Step 13: and the sacred?

We have seen that Indigenous ways of being in the world include mutually respectful, mutually responsive relationships between humans and non-humans. We have seen that although the contemporary West used to have relationships like this, it has tended no longer to have them since Descartes’ thinking became central to Western cultures.

It thus stands to reason that Indigenous philosophers have much to teach us when it comes to attitudes helpful in regenerating relations with the non-human world. They have their own gaps in their engagement in these relationships, and that’s our fault, as it is colonialism that caused this disruption. The resulting gaps aren’t 500-year ones, though, the way that European ones are. That means it is safe to say an Indigenous philosopher is likely to be better at understanding the relationships we are looking for than a Western one. And if “we” want to learn from and with “them”, then this will involve becoming open to the idea of the sacred being present right here in this world rather than in the next one, and ready to be met right here in our relationships with the material components of the nature we are part of.

Let’s recap some old ideas that we are going to need in a minute.

—> Can you say in your own words what Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews were?

—> Can you say why we can’t learn from and with them and ignore the sacred in the material?

The next couple of steps are going to look at whether, maybe, there are some existing ways in which we in the contemporary West sometimes already interact with the sacred in the material now, even though we may not be thinking about it that way at the moment. If there are starting points like this, maybe we can build on them.

Then, later on, the final steps are going to look at some possible future scenarios.

But first, what do we actually mean when we use the term “sacred”?!

This is going to be tricky, because if one philosophy thinks of “the sacred” as being in the next world and another philosophy thinks of it as being in this one, then the term can’t mean the same thing in the two languages involved. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin points out that this also applies to the term “spirit”, for the same reason.

—> Step 5 made a similar point about PRATEC’s reference to “runa, huaca and sallqa”. Can you remember what that was all about?

—> Relatedly, right at the beginning, we had a look at two different paradigms’ takes on what a “person” is. Can you remember the ins and outs of that?

If the term “sacred” doesn’t mean the same thing in different languages, then we can’t come up with one universally applicable definition of what the sacred is. At first glance, this looks like a new, unexpected difficulty. At second glance, though, from what we have seen so far, it can’t help but make perfect sense: we already know, from contemporary Western science, from Indigenous worldviews, and from Spinoza, that we can’t expect to understand the network of relationships in this world fully anyway. Once it is this network that we now think of as being imbued with sacredness, then of course we can’t expect to understand sacredness fully, either!

Anne Waters explains that our maturing in relationship can be sacred, and I think this is a succinct way of talking about Leroy Little Bear’s above ideas. If it is mostly in the manifesting that we encounter the spiritual, and if it is our relationships which are co-creative (in other words, which interact with the manifesting!), then, as Vine Deloria’s and Brian Burkhart’s ideas suggested in step 10, maybe we can think about the sacred as having something to do with that sweet spot in a multi-species jazz band where the individual player transforms the harmonies of the band and the harmonies of the band in turn buoy the individual player’s play.

So how close to being able to relate to that are we in the West at the moment?

In one way, it looks as if we might be quite close. William James, for example, agrees with Spinoza that because we can’t understand the sacred entirely, the way we can relate to it is above all about giving up our aspirations to unilateral control: we can’t just use our conscious rationality and expect that to cover everything that there is; we are going to need openness to a richer conception of rationality that allows those parts of us which are not part of our conscious mind to enter into the equation, as well, and to connect with the world around us.

William James’s work has even been called a pathway to shamanism by some!

—> Can you remember where to go for exact references? Step 1 and step 2 will tell you where to find them.

That’s not quite true, though, not least because William James’s work doesn’t treat non-humans as equal partners in relationship, and it doesn’t refer to non-humans as potentially wise beings who just don’t happen to share a spoken language with us. James shows that he appreciates non-human nature, but not in the sense of their having full membership of the community. (Some of John Dewey’s ideas in step 12 - the “doings and undergoings” - were further developments of William James’s thought. Still, even though Dewey clearly appreciates non-human nature too, he, too, stops short of treating non-humans as equal partners in co-creative, inter-species kinship in his work.)

McPherson and Rabb, on the other hand, cite an interview with an Indigenous architect who went on a vision quest and came back to share that the most important thing he learnt was to connect with non-human nature as its member, not as its coordinator. He described receiving help from a variety of plants, and he said it taught him to be less arrogant as a human being.

From all of the above, three things are starting to fall into place now: firstly, we’ve got even more reason now to stop expecting to exercise unilateral control than we did at the halfway house of step 8. If interaction with the sacred is somehow connected to our maturing in relationship, then unilateral control won’t help us with that. Secondly, we may be closer than we think to interacting with the sacred, in all those relationships where we don’t exercise unilateral control, and where we instead allow the relationships to become truly co-creative. Thirdly, any existing relationships where we are close, in the contemporary West, are probably more likely to be with other humans than with non-humans, because we don’t seem to habitually think of non-humans as eligible for this type of relationship.

Let’s see how this plays out in some case studies.