Both are Singing
A Comparison Between Western and Indigenous Science--in
which the author attempts to share the relevance of her
shamanic training to Western science.
As a part of the Native American training I received from my father, one of the aspects of perception that I was asked to understand was the distinction between Hawk and Eagle, between the way Hawk perceives and the way Eagle perceives. In this shamanic tradition, you gain the appreciation by what is considered to be direct experience. However, the distinction--once learned--is easily translated into Western logical sequential language structure.
"Originally, state . . . of knowing"
When hunting, Hawk sees Mouse . . . and dives directly for it.
When hunting, Eagle sees the whole pattern . . . sees movement in the
general pattern . . . and dives for the movement, learning only later
that it is Mouse.
What we are talking about here is Specificity and Wholeness.
Western science deals from the specific to generalities about the
whole.
Indigenous science begins with an apprehension of the Whole, only
very carefully and on close inspection reaching tentative conclusions
about any Specificity.
Indigenous science is based on a profound immersion in and awareness
of the whole circumstance. Rather than mistrusting personal experience,
Indigenous science has learned to thrive on it. The standards for
personal honesty are excruciatingly exact and taught from earliest
childhood. Educational structures like the Vision Quest have as one
goal coming to terms with accuracy outside of or devoid of your own
assumptions or the assumptions of your society. The idea is that you
are always--if you are wise--moving toward enhanced accuracy. You will
never entirely arrive at complete accuracy, but you are constantly
trying to move in that direction.
As to the efficacy of Indigenous science, let me give you one
example.
Since universe is Energy, part of the process of understanding, at
least as I experienced it, is to learn to "see" flows of energy and
specificities of energy. Both are necessary. Because, you see,
Universe is both Whole and Specific. Western science is beginning to
understand this through explorations of theories about particle and
wave. Both the particle/particularity/specificity of Universe and the
wave/flow of Universe were aspects I was encouraged as a child to
apprehend and understand. I was asked to "see" the "dancing points of
lights" and then to apprehend the shift from location to flow. Much of
shamanic practice has to do with developing the ability to enter and use
this shift.
So when I read that the Western science of physics was looking at
particle/wave theories, I had no trouble with that at all. Instead of
being startled or surprised, I was given a wonderful gift--the ability
to communicate more easily some of the things I learned in the shamanic
process of understanding Universe.
is irrelevant. To the extent that it's Specific,
relationship is a better construct than either time
or location for purposes of accurate understanding.
The process of Indigenous science allows you to learn about and to
experience the flow of Energy through Universe. You quickly come to
understand (well, maybe it takes a while) that Universe has a kind of
binary on/off structure, which can certainly be stated as particle/wave.
In the particle state, particles can be understood in terms of
"location." But "location" requires a point of reference which is more
or less fixed in relation to that particle.
Tell me now, where is that point of reference? Are you not also
moving?
The Indigenous scientific approach understands Universe--or All
Things--as constantly in motion. Even the particles are "dancing,"
already moving toward the flow state. Since everything is in motion all
the time (oops, time is irrelevant!)--since everything is constantly in
motion, any location is in constant flux in relation to everything else.
Ah . . . in relation to!
"All Things, All Things are Related" is not just a charming chant,
designed to put you in touch with "all your relations," it is a profound
evaluation of the nature of Universe.
There is great contrast between Native American languages in general
and that logical, sequential construct called English. In general, it
can and has been explained that Indian languages are much more
verbal--that is, verb oriented--than English. English uses an extensive
noun/category structure which requires you to constantly decide which
"category" whatever you are describing belongs in. Thus, in English, we
constantly divide a whole Universe into semi-relevant parts. Indian
languages generally don't do this.
Language predicts the conclusions we reach therein. Understanding
this, my ancestors consistently examined new words the way the commerce
department examines applications for new patents, except that their
usefulness was also explored, as was their impact on the culture as a
whole. The Academie Francaise limits itself to examining the accuracy
of French. My ancestors required a detailed cultural Environmental
Impact Report!
From an Indian perspective, the "priesthood" nature of Western
science is anathema. My own tradition disbelieves in "experts." "That
which enables, disables also" means that a physicist will fail in
understanding in many other areas, precisely because of the amount of
time she/he spends on physics and therefore not on other things. Such
people are not considered "experts," but "those extensively informed on
part of the whole". They are listened to not on a priesthood basis, but
on the basis of their having information others may not yet have--just
as vice versa.
The search for greater wholeness--which has no room for
"expertise"--is unending!
Any highly trained person will of course have a particular view--and
therefore has a special responsibility to listen before speaking in any
discussion of what the people may choose to do. Any person in a group
who gets out of touch with his, with her community, is separated
therefrom. Although I don't think there is the same negative
connotation as there is in English, a shaman out of touch with her, with
his community takes on aspects of the wizard--an isolated person who can
inadvertently or on purpose do things that are harmful to the community.
The process of Western "expertise" would be seen as a process of
encouraging people to be isolated from the rest of their community in
some way.
As I have said, Universe in its particle state has the quality of
relatedness. Universe in its wave state partakes of flow. The particle
state can be said, then, to have the quality of location. The wave
state can be said to have the quality of direction. It is this
movingness of Energy that of its nature produces Change.
But look, if everything is in motion, what causes what? How can we
say that this drop of ocean water pushes that drop of ocean - and that's
why it moves! Rather, direction, flow, the movingness of Energy of its
nature produces Change.
And here we have a problem with English. "Produces" means "causes."
It doesn't mean that in my tradition. There is more a sense of
evolution, a sense of cooperative evolvingness, of the Universal Reality
acting through you and with you and with everything else--all at once.
Perhaps "engenders" is a better term. Perhaps a better term has yet to
be invented. In any event, in any shift from one language to another,
much is lost in translation.
It seems to me that there are two aspects here that make Western
science's preoccupation with causality sometimes counterproductive.
(Remember, that which enables, disables also.) One is the probability
of multiple causation. Laboratory experiments obsessively select out
"causative" factors for experimental demonstration. This clarifies and
obscures, both at once. It leads to situations in which, for example, a
blood test run to determine "causation" of some dis-ease may not reveal
the culprit, as "we weren't screening for that condition."
It also leads to situations in which the results of isolated
experiments are applied to the broader community with disastrous or
semi-disastrous results. Mistakes are not ruled out by any discipline.
But this kind of mistake (Love Canal, nuclear waste disposal) would be
less likely in any Indigenous, Whole way of understanding the Universe
in which we exist.
The other aspect I see that seems to me to question the relevance of
Western science's preoccupation with causality, is: In a sea of
constant movement/change--which the wave aspect of Universe certainly
seems to imply--is causation really a viable way of understanding?
So Hawk--the tendency to look at the Specific--and Eagle--the
tendency to look at the Whole--have something to say to one another.
And if they both listen, what is engendered is what is called in my
tradition an Interactive Circle. Like Yin-and-Yang, each encourages the
other toward heightened acuity.
In cultural terms, this has been going on for a long time.
Renaissance Europe was preceded by the Crusades, during which Europeans
developed a taste for foreign knowledge/science and technology--and they
just kept it up! Much of "Western" science is truly based on earlier
exploration by other peoples--Chinese, Muslim, Native American.
According to my own oral history, for instance, Benjamin Franklin's
famous key-and-kite experiment was his effort to try to demonstrate and
understand better what he was hearing from some of his Iroquois
friends--which was that Universe is energy . . . and so on.
To learn to demonstrate through replicable, quantitative experiments
to those unwilling to spend the time to acquire shamanic skills--or
whose culture has chosen to forego these skills--some of the thing that
can be learned through this Whole approach to Life . . . is no small
thing. It is an invaluable contribution to human understanding . . . a
second eye opened on the Universe to help give us some greater depth
perception.
For me, Western science is that second eye.
Perhaps Indigenous science can provide that second eye for the West,
to the greater benefit of one and all.
Let us hope they are listening to one another.
Kind thoughts come . . . .
First I want to explain to you the base from which I'm speaking. My grandfather's grandmother was Oneida. She became responsible for an ancient tradition and for passing it along. She did this because she was both a Healer and a Spirit Healer. During what was, in effect, her internship, she was assigned a man who was slowly dying. That man, as it turned out, was dying of grief. She learned this very quickly.
This was a test for her, by the equivalent of the Community Medical Board, to determine what kind of healer she was, and what she would do.
She pinpointed the cause of his grief: He was the Keeper of the Old Things. He had not been able to find, during his very long life, anyone at all who would take the time to sit with him and learn all of these ancient treasures. This was because of the oncoming tide of the Pale Ones.
Therefore as part of this man's therapy, my grandfather's grandmother began to learn these things from him. And immediately his condition improved. He got better and better.
Now her purpose in life had always been to be a Healer. So during this therapy, she thought she would find somebody else to learn all these things from him and pass on the responsibility. But she was never able, in three decades of trying, to find anyone at all who could learn this from him or from her. So finally she accepted maintaining this tradition as a family responsibility. The idea was to perpetuate this ancient wisdom as far into the future as necessary, until Earth's children grew Listening Ears.
Black Elk, whom some of you will know, said that it was the fifth generation that would grow Listening Ears. I am the fifth generation. In my own lifetime I have discovered that people have indeed grown Listening Ears.
Now--my father's idea was that I should wait until I had developed some grandmother wisdom before writing this down. In other words, I needed to live through the life cycle before trying to commit to paper all these ancient understandings. My grandfather had given up a career in medicine to spend his time learning all this from his grandmother. He then passed it on to my father after a great deal of testing.
I don't want to give you the impression that this transmittal is based on automatic lineal descent. It's not. In this tradition, a man learns these things from a woman, if possible, and a woman learns them from a man. That way you keep things in balance. It gives you an understanding of the other half of life and prevents some of the competition that can often come in when you learn from someone who is also male, also female.
My father's responsibility was to find someone who would have the natural proclivity, the motivation, and the latent skills to learn all this. I went through extended periods of testing with my father, not pass/fail tests, but evaluations. There's a lot of evaluative testing that goes on in the tradition (see following box).
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There are many kinds of sensitization processes that you
have the opportunity to go through if you choose. You get many
kinds of testing to evaluate how you think. The idea is that
everybody learns, but you need to figure out how a child
learns in order to design a learning circumstance in which each
individual can teach themselves. The idea is always to teach
yourself. In fact there is no word "teach," or there didn't
used to be, in the fundamental language.
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As a result of 15 years of careful exploration of ways to share these things, the first book to be published out of the three Basic Learning Stories has received three national awards, one of them being recognition by the US Department of Education as part of an Exemplary Educational Program. The three Learning Stories represent Body, Mind, and Spirit. We hope to publish them soon.
The Consensual Oral History, under the title "The Walking People," has also been written down. It is about 700 pages long. It goes back to before what logically must be the crossing of the Bering Strait, which was called at that time Walk by Waters. There is a great deal that precedes that event, so it is indeed an ancient history, which has been maintained down all these generations.
Now--one of the difficulties of my path through life has been to find ways to express these ancient ways of knowing. I knew from the time I was a child that I would need to take the step in my generation of stating these things in English. I wrote a thought piece a while ago which refers to the problem of "catching a concept in a net of sound patterns called English." Sometimes you can do that and sometimes you can't. I want to speak to that briefly.
Years ago I took a class in parapsychological research. The language was driving me crazy. In my tradition, for instance, the process of going somewhere when your body stays here is called Spirit Walking--because that's what happens. The Spirit Walks. It feels like moving forward, like walking. In English, it's called Out-of-Body Experience. Well, in my tradition, that's considered dangerous. You don't want your whole Spirit out of your body because you may not find your way back. You handle it in a different way and you speak in terms of Spirit, rather than Body. So, all these body-related terms bothered me.
Finally I went to the teacher and told her my problem. She asked me to make a presentation to the whole class explaining this. The whole class spent time making up new terms in English. Over the years I have found ways to deal with this, which do not include leaving the room. And this has worked reasonably well.
When you talk to Native American people you need to understand that most Indian languages are much more verbal--that is, verb-oriented--than English. English has worlds of nouns. Iroquoian languages--which is my tradition--have nouns also, but not so many. The Hopi, I understand, have no nouns at all. Everything is described in verbal terms.
You would not, for example, call Paul Temple over there the Chair as much as you would call him Man who sits at the head of the table. This tells you something. You go through the thought process of placing him at the head of the table (in the North) and thinking about his behavior, rather than just announcing who Paul is, what his title is. It becomes extremely difficult, painful, agonizing sometimes, to try to say things in English, because you're forever jamming things into categories that don't work and making yourself think in ways that aren't natural to you.
Now--the tradition that I come out of says: If you want to be truly understood, you need to say everything three times, in three different ways. Once for each ear . . . and once for the heart. The right ear represents the ability to apprehend the nature of the Whole, the wholeness of the circumstance, the forest. The left ear represents the ability to select a sequential path. And the heart represents a balance between the two.
How do you choose a path if you haven't looked at the forest?
If you've only admired the Forest, where are you going in Life?
The distinction that I want to make between Western science and the approach to science which my tradition, and perhaps other Native traditions, have found useful . . . is that first you look at the Forest . . . and then you look at the Path. We had a speaker earlier, Michael Murphy, who described a process of acquiring sensory data and then testing it. This is the reverse of my tradition, which is that you first acquire an intuitive, whole understanding, and then you focus on a Specificity and examine it, and then you always put it back into the whole.
Now--when you examine anything, you examine it first with your mind. When I was a child, if I were trying to understand the process of a leaf growing, for example, the idea was to sit and think, allow my thoughts to flow into the leaf. Only after I was completely satisfied with my explanation would I ask the plant's permission and hold it in my hand. So you go through sort of a mirror image, a reversed image of the process of Western science.
We were talking earlier about the difference between the Western way of understanding, the Eastern way, and the Indigenous way--the Native American perspective and approaches. It strikes me that the Western tradition represents Body because it's always looking at things out here at arm's length. It's using microscopes, its using all kinds of tools to look at things, to take them apart. That's changing, but this has been the understanding. The Eastern approach uses Spirit--you meditate, you breathe, you apprehend the nature of the Universe through your Spirit. I think the Native American tradition, at least the one that I understand and grew up in, represents Mind. Because, as I say, you let your thoughts precede you. You let your thoughts flow into that circumstance to understand it.
Now--there are general similarities in Native American approaches to
life. But they are similar as you go from Ireland to Turkey. There are
enormous variations. But to a certain extent it's the same dance, from
one end of Europe to the other. The similarities I see in many Native
American cultures include such things as an absolute sense of the
Wholeness of Things. One of the problems that Indian children often
have in this education system is that in school people are always
talking about specific and separate things, but the Indian children may
understand that it's really one interrelated whole. And this passion
for separation just sounds crazy. You try to translate it from English
into an Indian language and it literally sounds crazy.
So it's very hard for them to take this seriously. Very difficult.
This was hard for me, when I began school, but my father kept saying,
learn the system, learn the system. How can you learn to say what we
understand in an intelligible way if you don't learn the system? So the
idea is, learn the system and contribute in that way. And it is a very
viable way of understanding life. What becomes dangerous is when any
one way of understanding life is considered to be the only way, or the
Right Way.
The idea of relatedness runs throughout all Native American thinking.
Everything is related to everything else, everything is attached to
everything else. So everything affects everything else. This gets into
the causality issue that you've been examining here at the Institute.
The idea that this-causes-that is simply impossible in Indian
understanding, because everything is attached; everything has its own
gravitational attraction. So you can say what I say comes out of my
tradition, but what Michael said this morning has already affected what
I say and the presence of the people on each side of me also affects
what I say in an ongoing way, and that's the way the world works.
The way that is stated in mythic terms is that Spider Woman created
the world, and she did it in this way: In the beginning all that
existed was Thought Woman. She was the totality of all that existed
until Spider Woman came and took from that Whole Thought the
specificities that were implicit in it and from these she spun the world
in which we live.
You see how it is? Every place where a thread crosses a thread, that
is an Individuation. And the continuing thread connects every
Individuation to every other.
The idea of how Universe functions that comes out of my tradition,
and I hear echoes of it in other Indian traditions, is that Universe is
Space which contains Energy. Energy of its nature moves. As it moves
it produces Change.
In the Western world we call that Change "time"--past, present and
future. But the idea is that it isn't time at all. It is Change--it
was, it is, it will be.
Part of the process I'm describing is what I hear discussed in
scientific terms at the present time as the distinction between wave and
particle--is it a wave or is it a particle? And the answer is: yes!
In the shamanic tradition you understand the distinction and the
interrelationship of Specificity and Wholeness. Particle is
Specificity. Wave is Wholeness, the direction that the energy takes.
And you spend a great deal of time looking at each. I can't speak for
all shamanic traditions. I suspect there may be something similar. But
in the shamanic tradition that I'm familiar with you understand the
world as binary. Now that's not good/evil, any more than light is right
and dark is wrong. Dark is not wrong in relation to light. Light is not
wrong in relation to dark. In fact, we need both. We need both.
So the binary nature of life gives us a multiplicity of yes/no
choices from which we choose our path, constantly branching in the
direction of our yes decisions. Each minute yes/no decision is a binary
decision. Understanding this helps you understand another binary,
co-equal aspect of Life. When you want to enter a different aspect of
Life, you wait for the point at which Particle becomes Wave. And just
at that split second before the Particle is gone and the Wave takes
over, you enter between, and you become Energy. At that point where the
Wave becomes Particle again, you enter between, and you re-become who
you were or you make a different choice. Which is possible. I think it
is that space in which healing occurs.
The critical thing is to understand that Particle and Wave co-exist.
In one of your papers on Perennial Wisdom it says that the Native
tradition is nature-focused. I would like to modify that a little. I
would like to say that Indian traditions are nature-inclusive. You do
not see man and nature as separate from each other, but you see yourself
in the context of an interrelated whole instead.
One of the attitudes taught in my tradition is the Rule of Six. The
Rule of Six says that for each apparent phenomenon, devise at least six
plausible explanations, every one of which can indeed explain the
phenomenon. There are probably sixty, but if you devise six, this will
sensitize you to how many there may yet be and prevent you from locking
in on the first thing that sounds right as The Truth.
But your task isn't over yet. Because you can't just float on a
multiple option basis. Now your task is to apply your life experience,
which is unique to yourself, and use it as a base to evaluate each of
those options. Now you assign a probability factor. That probability
factor can never be 100% . . . and absolutely never zero.
You keep a floating attitude toward life, but you constantly know
where you are in that context.
When I was very young my father would stand me on my left foot and
say, "Answer this question in the manner of the people." Wholeness.
And then he would stand me on my right foot and say, "Explain this in a
way your mother would understand." Sequence.
Then he would stand me on both feet and ask, "What do you see now?"
Because it isn't enough to do only one, only the other. The critical
thing is to strike a balance between the two.
In my tradition you get mind puzzles a lot. One of the questions
that my dad gave me as a mind puzzle was, "What is the sound of one hand
clapping?" When I discovered that is also a Zen question, I was
delighted. I'm reasonably confident that they come from the same
source. I spent months trying to come up with an answer, and I came up
with all kinds of different things. My father would say, "No, that's
not really the sound of one hand clapping, that's . . . " Then, "No,
that's not really the sound either." And finally , he suggested to me
the kind of clue that you get under this pedagogic structure--"Maybe
Eagle has the answer." And I knew immediately he was right, because of
course Eagle would understand the sound of one hand clapping.
As with all his suggestions, I taught myself. This process is called
go-and-be-Eagle. You become Eagle in your mind and heart, and look at
the world from Eagle's perspective. As a result of that, you may come
up with an entirely different concept of what the answer might be,
which, limited to this body, you could not have come up with, because
this body doesn't work that way.
In this pedagogic tradition, nobody tells you what to think or how to
process information. Instead, you discover it for yourself, you keep
discovering it for yourself. And only at the other end of this long
process of self-discovery would my father say, "That's another
generation that's reached that conclusion." In this case, however, he
said that my answer was a whole new answer, that he knew of eight
others, but that was a whole new answer to the question. He didn't tell
what the other eight were at the time, and I won't tell you what mine is
now, because if I did, that would prevent you from ever discovering it
for yourself.
The basis of learning, the basis of the pedagogy, is to cease
preventing people from learning things for themselves. This way of
thinking, what goes on in here, can really be taught from the inside
out. When it's taught from the outside in, someone else comes between
you and yourself, and that's not considered a wise idea. That's the
tradition.