The Sacred Principle Project

The story of the forbidden fruit is known far beyond Sunday church sermons. Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit, has been immortalised in art and music, referenced in literature, and used as a trope in mass media and mainstream culture in the Western Christian world that I know -- and surely far beyond that. What I have learned as an adult of the historic significance of this story and the profound impact it has had on the psyche shine a different light on the scenes and the dramatic "moral" of the story taught to me as a child.  There are several ways to interpret the story that can help us to re-position the messages in our collective understanding: the literal meaning, taken as the word of God and religious doctrine; the symbolic meaning of the images; and the historic-mythological meaning of what the story represents in the evolution of human consciousness.           *  Interpretation 1: L...

When did we split from the sacred? By "we" I mean the "Western", White, Anglo-Saxon, Judeo-Christian peoples. My people, my ancestry.  In my time living close to and learning about Indigenous traditions especially in the Andes of Peru, I came to wonder: where and when was my lineage Indigenous? We are all from somewhere originally, we all were native to someplace at sometime, right? So when did my family lose our Indigeneity?  At first I thought, it was when we left the land, that the physical settling on one piece of land and staying in one place generation after generation was the characteristic of Indigeneity. Which I do not have as my ancestors left their homelands in the 1600s and early 1900s, I grew up as a settler/colonist/invader on Native American lands, and I have moved to several countries none of which match my native ethnic heritage. But I came to realize that it is not about place itself, it is about mentality. Our relationship to the place. And that ...

Imagine a field.  You are standing in the middle of a field.  All around you are stalks of corn. Deep green, eye-high plants in every direction. Soft tassles hang from ears of corn on each plant, swishing gently in the wind. The ground beneath you is hard, brown-grey. The rise and fall of the rows are like waves, up and down, up and down.  Notable is what you do not see: no bugs, no birds, no weeds. Just stalk after stalk of corn, so dense you can hardly walk through.  A tractor planted this corn. Each seed placed in the dirt was identical, property of a multinational corporation and modified genetically. Herbicide and fertilizer is sprayed routinely along the rows.  This corn will be harvested by machines. It will be processed and packed by machines. It will be turned into feed for factory-farmed animals or high-fructose corn syrup for junk food. It will not nourish. It will not be stored for seed for future plantings, because each seed includes a "terminator ...

My thought exploration is posited on The Sacred Principle - the tenet of respecting and revering all of nature and creation as sacred as a starting point.  But I have recently been engaged in conversations and reading that are pulling me to explore sacred principles -- those values and beliefs of Indigenous communities and world religions that have universal, timeless wisdom.  So here is a collection of some of those sets of beliefs and value systems that speak to me and feel interconnected. Included here without assigning priority, judgement or analysis.   Andean cosmovision In the Andes, the Inca had three laws: Ama sua. Ama llulla. Ama quella. Do not steal, Do not lie, Do not be lazy. Of course the cosmovision is much more complex, with the concepts of ayni (reciprocity) as a Golden Rule and ayllu (community) as an organizing principle. A deeply held belief of Andean people is that we are all children of Pachamama, Mother Nature, and owe her our deep respect and...

 I guess I have been dancing around this one for awhile, without even knowing.  And my blogs and thoughts so far, while they surely have been influenced by authors, speakers, conversations and podcasts, have been my own journey. Now I see (of course!) I am not the first and I am not alone.  I throw myself head first into Spiritual Ecology .  Perhaps all I have said and all I have to say has already been said better than I could ever say. And yet I must document the resonance I feel with spiritual ecology. I feel found. Here it is: "Surely we need to recognize that there is a direct relationship between our outer, physical, ecological predicament and our forgetfulness of the sacred in creation." wrote Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in 2010 in his article about spirituality as the solution to the climate crisis. " We cannot redeem our physical environment without restoring our relationship to the sacred." YES.  Remember. Redeem. Restore. Relationship.   Of cou...

This is a thought experiment. A documentation of an exploration. A map, drawn as each step is taken, destination unknown. Welcome. The idea is simple, and radical.  What would the world be like if our starting point was that the Earth and all of Creation are sacred? Sacred. Worthy of respect. Holy. Divine. Regarded with reverence. Secured and immune from violence and violation.  This is not a new idea. In fact, it is the oldest idea. And yet, we, as humanity, have generally lost this relationship in modern times. So the proposal is, to posit sacredness as central to our relationships again.  Principle. Fundamental. Primary. Value.  The foundation, guiding tenet, and central axis on which our behavior, decisions and policies be based, recognize the sacredness of all living things.  Beautiful rendition of the sacred cycles and dance of life, with neolithic influence. Artist unknown.   How to apply this? But first, why? It is unnecessary to detail all the ail...