All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive.
I want to read a quote that’s going to be important for our entire discussion here about how we belong here on Earth. This understanding will transform not only our lives, but life on Earth.
This is from John Trudell, he was a Native American activist and a poet. He says:
‘All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people we knew who we were. Ee knew where we were. We knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside us, usually in a dusty box in the mind’s attic, but it is accessible.
‘Whites can’t heal themselves by imitating Native American spirituality. They need to explore their ancestry and learn about their tribal origins. They need to remember who they are and reconnect with their ancestral culture, and this is a lifelong learning process. But most of them don’t want to know about their past. Most of them know nothing about their great-grandparents. They prefer to pursue spiritual shortcuts because shortcuts take far less effort than walking the long and difficult path to genuine understanding, to remembering, to healing.’
This could almost be a Sufi Master speaking to us, right? It sounds like Hazrat Inayat Khan. But here’s a person who probably never even heard of Sufism or nonduality. What he is saying is vastly important to us—that we belong here, our birthright is to be a fully awake, fully spiritual person here on Earth. This is in our genetic DNA, the cells of our body.
We can bring this out. First of all, by knowing about it, knowing the history of it. And second of all, by grounding ourselves here in the Earth. Grounding ourselves in who we are now. Not some imaginary enlightened being in the future, not something that we imagine how it may have been in the past, but here now, in this exact world that we’re in.
Most important, this is a hard road. Don’t try to take shortcuts. I think that if we can just simply admit that this is a hard road and take it, choose it, a lifelong hard road, that we will have huge breakthroughs. Can we hold to our inner being knowing that we will never be exactly in an exact solid spot? Can we stand our ground until every human being on the planet is awake?
Here are two examples now, from very differet places and times. Hazrat Inayat Khan and John Trudell. They speak to us in the here and now. We are each a solid, alive, vital human being. We can know this through our experience in a way that we don’t forget.