Tsalagi Way of the Seventh Sacred Direction - by Bill Neal

In the way that I have been taught, the Tsalagi hold that there are Seven Sacred Directions - East, South, West, and North representing all of creation, the Sky Above and the Earth Below. The Seventh Direction is Here, Inside, it's at the Center. Standing at the Center means that we realize that where we are in our lives, right here and right now, is the sum total of all the decisions that we have ever made in our lives, our reactions to all that has happened in our lives that have brought us to this point, right here and right now. Taking responsibility for that is to Stand at the Center of all that we have created in the world with our lives. That is the Seventh Sacred Direction. When we Stand at the Center we are creating consciously. When we are all ready to do that, and do it well,the world will be a much different place and our reality will be shifted.

At this point some might object that, by speaking about creating consciously, I am allowing the ego of the self to imagine that the two-leggeds can do the work of the Creator. This is not about self in the way that we might think. This is about being responsible for what we create with our lives, which each of us needs to to begin to do. Part of the difficulty with understanding these discussions has to do with how we perceive and understand what let's call a "First Cause" or "Prime Cause". Most of us have grown up with a concept of "God" as the First Cause in which he is an anthropomorphic being, the image usually being an old man with a long white beard up on a cloud somewhere, a being that lives outside of us and outside of nature. Even when we say "Creator", "Great Spirit" or "Wakan Tanka", we are still thinking of the "he" who looks like us and is outside ourselves. To truly understand the Native American concept of the "First Cause" - the "Great Spirit" or "Great Mystery" or "Grandfather", that goes by names like Gitchi Manitou, Wakan Tanka, or Chinigchinich - is to understand that all things are part of an incomprehensible totality which always was and always will be, that all things are equal because they are all part of the whole. What we call God and all other names is what Black Elk described as the "spirits" of all things existing together in oneness, as a whole. Even the word "spirit" does not adequately represent a concept which to us is incomprehensible. Because it is incomprehensible, we assign to it meaning that we are capable of understanding, but we have to remember that our limited understanding is not what it truly is - only what we can understand. As our understanding gets better, our concept of the totality of existence, of the 'First Cause', will shift. This I think will be a difficult discussion for many but, for those who are truly interested in the Native American way, it is worth sticking with.


When one is called to begin to create consciously, it is essential to learn to pay attention. To learn to perceive more of what is actually taking place all around us is the first step in taking responsibility for what we create with our lives. A primary function of our minds in day-to-day life is to filter out the sensory data that is not directly applicable to our day-to-day survival because we can't process that much information. In fact, today, in the way that we live our lives, we are bombarded by more sensory data, in a single day of our lives, than people one hundred years ago dealt with in an entire year. That is one way in which the world has changed radically. So our brains must filter the majority of that information out so that we don't owerload and become 'insane'. As a consequence, we have learned how not to hear, not to see, not to feel, not to taste or smell. As the products of compulsory public education, the one thing we have all learned to do is stare out the window, another reenforcement of learning not to pay attention.


This reminds me of a story that someone once told me of a people who lived near a powerful waterfall - not unlike the Miwuk people of Yosemite Valley. It was a very beautiful place and the people counted themselves as blessed to live in the midst of such beauty. The waterfall, however, was very loud so that when friends and family would come to visit, they could not even hear themselves speak. The people who lived there, as a means to still hear each other and to avoid sensory overload, through time had learned not to hear the noise. And, over time, that not-hearing eventually became permanent - a permanent partial hearing loss. This is an example of what has taken place in our lives.


I had an epiphany once after having taken a photograph of a very beautiful view. When the picture was developed I saw that there were powerlines passing through the foreground view in the picture that I had not seen while I was there admiring the beauty. Looking at that photograph made me wonder - what else do we not see, not hear or smell or taste or feel - and not even know that we are missing it? What kind of loss do we suffer everyday without even knowing it?

If what we perceive drives our version of "reality", in what way does our not-seeing, not-hearing, not-smelling or not-tasting - our not-feeling - affect the world that we create for ourselves and, by agreement with others, the world that we create together and that we all live in together?

Learning to pay attention - some call it awareness, some call it mindfulness - is the first priority if we want to create a better life, a better world, if we want to Stand at the Center in the Seventh Sacred Direction, and begin creating consciously. How can we make the best possible decision of how to act in any situation if we are not acting with the best possible information about the situation? And remember, how we act in circumstances beyond our control is how we create our lives, since our lives right here and now is the sum total of every decision we ever made about how to act in the situations in which we find ourselves, right up to today.


Many years ago I was introduced to the art of mushroom hunting. My friend knew the safest and best-tasting mushrooms and how to cook them. The first time I went mushroom hunting with him it did not take him long to begin to fill his basket. I, however, found nothing. I didn't understand it. I knew that I would not know what kind of mushrooms I found, that I would have to rely on him to identify them for me. But I found nothing. Finally I stopped to relieve myself. Looking down at the ground in front of me, I was shocked to realize that I was relieving myself on the very mushrooms that I was looking for and had not even seen up to that point. It took that foolish act for me to begin to learn to see them - another 'rude awakening" like so many we experience in life. What does that tell you about our way of being in the world? It is an allegory for how we live our lives.


I have a friend who teaches "earth skills". He is a tracker, has written manuals on animal tracking, teaches wilderness skills and "earth philosophy". He introduced me to a series of books by a man named Tom Brown, Jr. My initial reaction was that I had no reason to want to track animals and, although I used to work with wilderness survival therapy programs, today I am much more sedentary and urban than in my adventurous youth. What value then is there for me in these books? The answer is that, for me, they were entertaining and educational illustrations of the value of learning to really "see", to focus on and recognize what is going on all around me. When will we all really begin to "see" what is constantly going on all around us?


What moves us to care about these things? Why should we care, you might ask? As the Native American Spiritual Leader in a prison, I have worked with women who are broken, sometimes massively so. The motivation there is clear - to help them fix what is broken in themselves by seeing the events of their lives differently and to change the way that they react to those circumstances. But there is an old Anishnaabe prayer that says that "of all the living things in the Circle of Life, it is only the two-leggeds that are broken". We all are broken in one way or another, some less or more than others. The Hopi have a prophecy about this world that we live in. They call it "Koyaanisqatsi", a life out of balance. It is a law of physics that systems tend toward stability. If we think of this world and all the life within it as being part of a system, and if we recognize that the two-leggeds are the cause of the instability, imbalance, and disharmony, then we need to realize that, eventually, the system we occupy will certainly eliminate us, the disharmonious element, in the natural tendency of the system to regain stability. Should we care about that? How long do we have? The Hopi say "we are not in the eleventh hour - the Hour is now. Aho! All my relations!