Holy Ground

The average teenager can recognize over 2000 corporate logos and less than 10 native plants. Americans spend 95% of their time indoors… ”

The Toltec teachings of Mexico stated there were three things that determined a person’s level of energy. 1) The amount he or she was born with. 2) The routines and habits of your life, whether they sustained or wasted the power of the life force. 3) Your relationship to the great forces of energy in the Universe – the Sun, Mother Earth, or “Wakan Tanka,” (the Great Mystery.)

In these teachings, a sage or “person of knowledge,” is not defined by what he or she knows. Since the unknown is vast in relation to the known, the wise are recognized by their openness to and relationship with the Unknown. The universe, including “dark matter,” is mostly unknown. The Great Mystery implies the Unknown. The Earth, mountains, and Nature – being far larger than us – are therefore mostly unknown.

In the classic archetype of the heroic journey, the heroes and heroines have to leave home, leave behind the castles, settlements, and villages to enter “the realm of primal forces” if they’re to find the magic potion, golden fleece, or gift from the gods. They have to leave behind what’s familiar, predictable, and domesticated. They enter dark forests, underworld passages, stormy seas… the Wild… the Unknown.

Modern life points us toward what’s known and away from the Mystery. We invest heavily in compulsory education. Our teenager’s two thousand corporate logos represent the known — they are entirely human creations. Indoors, inside the walls where we spend 95% of our time, we find only the known — the objects we see, hear, touch, and interact with – almost our entire sensory reality — have been created by human, industrial processes.

But what is undomesticated, passionate, and alive – the great forces of energy in the universe – do not inhabit corridors within these walls and cubicles. We head toward the wilderness to seek what’s wild. A “person of knowledge,” or those who long to expand their fields of energy, will not seek (or find) those great powers within the walls and cubicles created in our minds — in rules, religions, or corporate logos – all representative of imaginary realities used to organize, restrict, and cement a social order.

Both the heroic and the spiritual journeys lie outside the established order. Yuval Harari in Homo Deus, says “Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.” Religion offers rules that, if you follow them, bring a pre-determined destination — sacrifice a goat and you’ll have a good harvest; believe in Christ and you’ll go to heaven.

Spiritual and heroic journeys do not have pre-determined paths or outcomes. They are mysterious, unknown. They challenge conventions, laws, and current definitions of the self. They seek to challenge, rather than enforce limitations… seek what’s deeper and larger, what’s more foundational and beneath the surface.

For millennia, people have walked into the wilderness on spiritual journeys. They’ve gone to discover their passion, their purpose, their vision – the ground on which they stand. They’ve walked into the mountains, deserts, and forests, away from houses and settlements. They’ve left behind habits and routines, the delights, duties, and distractions of daily life. They’ve said goodbye to human conversation and the languaged, intersubjective reality that ties us to an inauthentic and inherited view of the world.

They walked onto the land — into a primal reality of sun, wind, and earth that existed long before the first two-legged appeared – to encounter the great forces of energy in the universe, to open and develop their relationship to the Unknown, to that which is far larger than the self.

Chief Seattle once said, “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.” For millennia, people have walked to the wilderness to feel connected and to find where they belong. They’ve come to meet their maker, their Original Nature out of which our lives — human life — emerged. Christ said, “the kingdom of heaven is expressed all throughout the earth, and men do not see it.” For millennia, people have walked into the wilderness to become seers, to see… and to bring heaven back to earth and find holy ground on the ground.