we are as much indigenous now as we have always been

There is a sentence that appears almost casually in academic texts on indigenous peoples. It’s a kind of habitual ethno-ignorance and ethno-shaming. Like “They believed that everything in nature had life and spirit inside them”. But it’s not about faith. About beliefs. And certainly no more than how the average Westerner’s relationship to our psychic world is about beliefs. In the oldest living traditions today, it is about a direct experience of our psychic world. About its influence on us, and how they through millennia have learned to refer to the common experiences that lie behind them. A psychic relief that serves to create the references we need in our reflections when we are called to our intrasubjective consciousness. An active mental state in direct relation to our common psychic life. It’s not about faith. It’s about interaction. A relationship between what the person shares with others that is reflected in our lives. When that connection to our psychic consciousness has been created and understood it is as little about faith with that as it is with any person today who blindly trusts the mathematics or physics behind the knowledge of our engineers’ achievements. Or having no personal experience of the scientific work that underlies them. For most of us, it is no more common to apply the direct work that involves us with our psychic influences that also develops our personal relationships with what they are, as it is to learn the science behind our gadgets. We look at indigenous people and we see ourselves in relation to the work behind the technology we rely on today, ignoring that we learn by listening to what affects us also in others. To that which is much more than what we just like to see of ourselves in everything around us. That there is more to discover of what it is that interacts and affects us all, all the time. So we need to relate to this with references that others around us can understand. The language we use then is not about faith. It is the ongoing relationship we have with the psychic consciousness we share with others in and around ourselves. Science is how we try to approach it from the outside in. But how we really imagine and describe our relationships to our internal organization, our internal architecture, is how we try to approach it from the inside out. From the within in the without. From the sphere of the mind in a psychic sense as an experience of the biosphere from within. In that we also have to be responsible for how we participate in it. One thing we share with everyone, indigenous or not, is that we don’t get there without real human closeness, with trust, honor and confirmation of what it is we encounter within ourselves. Without this, we only experience confusion, uncertainty and trauma. We do not experience a deeper physical communion with Nature or people, or the unknown. With our bodies as our way of involving ourselves. It is more like we without warning have been thrown to the wolves, without guidance or inner direction before we where ready for it.