CanteOhitikaHoksila's video: Wind Message Owl Song

Spirit is not concentrated in a single monotheistic Supreme Being. Native wisdom tends to assign human beings enormous responsibility for sustaining harmonious relations within the whole natural world rather than granting them unbridled license to follow personal or economic whim. It regards the human obligation to maintain the balance and health of the natural world as a solemn spiritual duty that an individual must perform daily–not simply as admirable, abstract ethical imperatives that can be ignored as one chooses. The Native Mind emphasizes the need for reciprocity–for humans to express gratitude and make sacrifices routinely–to the natural world in return for the benefits they derive from it–rather than to extract whatever they desire unilaterally. Nature’s bounty is considered to be precious gifts that remain intimately and inextricably embedded in its living web rather than as “natural resources” passively awaiting human exploitation. Human beings are to honor nature routinely (through daily spiritual practice, for example, or personal prayer) rather than only intermittently when it happens to be convenient (on Earth Day, for example, or following a particularly moving speech or television documentary, or in the throes of personal despair over a pressing local environmental crisis). And human violations of the natural world have serious immediate (as well as long-term) consequences rather than comfortingly vague, ever “scientifically uncertain”, long-term ones. The Native Mind tends to view wisdom and environmental ethics as discernible in the very structure and organization of the natural world rather than as the lofty product of human reason far removed from nature. The Native Mind tends to view the universe as the dynamic interplay of elusive and ever-changing natural forces, not as a vast array of static physical objects. It tends to see the entire natural world as somehow alive and animated by a single, unifying life force, whatever its local Native name. It does not reduce the universe to progressively smaller conceptual bits and pieces. It tends to view time as circular (or as a coil-like fusion of circle and line), as characterized by natural cycles that sustain all life, and as facing humankind with recurrent moral crises–rather than as an unwavering linear escalator of “human progress”. It tends to accept without undue anxiety the probability that nature will always possess unfathomablemysteries. It does not presume that the cosmos is completely decipherable to the rational human mind. It tends to view human thought, feelings, and communication as inextricably intertwined with events and processes in the universe rather than as apart from them. Indeed, words themselves are considered spiritually potent, generative, and somehow engaged in the continuum of the cosmos, not neutral and disengaged from it. The vocabulary of Native knowledge is inherently gentle and accommodating toward nature rather than aggressive and manipulative. The Native Mind tends to emphasize celebration of and participation in the orderly designs of nature instead of rationally “dissecting” the world. It tends to honor as its most esteemed elders those individuals who have experienced a profound and compassionate reconciliation of outer- and inner-directed knowledge, rather than virtually anyone who has made material achievement or simply survived to chronological old age. It tends to reveal a profound sense of empathy and kinship with other forms of life, rather than a sense of separateness from them or superiority over them. Each species is seen as richly endowed with its own singular array of gifts and powers, rather than as somehow pathetically limited compared with human beings. Finally, it tends to view the proper human relationship with nature as a continuous dialogue (that is, a two-way, horizontal communication between Homo sapiens and other elements of the cosmos) rather than as a monologue (a one-way, vertical imperative). http://www.facebook.com/video/?id=1538965098 http://www.facebook.com/tashunka.witko