquer and destroy native cultures worked extemely well. The Indian schools were a big part of this. Our culture went out and captured young people, threw them into these schools, and destroyed them. For us now we’re talking the grandparents of people who are alive today. Everything is real. It’s going to take generations to recover, not just a few hours, not just sitting around and singing some song; it’s going to take generations to rebuild what was lost.
Yes, my dear fellow white people, you and I weren’t actually there doing it, but we are still part of that same culture. We do it still in very subtle ways. Our cultural methods do this to ourselves, to our own children, to people around us. We have lots of work to do to get past this in reforming our worldview. This shows the importance of our Enlightenment studies and nonduality efforts. It’s not just about you attaining enlightenment. It’s about us all waking up to our responsibilities, healing our connection to the earth, learning to live with each other, reforming all our institutions and the way we live. It’s going to take some time. We’re not going to get there in our lifetimes. We can take steps.
What we’re doing is important because we need to undo all the damage that has been done. But it can’t be done with a selfish motive… which is good news. If you approach your own spiritual life without self-motives then you are going to get somewhere. It’s not for you. It’s for everyone and everything else. It’s for the way that we blend into everything and everything else. When you approach it that way, you’re going to have a way better result. And you’re also going to be so much more delighted with what you find when you find yourself.”