Tracking the Ways of the Heart

A Conversation with John Stokes

and Francis Weller

This interview occurred near the winter solstice. John shared many thoughts regarding indigenous wisdom, the role of the heart in our spiritual life and the essential place of nature in the maturing of our lives. Enjoy.

 

FW: As I was getting ready for this, I came across this passage of D. H. Lawrence. He said, “This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots. We are cut off from the earth and the sun and the stars.” And part of thinking about you is that you really have made a commitment of your life to reestablishing those roots and those connections to the earth and the sun and the stars. I guess a good place to start with any story is what drew you to this restoration process?

JS: When I was a young boy, growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I had this series of things that happened and just watching what was happening to the world around me as it came into my world through television and as I watched the beautiful orchards being cut down to establish the housing development that would bear the name of that orchard, the streets being named after the trees that had been cut down, and I saw how the animals were being mowed down, all I could imagine in my little eight-year-old mind was, “Who is going to speak up for these things? Will they be here for me to enjoy when I grow up? I’m just a kid and yet they seem to be killing everything I love.” So from that moment, I wanted to go out and I wanted to defend nature and yet I didn’t know how I could do that.

And so, as I progressed through my teen years, I held on to that feeling. Secretly inside, I was looking for the allies who could help me in this struggle or in this job, and what happened was that life took me to the native people, quite by accident, you might say, if there is such a thing. Serendipitously, I found myself in Australia in my early 20’s. I got a job in an Aboriginal community college and my education truly began. I realized that the native people had been defending this earth all along, as part of their vocation, and I saw that if I was to kick in with them, I would be helping them and I would help the earth and the animals at the same time because the way that we defend the earth is not just through our physical actions but through our spiritual actions and through our ceremonial duties. So these native people alerted me to this higher level of activism. So this is kind of the roots of my nature awareness. My family—my father was really into nature, really into birds. He always encouraged me to go out into nature so even though I didn’t go deeply, I did immerse myself in nature, always looking for a way to get in further, deeper. I also spent a lot of time with Gary Snyder when I was in my early twenties and just the questions he asked me and the quality of his thoughts really took me deeply into nature.

FW: What kind of questions did he pose to you, John?

JS: He once posed a koan to me. He said, “Here’s one for you, John. What we all need to do is go back to the earth but the one thing the earth couldn’t stand is if we all went back to it.” And so I thought about it and I came back to him with my answer. I said, “We all have to go back to the earth but we all have to be taught how to live there and to be or else the earth won’t be able to handle our presence.”

And so from that response, came the Tracking Project. I saw that there was a training we could offer people that would help them go back to the earth in a good way because we can’t go out there with our Escalades and our Denalis. That is not going back to nature. There is a way to go back that’s a little more simple, a little more humble. With knowledge, you can do without so many things.

FW: That triggers that thought of Paul Shepard’s where he said, “We can’t go back to how things were because we’ve never left.” This is who we are; we are people of this earth and any fantasy that we have right now that separates us from the earth is one that is creating great destruction.

JS: Even the word “nature” is so misleading. What happened to me in one of my meditations is I saw clearly that nature is what you might call “what is.” What is happening on this planet is nature and we couldn’t separate ourselves from it if we tried. And yet because we have in our minds, there is an aspect to which we have created a block, we covered ourselves with Saran Wrap and we really do have to peel that layer off to be able to truly feel what is happening here. We have insulated ourselves in our houses and in our cars- so take off your human armor and let’s step back into the natural world.

FW: Even in my practice as a psychotherapist, it is very clear to me that so much of what people are suffering from is that great disconnection and separation from that. I call nature the “ultimate regulator of the soul.” That is the environment in which our psyche evolved and when you are separated from it that creates great illness great disease. So how do you approach the healing of that separation? Or, I should say, the “conditioned separation” because I agree with what you are saying. We can’t separate from it but we have this conditioned perception that we are separate from it.

JS: Yeah, the process—it takes a little while but as with all healing, the first stage in the healing is the recognition of the problem. And when you can get an individual to realize, “I am really feeling out of sync with nature,” and they want to move on that notion, well, now we’ve begun. So we usually begin with those special words that the Iroquois people have been holding onto, and they have come to be called the Thanksgiving Address. It is the way of opening a dialogue with something that we haven’t spoken with in a long time and they- the Mohawk- who are a part of the Iroquois confederacy (the older brothers on the eastern door of the confederacy in upstate New York and Canada) begin their day and begin all their functions, all their gatherings, with a formalized way of greeting nature. And so we begin there. And we begin by standing in a circle and that circle reminds us of the circle of life and we let one person say those words and we begin with ourselves because it seems to be humans who lose their way. And then we begin to climb a ladder and that ladder leads us right from Mother Earth that we are standing on, right up through all the levels of life on earth and then into the sky world, on to the beings the dwell in the sky, and we continue on in our minds, higher, until we reach that thing that we would call the Creator, that being or that divine mind in the world, and then we come back, back into ourselves, so that we don’t stay way up there, come back home into our own body, find ourselves standing there but with a new understanding, a new awareness of all the things that are around us.

And one of the magic things that happens when we say those words is that nature will respond to us. And when people see that feedback, when a bird flies over as you are talking about the birds or when a wind comes up when you are talking about the wind and when people notice that that connection has been made, the progress….we have begun.

And the next thing we will do is we will take people into their own bodies and teach them how to track themselves because they will need to spend a bit of time figuring out where exactly they got hung up. So we start with the breath and we do a lot of different breath techniques to help people track how they are breathing and then we start to look at the ground and we notice on the ground all these beautiful markings. Suddenly, we realize that everything moving on the planet is leaving a track and if we open our minds to tracks and not just think of them as prints left by animals but things left by the wind or a raindrop as a track of the rain and when we expand our picture of tracking, we realize we can just turn around and look behind and there is the track that led us to this moment in time and we can backtrack ourselves and there is a lot of information there.

And next we would teach people about their bodies so that they can get in touch with their own health because a part of the message we heard from the Great Peacemaker of the Iroquois was that we have to find inside ourselves what is called the Good Mind. And when we find the Good Mind and we start to come from that place, then peace comes to us. And when we practice the Good Mind in peace, then we get what the native people would call “true power,” which is the power of a humble person here on the earth. And that is the only real power that exists. And so now the person is starting to really feel him or herself and how they fit into this web of life and you can go on from there.

FW: What I understand from that is what you are doing is reanimating the conversation between the human and the more than human world.

JS: You could say that. It’s taking people into these other dimensions. We have become so narrow. We have become so narrow minded about what is animate and what is inanimate. That’s been a big part of our separation. We’ve started to see some things as alive and as less alive.

FW: I remember you sharing a quote one time many, many years ago, when I first met you, at one of the men’s gatherings up in Mendocino. You shared the quote from an elder, “What we don’t talk to we don’t understand and what we don’t understand we fear and what we fear we destroy.” And if the world ceases to be animate and have soul, we do cease to have that conversation and everything becomes frightening in that sense.

JS: Yeah. So you could say that all the destruction that we see going on around us is completely fear based.

FW: I agree.

JS: And if we could just learn to understand that thing, whether it’s a person of another color or culture or whether it’s another life form. But I know that one thing we can’t do is to proceed on a piece-by-piece basis.

FW: What do you mean by that?

JS: Saving one species, a tree, or saving one species of fish because the fire that’s burning the earth is burning everything at the same time. It’s not just one culture, it’s not just one group within a community. It’s burning everything. So the breakthrough we need to make is rather large. What I have been telling my young people is that it is just like with a computer. We are using the wrong program. The earth is not on that program and no matter what we change within that program, it’s still the wrong program. We are coming from a materialistic place and so we always want to find some money behind everything we do. Even when we are doing the right thing, we think we should receive money for that. But what we need to do needs to be done just because it needs to be done. So we need to kind of come to a new…. you know, as Thomas Berry would say, we need to reinvent ourselves as human beings to remember the true spiritual vocation of what it means to be a human being on the earth and this is where I think the native people excel and why they have so much to share with us, not as the exclusive owners of this knowledge, but just as a group of people who have held onto their original instructions from the beginning and that kind of information is just so valuable. So I have learned this as I have been with them. I am continually amazed by how much more there is to learn each time I meet new native people, what piece of the puzzle they are holding onto and how important that can be for all of us.

FW: What you are talking about are the satisfactions that come from relationship, from participation, from intimacies with the world and each other, rather than from the accumulation of materials and goods and status and power and position.

JS: Yes. And now that you’ve used that word, “relationship,” I have a nice story to tell you. This idea of reconnecting: my great teacher from Hawaii, a man named Parley Kanaka’ole (he’s passed on to the other world—it’s been ten years now), he had a lot to share with me. One of his thoughts was that we have to stop thinking about the environment as something separate. We have to stop thinking about it as a concept. It is much more of a feeling and a relationship and that is the reason that the Creator gave us heart is to put that where we feel that relationship, not in our minds, but in our hearts. The development of the human heart would be a wonderful area of research for the future.

His story was this: suppose you hear that an aunt that you’ve never met before died and you were supposed to go to the funeral. Just imagine what you would feel. You’ve never met this woman before. He says, now imagine that your favorite aunt passed away and this was the woman who you went to visit every week, who sang you the songs that you still remember, who baked you the cookies that you loved the most. And now imagine that she passed and now you go to her funeral and now imagine what you feel. Well, the point of the story, he said to me, is that caring comes from connection and the people who don’t care about what is happening to the earth don’t care because they have never been connected with the earth.

So one of the things we can do for them to help them is to connect them in whatever way seems to be useful. People learn in different styles so everybody can’t learn the same way. What I have been trying to do with the Tracking Project is to connect the young people to the earth so that they see their fate and the fate of the earth as one fate. Caring comes from that connection and once you have turned someone on in that way, you don’t really have to monitor them after that. They follow their own inspiration and they find their own place in the work. That was a nice insight for me regarding “caring” because I was always wondering, “What’s wrong with me? I must be maladjusted. Why do I feel this so strongly when other people seem to be able to go around in their lives and not be bothered by it?”

FW: I’m just struck by how you started off the conversation about this eight-year-old boy who felt grief and loss. That seems to be an important pathway into recognizing that something needs to be done.

JS: Yeah.

FW: Do you encounter that with the people you are working with, that they first strike a layer of grief?

JS: Again, through my time with the native teachers….In some cases, when I mention one of these elders, I have been traveling with them for fifteen or twenty years. Another important man in my life, Chief Jake Swamp of the Mohawk, he let me know a long time ago that the world is in grief at this time, every person in the world suffering from grief and that grief is not only the loss of all these things we’ve mentioned, the cultures, the languages, not just a species but watching life itself disappear around us, as well as the grief for the personal losses of the values we might have held or desired.

I see a world in grief and what happens in grief—the Iroquois, again, have taken this idea so far. They have identified thirteen or more symptoms of grief and they’ve come up with some words that can relieve that grief because a long time ago in their history, they encountered grief and out of that grief, some people say, came the Thanksgiving words as a way of leading someone’s mind back to the beauty of the world. The first thing we notice when someone is in grief is that their eyes are full of tears and those tears are enough to blind them to the beauty of the world. And because they can’t see that beauty, they feel so alone and so sad. So what we do in symbolism is we wipe those tears from their eyes with the skin of a fawn so that they can see the beauty of the world again. Then the words go on; it’s called The Condolences.

We will also talk about how the dust of death can lodge in the ears and then you can’t hear the beautiful songs of the birds anymore. You can’t hear the children singing. All you can hear is your own crying. Then the third symptom is a lump of grief that will lodge in the throat and the food and the water can’t pass and when this happens, the person can’t speak the beauty of the world. In symbolism, we will offer them a glass of pure water to wash the lump of grief from the throat. We rekindle the fire so that they are warm again, so that they are not sitting in the dark, so that the smoke of their fire will rise up into the sky and the Creator will see that they are all right.

FW: What a compassionate response. Beautiful.

JS: We need each other so much.

FW: Oh, desperately.

JS: Nobody can do it by themselves. That’s where I saw again…now that I have seen my work in the world, it wasn’t with individuals; it was with communities because it is in communities that we have survived and in communities we will survive. So when you do special programs, you get some kids but when you go into the communities and go into the school that serves all the kids, you get to see everybody. And another teaching of native people is that everybody gets to be an elder, not just the smart ones, everybody. And you don’t want people falling into cracks. You want to be sure that everybody receives the same teaching and everybody is equal. That is what we have tried to do over the eighteen or nineteen years, is just keep going, keep going, keep going, see the same community until finally you’ve touched the entire generation within that community.

FW: Let’s talk about community building a little bit because I think we’ve mentioned that it is a core focus for WisdomBridge and for your work, as well, and you shared a story from Tom Porter. Would you mind sharing that story?

JS: Sure thing. I was doing a program out in the East called the Sacred Circle. It was a very interesting gathering that had been begun by Phillip Deere, who was a very important elder. He was a Muskogee Creek Indian who lived in Oklahoma. He wanted to create a forum where non-Indian people could meet native elders and learn about the real issues that were happening in Indian country and I was asked to help. I called myself the Sacred Coffee Carrier. I was useful to the elders because of my tracking abilities and if they needed a sweat lodge built, I could build it and if they needed a certain medicine from the woods, I could find it. That allowed me to practice my favorite activity, which is listening to the elders. So I served that gathering for a decade.

Over the years, I would notice that sometimes we would get elders from different parts of America and when it came time to do things, people would have certain ways of doing things that were really contrary to other people so we would have to have a lot of discussions about how we would accomplish tasks. There was a man with a lot of power and his name was Sakokwanonkwas, Tom Porter. He was a bear clan loyaner, which is not really a chief. It just means a good man, one of the leaders of the Mohawk community. I noticed that when he was there he had a way of peacemaking with everybody and it always flowed so smoothly. Everybody felt like he was speaking to them; everybody felt like they had his attention, his interest, and there was no jockeying for power when he was there. I would watch him very carefully to see how he accomplished this magic and one day, because I couldn’t see it, I had to ask. And I said, “Mr. Porter, could you please tell me how you build this community I see you build each time?”

“Oh,” he said. “I’ll tell you the secret. It’s not that hard. I don’t build community; I just block the things that block community. Then community builds itself.” He said, “So if I see fear or jealousy or some of the lesser emotions rising, I’ll go see that person in a private moment and I’ll talk with them about it and as soon as I remove that block, then you’ll see that the love and community and understanding just flow because it is the natural state of affairs.”

So I started to practice his techniques and some people heard that whenever John ran a class, it always became this beautiful community. So they came from a community building institute to study me. They stayed with me for a week and at the end of the week, their notebooks were blank and yet they were sitting in this beautiful community where people really respected one another. The feeling was so good. And they came to me and said, “O. K. When did you do the community building exercises?” I explained to them Tom’s secret. All they could do was laugh but they had experienced its effectiveness. So I would put that out to people to try that. Of course, you can always start with yourself when you find yourself in any of those lesser feelings to kind of elevate yourself and you will notice that that sphere of influence will begin to spread. Yeah?

FW: Yeah, I think you’re right.

JS: Yeah….to the people next to you.

FW: How does he work or how do you work with conflict within the circle?

JS: The things he would notice he would allow; he would allow it to be expressed and then if possible…the thing we should remember about the native processes is that, by and large, they are consensus based and consensus is really time consuming. So there is a lot of talk and a lot to talk. You also have to be able to listen because so often today, you notice that people are not really listening. When someone else is speaking, they are using that time to formulate their next words, instead of listening. Tom showed me how to really listen as an elder and I also noted this. When he would speak and when other people would speak, he would not leave the room at any time. He would stay there in his chair and listen through the complete process. Some people will talk and then go outside for a cigarette and just let whatever happens happen. I noticed that these Iroquois leaders, because of their style of government and because of this consensus style, they are very patient; they’re very good at listening. They are not big on giving advice. They allow the conversation to find its own solution just by letting it roll. They will tweak it a little bit if they think they need to or they will throw out a nice wise saying but by and large, they’ll let the resolution come from the group itself.

FW: That’s quite an act of faith.

JS: (Laughs) Well, you see, the things that we are lacking are all those tried and true values mentioned: listening and faith and compassion and these are the traditional values that we need so much at this time.

FW: And to have the faith that the intention of the other is going to be--how should I say it?--in the best interest of your own soul and to have that kind of agreement in the circle is a powerful thing. I don’t think we have that, by and large, a lot in our culture. We think the other person will be our opponent or our adversary and that is one of the values of indigenous cultures; there is that sense of shared direction, that we are all trying to get over here collectively, not so much individualized and separated.

JS: The more I learn and the more I am around these patient and funny old guys, I just see that a lot of the problems that we deal with today come from a really immature place. If people just find a maturity within themselves, it’s a much higher ground and a lot of the problems just vanish. And the idea of maturity and humility also comes naturally to a mature person. The ability to see the same values in another person beyond yourself just comes from being a mature person.

Now, this is an interesting point because one of the books Robert Bly used to note to me in the old days was the “Infantilizaton of America”. We’ve become so infantile, we need to be satisfied so quickly. We don’t want to be patient. We don’t want to be humble. We don’t want to be faithful. It’s more fun to be a crybaby and a jerk, to get what you want immediately. All this technology that surrounds us actually deprives us of the beauty of maturity because the finger that pushes a button can only push a button. And when we don’t learn to do things for ourselves, we never really grow up. We are still crying to our mama to get us something from the ‘fridge when we could do it for ourselves.

So this natural world and tracking and the world of self sufficiency is a vehicle to a mature way of thinking because when we learn to do things for ourselves, this is the definition of growing up. Really, we are just playing at such a low level right now. I tell people we could be in high school but we kind of stayed in third grade and I see the native people playing at the postgraduate level. So just for everyone to get out a little bit, to get away from the umbilical that keeps them connected to the infantile way and then, maturity, patience, humility and humor, all these things follow naturally.

FW: Your organization seems to also rely upon the arts as a way of cultivating that maturity. Could you say something about that?

JS: Sure. In the world of indigenous people, there is a common knowledge that each of us is here for a specific purpose, that each individual human being was placed here because we carry something very special. This has been expressed by non-native people also. One of the more beautiful quotes I ever heard was from Martha Graham. She just said that each of us was put here as an artist and each of us has a duty to express that art and it is not our job to judge our art or to question it but just to let it flow, that if we don’t do that, then the thing that we are supposed to express will be lost to the world and the world will be a sadder place because of it. Helping all these young people find their art and then to help them develop it to their highest ability has become one of the goals of the Tracking Project.

At another level of art, what I saw was that artists have a way of expressing a vision and because they can do it in a variety of ways, they tend to express the new vision of things to come and then the scientists prove that what the artists say was true and then the merchants see a new product to sell. At the very end, the politicians look, and see everybody heading another way and they jump in front of the line and say, “I was with you all the time.”

In this process of change, I think the artists have a vital role. From the aboriginal people in Australia, I got this term. They call it the Arts of Life and their idea is that if we make our lives too complex, we’ll never have time to practice life as art or the Art of Life, which is painting, singing, dreaming, dancing, playing with our children. Art is really a core concept for us.

FW: So what you are saying, too, is that art is not so much the production piece of it as the process piece of it. I heard that the Inuit people would carve a lot of their ivory figures during the wintertime to pass the time and oftentimes they weren’t kept. They were discarded, not because they were making something but because that was the process, that was the time, that was how they made that time meaningful. We have art as a production process in this culture so I like what you are saying.

JS: Yeah. It’s wonderful. People think that the aboriginals are so simple and yet if you look at each object in their simple life, it is so intricately designed, so well thought out and again, the art in that is so deep. That’s another thing I think people miss in this life is that we go to the store and we buy the product, the thing, that five million other guys have and we don’t really take the time to individualize it or make it our own.

FW: Yeah.

JS: So it’s just a funny thing but taking things and making them your own is really a big part of this getting back to nature because that’s how we personalize it. And then environment doesn’t become that empty word.

FW: Often when I am teaching, I tell the students that are in the class, that in a culture so addicted to individualism, there are really very few individuals walking around. Have you noticed that? We conform so much to a singular stereotype. So these arts and what you are talking about is how do we become authentically who we are so we can fulfill that purpose that we came here to share.

JS: It was brought to my intention that some people were working at the Institute of Heart Math and they had found some very interesting things. A lot of times when people are working with me, they’ll tell me that what they really get from me is heart. I have a passion. That grief that we talked about that I had as a young guy, well, it’s still there but I just turned it around. That grief is my passion and that passion is my energy, it’s why I can be fifty-one and still going just as hard as I was when I was twenty.

We just need to get into our heart because inside of our own heart is an intelligence and a blueprint for who we are. What they found at the Institute of Heart Math was that when we are in a deep appreciation or a deep love for something, our heart literally opens. They called them seven fractal toroids and the heart will open and those seven veils will part. The heart will open and the heart will begin pump a wave and that wave will go through the body. Because the heart is the loudest sound in the body, that wave will be pumped through every cell of our body and it has a way of unifying the body.

When someone’s heart opens like that, they say that from that moment on, everything that person says or does has a unity and everything they do has a real solid feeling. Our own uniqueness was put there for us but our job is to unlock it. It is inside of us and what is beautiful about the numbers is that when they measured those waves that were emanating from the heart when the person was in deep appreciation, they found that the relationship of the waves was that number, the magic number we call the golden mean, 1.618, and that when we are in that space, we have become almost perfect, that we can bend from our hearts and our minds to the furthest reaches of the universe. We can receive and we can also send it right down into our own DNA. And so once we can get to that place, we can literally reprogram ourselves and everything we are doing, can take on that unity. The Thanksgiving words are not the only vehicle, but they are a very effective vehicle.

FW: It is a very beautiful gateway into that space. We use that every year at our annual Thanksgiving gathering and it completely sets the tone for the whole time we are together. We do a three-day gratitude ritual and it is the sweetest event of the year, lots of children running around and old folks. We begin. We each take a turn. We’ll be moved to get up to speak on behalf of the fish or for the birds or for the trees or for the teachers or for whatever and we will follow that path that you laid out in the book and it is a very moving time. We’ll add to it at each time. We’ll bring in our own thoughts, our own words, our own feelings to each portion and it takes us two to three hours to go through the Address and it is gorgeous. So I want to thank for that doing that piece and offering it to us.

JS: At the time, no one else was foolish enough to take on such a hair-raising responsibility.

FW: Well, thank you for doing that.

JS: Well, it came up in Brazil that the young guys heard me talking about the state of affairs in the world and then they asked me, “What should we be doing?”

I told them, “You guys can tell by talking with me that I believe in what I do.”

And they said, “Yeah.”

I said, “If there was a better way to do what I am trying to do, I would be doing it.” So at this time, given the level of where I am, I think this is the best thing that we could all be doing because you see, when we bring our minds together as one mind, that’s what is important. If you look around in the world today, you see that everybody is using their own mind to go where they think is correct and there is not a lot of oneness of mind. It is one of the most difficult things in the world to sit down in a group of people today and find a common understanding.

The refrain of the Thanksgiving Address is, “Now our minds are one.” What the speaker is actually doing energetically is he is taking the power of each person’s mind into that circle and that responsibility was given to him and he takes it all and he packs it up inside the circle and then with his mind, he sends that up. When we do that, I guess what I am trying to say is this is a form of food and this is the food the world enjoys. When we stopped doing this, it goes along with the downhill slide and when we remember to do it again, we feed the world in a way that it doesn’t have to take its food in another form.

Now, Mr. Guerdgeif from Turkey was not a native person but he had an understanding that was very native and he said that wars could not be stopped by people deliberating, that wars were created by the earth when it was not being fed correctly and that one of the ways we could stop war was by developing ourselves and feeding the world with our consciousness through prayer. That really resonated with me. I’m half Turkish and I’ve always resonated with that side, my mother’s side of the family. I’m 50% Welsh and 50% Turkish. When we get together and we meet with native people they will explain that the world used to be kept by the ceremonies that everyone did, that those ceremonies would interlock with the ceremonies of the people next to them and next to them and next to them and sometimes they would even get together with all the guys whose territory surrounded their territory so you can see this grid pattern and then if everybody is just taking care of the piece…..

FW: Oh, that’s gorgeous!

JS: Isn’t it beautiful?!

FW: I love that.

JS: So this is the beautiful shining model of why no one has it all, we need each other and if we can spread this awareness and can go back to the land, take care of the sacred sites because they have an energy that we can tap into, as well as embellish and then that is what is going to get us through. It is not going to be just our minds and it is not going to be science because this is the only earth we have.

FW: Well, we will only care for what it is that we love so it is about the heart. So we are back to the heart.

JS: We’re back to the heart.

FW: We talk about the sign of a mature human being is to be able to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, that both are part of what we have to acknowledge, that life is difficult. Life has suffering and loss in it and life is exquisite and beautiful and amazing and you have to hold both.

JS: And with a big smile because it is pretty funny, too.

FW: I like what Brian Swimm says. He was asked once, “Why are people here? We don’t seem to serve any purpose at all!”

His response was, “We were put here to gawk! That’s our purpose. Our purpose was to be amazed and to celebrate the amazement.” And that’s what you are talking about, too, with these rituals that were done by traditional people as part of their gratitude and their celebration of amazement that all this has been given to us. What a great gift! How else can we respond but with gratitude?

JS: And it really is as simple as that.

FW: It is!

JS: And that place is a foolish place to the discerning and cynical mind of the times, to see people who are happy just because it’s another day or people who are happy to touch water they’ve seen a thousand times before. It looks foolish to people but that’s the correct attitude.

FW: Yeah, I like that little prayer of Meister Eckhart’s. He said, “If the only prayer you ever uttered was ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”

JS: That would suffice.

Another origin story of the Thanksgiving Address was that they arrived here on the earth, and there is no agreement of how people arrived here, but there are some wonderful stories and not everyone thinks we came from within the earth and not everyone thinks that we came from the stars but there are many different stories. But one way or another, they found themselves here on the earth and when they did, they say, the first thing they had to do was find out that they didn’t know anything. When they realized that they didn’t know anything, they learned that they had to go out and learn what was around them. As they went around them, there were things that were life threatening and there were others that were life affirming. Some things were dangerous and some things were beneficial. They saw what they could eat; they saw what they couldn’t eat. They learned that they needed fire and shelter. And that when they saw what they needed, then they learned what they needed to appreciate. Then that appreciation became their religion.

So it wasn’t that they came here with religion and then made things follow. They were tracking and they were surviving and then they knew what was important. That became the words of Thanksgiving. Yeah, we’re here to……again, another way of saying it is that the highest purpose of our human family is to harmonize ourselves with nature. And when we harmonize ourselves with nature, the whole world is happy and when we don’t harmonize ourselves with nature, then everything we do is hurtful to the natural world.

When a human being is beautiful, there is a tradition among the Indian people that is called the Hunter of Good Heart and that when a person, a man, who needs food for his family and he goes out and he has been doing his job and he prays to the animals and he explains what he needs and when he gets his deer, he uses every part of it, he give thanks and he sends the deer back home in the way that the deer asked us to do. That man is called the Hunter of Good Heart and the animals will offer themselves to that man because it is an honor. It is an understanding that we don’t have today because we lost touch so we don’t know how to do it right. A lot of people think that it is just bad because they see it done poorly but people survived here for hundreds of thousands of years doing it in a correct manner.

To imagine that we could become so beautiful that the animals would do that for us, well, that is really how it is but it is just coming back to that knowledge. So it would be a sad world if there were no people because we have the ability to enter the mind of all the animals and we can also bring their voices into our human community in the way that the medicine people, the shaman, the pajé, used to do. But in order to do that, we are going to have to get in touch with the language that used to be the language that was spoken around the world. That’s the language of the heart because there was a time we could talk to the animals and they could talk to us. But you don’t hear it in your ear; you hear it in your heart. And when you can speak that language, you can travel all over the place and talk to all kinds. So one thing I’d like to just bring up, you had mentioned how the earth was informing us.

FW: Right.

JS: The way it came to me and the way I’ve heard it expressed is that the earth is dreaming a new dream. And the earth doesn’t want to be treated like this anymore. If we could just stretch our minds for a moment and imagine that the earth is a living being (he chuckles) and then to think that that living being has a mind, has a dream, and the earth is tired of being abused. That’s not what it was put here for- so the earth is sending out this beautiful new dream but we need to have new eyes to receive that and we have to get into that kind of quiet place, that place of listening. We have to turn our thoughts off and kind of stop trying to find the answers and let it come. As my friend would say, it’s like a didgeridoo. It’s just a hollow tube so you just step aside and let that new dream come in. Then, once we see what it is the earth would like us to do, then we will proceed on the right path and everything we do will be on the right path. Until that moment, we may or may not be on the right path.

I’ve just met a wonderful character in Brazil. I had not connected with the indigenous people in Brazil until recently. Then a man came down from the upper Amazon, from a little tribe of 320 people and we found out that he was the pajé, the dream shaman, for his people. He was thirty-eight-years-old and helping to lead his people back to their culture, back to their language, back to their ways. And each day in the Tracking Project, we do a dream circle. It is very simple. We just ask if people had a dream and if they would like to share the dream because sometimes one individual’s dream is for the whole.

So we did the dream circle on the first day and this fellow, Fernando, he was very impressed because the knowledge that I have from the Aboriginal people in Australia was pretty old, pretty deep, and he thought it was neat that a white guy had been around that knowledge. So he asked me, “May I begin the dream circle each day?” He said, “That’s how I would do it back home in my tribe. I’m the pajé for my people.” So I said, “Fine.” Well, he stood up and then he had a little thing, like a mantra he would say. Each day he said the exact same thing. And each day, he would say, “Good morning. As I said to you before, my people believe in their dreams and we follow our dreams. Dreams are very important. This is the dream that I had last night.” Then he would relate his dream. I was just dazzled by a simple fact, that many people today if you ask them about their dreams, the common response is, “I don’t dream.” Or, “I never have dreams.”

FW: Or, “It was just a dream.”

JS: Or, “I don’t remember my dreams.” And here was a man, it wasn’t even hit or miss, it was every night. “And this was the dream I had last night.” And I think that dreams got put in the same kind of crazy box where we put so many other beautiful and special things. And we need to bring the dreams back out because you and I were talking about this shared knowledge that we all have and I know that Carl Jung did work in identifying this body of knowledge but I see that the dreams unite us because when you go into the dreamtime, with all space and time unified, we can literally be anywhere, any time and any place, and dimensions within dimensions. We can see possibilities and we can see sure things. Just to get back into respect for our dreams as living things, as sacred knowledge, coming to each of us in our own unique and individual way and yet connected to this body of knowledge that is common to all. It’s fantastic! One of our camps for girls is called Dreamtracking because I’ve learned that not only can dreams be tracked like living things, but when a dream comes into your mind, it leaves a track that can be read.

FW: I like that.

JS: And it is possible to think of them as things that are alive and that can utilized. The other thing, Francis, about common knowledge, is just looking up into the sky. Some people say the stars have been a major source of knowledge for all of us and that we all, in a sense, are looking at the same sky. It is true that there is northern and southern hemisphere and that there are summer and winter constellations but there are things that were written and hidden in the stars. They can only be ascertained with contemplation and we have built our cities and made them so bright that we can’t see the stars. So they say that the cities have stolen the stars. There is a lot of knowledge that we need that is written there so there is a lot to be said for getting away from the city, into the mountains. Just laying down and looking up. You can see that we are doing ourselves a tremendous disservice with the lifestyle we are practicing and for those of us who would like to improve our lot and kind of find a way through these times, you can see from all I’ve been saying, you can see that getting out into nature is the first crucial step in that process. It’s so hard to do it from our urban lives. Just getting out into the natural world and the healing that comes from that and the peace that comes from that………(he laughs), it’s indispensable.

FW: I’d like to talk about soul loss particularly but I think we talked all around it. I think that is one of the main wounds of our people right now is just some sense of flatness and despair and feeling disheartened and speaking of the dreaming, we’ve been given several rituals to do that have come to us to do and one of them is a collective soul retrieval that is really astonishing. We call if it a reclaiming ritual. And realizing that we don’t have the technicians of the soul anymore in our culture, the shamans, that the community has to become its own shaman. We have to do our healing work in order to restore us and this reclaiming ritual came to us and we’ve done it many, many times now. I remember Malidoma, the first time we did it with him together, he looked at me and said, “That’s the first indigenous ritual I’ve seen in this culture.” So we feel like part of what is happening to our community is we are asking for and being given the rituals we need to do to make ourselves right again with the world and that is part of it, allowing human beings to feel like they have sacredness again and purpose and a sense of dignity and vitality instead of this kind of oppressive and contracted spirit that just feels hopeless. So that’s one thing that just came to mind.

JS: That’s great. Well, we just need to grow. We need to grow and we need to grow up. Kind of a funny way of saying it is one native guy, Coyote, from the Wylaki people, he says, “It is a mistake to cut all the branches off the tree and then tell it, ‘I don’t like the way you are growing.’” Because what we’ve done is we’ve made the space for human beings so tiny. And then we look and we find ourselves to be lacking in 459 different ways.

FW: Right.

JS: Of course. So any way that you can make the container larger, that’s what I try to do. Nature was about the largest thing I could find and then if I just guide people out and then create the space and then maintain it so that they are safe within that space to find themselves. Sometimes what I see with people today, especially the young guys, is that they’re not doing anything crazy, it’s just that within a tribe they would have had a place but in our world today we don’t have that role anymore. So their kind of craziness is just because they are living in a world that doesn’t have room for it. If I find a boy and he’s really intrigued with fire and he’s going to burn the whole camp down, I’ll let him be the fire man and he will become the best, most respectful young fellow. So we try to identify not only troublemakers but peacemakers. Who’s the leader, who’s in power? And then when people find their place, they just grow naturally from that spot. One time, Robert and James and the men’s team went to Santa Barbara and I think the gathering was for about 150 psychotherapists.

FW: I was there.

JS: You were there. And I remember asking, “How many diseases of the mind, mental illnesses, that we see around us today do you think are caused by the spirit or the soul of the human being missing nature?” Because I see that is like the grand craziness. Then it takes different forms in different people but by and large, if we can get them out there and peel away the conditioning, then the healing just proceeds in a natural way.

FW: Yeah, most of our work attempts to mend that connection with nature. We do a 10 month initiation process with men that really does a lot to try to strip away the kind of artificial accumulations and bring them back to some sense of themselves and we do all of it in nature and it has also been astonishing for me when we have done it in different locales, to see how the earth dreams differently in different places. Like the mineral dreams that came up when we were working down in Ojai, near Santa Barbara, compared to the dreams we have with people up here when are doing work with people in the forest, it is so extraordinarily different. And I’ve heard that before, that the earth will speak differently in different places but then I actually got to see it and feel it and it was great.

JS: Yeah, yeah. That’s going to be something I study more in my later teen years here. The sacred sites and the nature of the energy. One of the interesting things, a guy came out with me. (I love these classes because all kinds come and they take your mind into areas you might never have visited if you had stayed home). This guy was into dowsing and he sent me an article and they have found that when they dowsed these kivas in the Southwest, there is a huge dome of water sitting under every single one of them so what I have learned is that the feelings we feel when we go to these sacred places are caused by the energy in the earth and that was there. The native people didn’t make it up or just decide, “This one is close to us so let’s call this the sacred site.” As they walked about the earth, they felt these umbilical energies and then they just identified what that one was good for, what this one was good for. So some of them, like they energize us but what the energy really is is our kind of static or our negative energy falling away so we experience exhilaration but it is not exhilaration that is being fed to us. It’s something else is being lifted from us.

FW: Right.

JS: And then the nature of the dream is just another way of expressing that flavor. So I am really into dreams. Back when I was eighteen, I met a guy (he is now the editor of Edgar Casey’s papers and the Association of Research and Enlightenment) and he convinced me that I had great dreams and I should start to write them down so I have like twenty-nine volumes. Being in touch with my dreams was one of the things that attracted the aboriginal elders to me because we can use this or not (this piece). What I realized later was that they were sending me dreams and my ability to catch the dreams and how much detail I would remember was a way for them to gauge who I was and where I was. And as they sent me more complex dreams, they could monitor my growth so that they always gave me enough, not too much to hurt me and not enough to make me hungry,. And most of my teaching that I received was on that level and so because of that, I was able to proceed at my own speed, I was able to ascertain things from other times and when I came back to meet the Indian people, after seven years in Australia, the Indian people here in North America were really interested by the depth of the aboriginal knowledge, not so much in myself but as a messenger of this knowledge. They wanted that so they invited me to their community to share that with their kids but the elders would sit in on the teaching. So you could say that the whole dream connection is the reason that I have been able to maintain the momentum over all these years.

FW: That’s wonderful.

JS: Hey, man. You’re doing great stuff. It sounds so cool.

FW: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I am just overfilled with gratitude for the work you are doing and it’s inspiring us up here and we will continue to converse about this and hopefully get you out here sometime. Thank you, John.

JS: Well, great!