Читать книгу The Redemption of Black Elk: An Ancient Path to Inner Strength Following the Footprints of the Lakota Holy Man - Linda L. Stampoulos - Страница 11

Find your Sacred Place

To live a full life one must appreciate the mysterious forces that not only surround us but run through us. Call it what you will: spirit, energy, power, consciousness, Chi, the idea is the same: this “life force” is in every living thing, animal and plant. One key to a full and balanced life is understanding how to manage and maximize this force. A person need not recognize the FULL nature of such a life source, indeed many people live their entire lives on a “hit and miss” approach, not really knowing or grasping its full potential.

To connect to such a force it would seem of primary importance that a person consciously put himself in a setting conducive to apprehending the experience.

Joseph Campbell felt it was absolutely necessary that a person make time and take time to be completely alone, separated from the daily grind of endless demands, and enter a sacred place. A sacred place, according to Joseph Campbell, is an absolute necessity for anybody today. He uses this term to describe a special place, a certain time of day that you can visit to remove yourself from the world around you. When you are there, you don’t know what’s in the newspapers, you don’t concern yourself with your finances or the other thoughts that can invade your peacefulness. This is a place of creative incubation, he states, a place where you can experience and bring forth what you are or what you might be.

It can be as simple as listening to your favorite music, reading the book you’ve always wanted, or even closing your eyes and shutting out the noise of the world. At first nothing happens, but he assures us, if you have a sacred place and learn to use it, something will happen. You will begin to get the “thou” feeling of life.

The first step on our journey of inner exploration is to provide ourselves with a setting, an actual location from which we can begin. If we follow Black Elk’s footprints, we will see that he often would travel out into the Plains, alone, to think and be at one with himself. His whole world was free and peaceful, with little or no distractions. How different from our world.

Set the alarm, get ready for work, do the shopping, balance the check book, the demands of our lives go on and on. There is ALWAYS something required of us to do. More often we get so involved in our everyday activities that we hardly know where we are. The claims of the environment can be so great, most of our actions are economically or socially determined and so very demanding. These things do not come out of our life, they penetrate into it.

Selection of one’s sacred place varies from person to person. In general it’s best if it is outdoors, close to a natural setting. Nature provides subliminal triggers, ancient triggers, firing energy into memory cells gone dormant. These “sparks” will ignite a nostalgic mood, familiar yet unfamiliar, imprinted wiring that will lend itself to deeper thought or insight.

The individual begins his meditation with a certain state of mind, a level of awareness which will eventually lead itself to its own “energy” source. Joseph Campbell referred to this as a level of consciousness, something beyond awareness. It is a connection to a greater consciousness beyond that of one’s own and shared by all. It will be as strong and as deep as you allow yourself to move into it. Everyone has the capacity to move from their everyday happenings into this other place, a place where your mind and body want to go. No one can tell you where your serenity is, everyone must learn to recognize it on their own. But when you even have a small recognition of where it lies, “grab it” says Campbell, and you will put yourself on a track that has been there waiting for you all the time.

Meditation can serve the same function. It places individual awareness on a higher platform allowing one to “listen to the body’s own spirituality and heart life.” This life song is inside each of us. “The world is full of people,” Campbell goes on, “who have stopped listening to themselves.” They go with society’s demands and live a life that their inner voice is not interested in at all.

And so the journey along the ancient path begins: finding a sacred place and igniting the first beacon. The following Meditative Reading introduces Black Elk as he talks about the experiences of his early years living in his “sacred place” on the Great Plains.