Philosophies - A Caveat
Please bear with me
while I clean up this blog and figure out how to separate the installments of
Stan’s Travels from other posts and make it all seamless, uncluttered and
beautiful...
I feel the need this
morning to convey a point! Too much
coffee, I suppose. I recently wrote a
book, Renting the Veil, about a
rather linear-thinking ordinary businessman who suddenly lost his young wife
and spiraled into uncontained grief. He
became inadvertently caught in the net of New Age thinkers who tried to help
him through. The ill-fit of this
philosophy afforded much opportunity for comedy. During the course of the novel, many beliefs
foreign to readers were presented and I was asked to explain them. Having many diverse interests competing for
my attention and not much patience or unfortunately follow-through (which would
be a great help to market my endeavors), I managed to whip out a post
explaining Power Animals. Well, of
course what naturally followed from nonbelievers was criticism that this was a
good deal of nonsense. A year later I
feel compelled to clarify.
Well, in my belief
system (to which I am not asking anyone to ascribe) nothing is nonsense and
everything is nonsense at the same time.
I recently watched a
Ted Talk featuring a successful writer whose topic was “what to do now?”
She had published a best seller and her friends were questioning what she could
do now, as the chance that she could “top” that was statistically slim.
This seemed to have spiraled her into a questioning of self-worth, a notorious
malaise in the emotional world of artists. Her exposition evolved around
a discovery through research that this questioning had only surfaced since the
Age of Reason when people no longer believed in multiple gods governing the
chance events of their fortunes and began to individually assume the responsibility.
This eventually evolved from positive thinking into the almost-extreme version
in New Age philosophy and modern physics that purports one’s belief creates
one’s reality. The downside is that when things go sub-par, there is
self-blame and frustration heaped upon disappointment. From this abyss,
it is pretty hard to pull up your bootstraps and trip merrily along.
The writer’s
conclusion was that it is much healthier to believe in a multitude of gods
governing her fate, some being wily and temperamental. Whatever one’s
chosen philosophy, at its root is the proposition that it is just a
psychological tool for understanding and accepting the world around us and
attaining the goals we feel are important for our own happiness or
equilibrium. This is no less true with the Native American philosophy
that I have been expounding upon. It is simply a tool to better
understand our own psyches and help us to interact with our environment in a
rewarding way.
For example, if one
draws a card in a Medicine Pathway spread laid out to represent her immediate
past and the card is a wild boar, to the reader it may be quite clear that this
represents the conflict she had with her boss the day before and gives her a
level set that the spread is accurate and she can proceed confidently to
analyze the card representing the current lesson moving through her life.
The current card may be a deer, the medicine for gentleness. The reader
will take that into account in her actions and call on the attributes of deer
to help her through today’s actions and interactions and feel confident that it
is a positive way to approach the situations before her. This helps to
remove insecurities and other emotional dross which might otherwise impede her
joy of simply living. Hence, like any philosophy or religion, it calms and guides.
(In the extreme one hears the Marxist criticism that religion is the opiate of
the masses, but it it may be helpful to recognize that there is still a good deal of active
internal questioning and analysis going on... and lighten up on the
self-criticism.)
Another person may
draw wild boar and in his mental application to his personal journey, it
represents his confrontation with fear, that fear being a financial
insecurity. It is only as literal as the interpreter wants it to be. I
have a friend who has been drawn to owls her entire life. When she came
to visit, two owls came to my gate posts and did not leave the property for the
week that she stayed. Crows tried to drive them off, but they steadfastly
returned and remained throughout her visit. She is a person who needs
miracles, who must visually see magic at work and she does. She is the
person most likely to witness a statue of the Virgin Mary crying, even though
her chosen religion is the Islamic. Others could never allow themselves
this latitude without immediately checking into an asylum. Your
philosophy is all about what works best for you. The more attuned one
becomes to his own thought process and beliefs, the more clues will be
perceived and the more it will be substantiated.
Please understand
that I present the information here as a choice, not an imposition of reality.
- See more at:
http://www.rentingtheveil.com/