Yes, cousins, I do owe you an explanation. You keep asking me about my "religious beliefs"- I do have principles that inform how I see and experience my world and my life. You can call them "beliefs", but I call them principles or just perspectives, and I understand them to be organic- understandings that are drawn from many living sources. I don't really get them from a book or a well-worn creed. You can call these principles "religious", but they do not accord well with what you normally mean when you say "religious". I am not offended by the word; I just don't find it adequate. Maybe I just don't have "religious beliefs" in the usual sense. I have perspectives that help me to experience the sacred in a satisfactory way- a way that helps me to discover and sustain my path to my destiny or purpose for living.
I take the time to add a certain element of ritual drama to my perspectives, to formalize those perspectives into ceremony, for the positive impact that has on me and on those with me- all of my relations in this world and beyond it. But again, my ceremonies do not serve to simply repeat what I've already done many times; they serve to express, in the moments that they happen, a feeling or an experience that I am having- though in an outward manner, a manner that can be more easily shared, and which fulfills a deeper and more mysterious need in me.
How I act matters to this world and to the unseen world, too- ceremony and religious practice is a consequence of that. What I do at any time can become a ceremony or a prayer.
I hate to sound like I'm being overly complex or splitting hairs, but language is powerful. It shapes how we experience everything, and I want you to experience me more clearly. For you, there are religious buildings and occasions and objects, apart from "secular" ones. For me, the sacred power permeates everything, so that all things can be said or understood to have a religious meaning or presence. That's how I see it.
A World-Lodge with Five Pillars
I have five pillars or principles that I take for my guidance. Again, they are perspectives, multi-layered perspectives that reflect, on some level, how the most ancient people from all over our world understood things. There is a good deal of sacredness tied up in these five perspective-families for me, these principles. The words themselves are not sacred, but the experience of the world that you consciously find if you internalize these principles is very sacred.
The first principle is from the lodge of relations: it is the principle of animism. It shows us that "personhood" extends far beyond just human beings with brains and opposable thumbs. Personhood is shared by many other beings, and we are bound to them all in a sacred relationship. The second is from the lodge of power; it is the principle of form and power. Where the scientists say that everything is "energy", I go one-step further and say that all is "power"- just as many of the ancients did. The nature of that power, and how we all share in it, is the domain of principle two.
The third principle is from the sacred living lodge- the principle of interaction. It helps me to live according to the rightful principles of inter-related life, those ways of behaving which maximize my own personal power and my successful dealings with people and with non-human persons. The fourth principle is from the four wind lodges, the principle of the life-journey. This principle helps me to see life from the perspective of a journey, with four great stages, related to the directions and winds of this world. It helps me to put my life in a sacred perspective and find wisdom.
The last principle- from the vision lodge- is the guidance principle. It helps me to understand how to find my place in life- how to seek guidance from the great powers that exist, and why seeking it is so sacred and important. I know these things sound strange to you, but they have their own consistent and even beautiful grace- and they have informed the vast majority of human lives, in some form, since the dawn of time. They have brought me peace.
I will share a more detailed explanation of these five principles with you now. When I am finished, I hope you will appreciate my way of seeing better, just as you have helped me to appreciate yours.
