I thought I would take a break from the sermons and instead respond to a query. A query that has presented itself in many forms, my own self-doubt at times and from others trying to gain some insight into how they might avoid some of the pitfalls that accompany the choice to question everything.

In my experiences, I have fallen into every pit and then some, if someone desires this life or already on that path, my consul can only point to the rewards and perils. So, here are some admissions. Get ready to "suck it up" as they say:

- Nobody will ever understand you completely.
- You can only speak for yourself.
- There will always be a major distortion between what you know, what you will be able to communicate, and what people will then comprehend.
 - There is no such thing as perfect trust.
- Life does have no intrinsic meaning.
- Much of my life is directed by things preceding me and therefore out of my control.
- Your mind will always be polluted by public discourse (superego).
- We impact everything, but yet we are often powerless to control.
- Discursive opinion will often not match reality.
- Perspectives and living are ephemeral and temporary.
- There is no perfect truth (save for maybe Math)
- You will always be irrational.
- Your emotions will always interfere with your sense of truth.
- Life is composed of layers of visible and invisible cliché's and story lines
- We are ultimately subject to forces beyond us, natural selection, laws of accelerating returns, etc.
- There is no perfect break from some vaguely deterministic path.
- What ppl tell you or how others view you will inevitably affect you.
- No event or action is completely beneficial.
- You will always be an agent of some evil.
- You will never be beyond reproach.
- You will be the vehicle of stupid actions that are equally as inane as the sins of others
- You will always have bias.
- Outside of science, nobody knows. like politics. etc.
- We will always have to act on incomplete knowledge.
- There is no absolutely good action
- You will never be able to do precisely what you want to do
- There is no true home
- You can never be truly authentic
- There will always be so much more beyond your awareness.
- Not everything is possible
- You will always be part of an existing process
- You can never truly break from the trajectory, maybe nudge it around, but that'll ultimately be part of that trajectory
- Your weaknesses will always be betrayed by your actions at some point
- You will always be in some nature fake
- No event or meal or situation or conversation will be completely satisfactory
- Nothing will every be completely satisfactory
- You will never be completely comfortable
- Something will always be itchy
- The gravity of life will always be subject to potential subjection of risk to utter, stupid, and simple annihilation. Like a car accident.
- You will never have total control
- You won't be able to win them all. Someone will always hate you no matter what.
- There is no perfect art
- There are other lives within you that will carry on their own
- You won't ever be beyond your own embarrassment.
- You will never do the optimal thing
- There is no true external should.
- There will always be a kryptonite.
- You cannot escape your emotions.
- You cannot forget the past.
- Something will always haunt you.
- Nobody is beyond temptation
- Knowing and doing will always be different

This list is the result of the input of several friends. It represents many years of experience of walking off the beaten path and I’m always looking for more. anyone?

There is a great deal of lip-service given to the Native American cultures by the “new age” movement, but little else. Millions of dream catchers hang on walls, and probably an equal number of kachinas on shelves. Little has been done to address the wrongs done to these people, and I believe in these actions, we have hurt our chances to survive.

Who would you pick to teach you to survive with little water and how to grow crops in the conditions projected for much of the world in the not so distant future. My choice would be the Hopi. But instead of a dialogue of heart and mind we continue to pursue policies that seemingly insure their destruction.

Take water, central to the Hopi culture, a majority of there ceremonies are centered around it. They have survived, even thrived (before the white man came) in one of the harshest climates on the planet. You would think that their experiences might have some interest for us, but instead we (Peabody Coal) steals 1.3 billion gallons of water a year from their aquifer per year to transport coal cheaply in order to keep your electric can opener working.

It is a logical question to ask how something so important to the Hopi could, in the time of lawyers and law, negotiated away the life blood of their culture? Well, do you think it might have been the fact that the lawyers provided (pushed on) by the federal government to negotiate for the Hopi, were also on the payroll of Peabody Coal. That little tidbit wasn’t revealed until after the deal, and the company with the support of the courts will not address a new deal or the fact that the coal can be transported without water.

The ancestral wells of the Hopi are drying up, it is projected that they and the aquifer that this culture has depended on for 4000 years will be gone in the year 2011. There seems to me to be a pattern here, the concept of “justice for all” only applies if you don’t have something we want.

According to Hopi prophecy, at the end of the fourth world, the older white brother, Pahana, will return in a true exchange of hearts, as well as knowledge. From a totally unpatronizing perspective, we have got alot to learn from the Hopi and other traditional cultures.

A personal observation, that the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a “ hatred of materiality”, a goal oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature. The spirituality of tribal people is rooted in a deep and unsentimental connection to the Earth, expressed through a careful attentiveness and reverence for particular plants, geographic locations or features, and local differences. This “disconnect” of modern civilization can be traced to the rise of religion, particularly the great monotheistic ones. In my mind we are paying the price for the desire to leave our plight, rather than seeking a harmony with.

If we are graduating from nation-states to a noosperic state, we may find ourselves exploring the kind of nonhierarchical social organization - a “synarchy” based on trust and telepathy - that the Hopi and other aboriginal groups have used for millennia. If a global civilization can organize from our current chaos, it will be founded on cooperation rather than winner take all competition, sufficiency rather than surfeit, communal solidarity rather than individual elitism, reasserting the sacred nature of all earthly life. Those who desire such a world will work to create it.

As the Hopi also say;
"We are the ones we have been waiting for."