An excerpt from Mikkal’s forthcoming book “AWAKENING THE SHAMAN WITHIN: Jung and Shamanism in Practice.
C.G. Jung and Mountain Lake (Pueblo)
In 1924 C.G. Jung took a trip to the United States, after spending Christmas in New York, he visited New Orleans, and then headed towards New Mexico. He was more interested in “psychological expeditions” into cultural worlds outside of modern Western civilization. New York was not the place. New Orleans must have shown him some vestiges of it, but meeting the medicine man and revered ritual elder of the Taos Pueblo, Mountain Lake, offered him the kind of expedition he was seeking. Jung was in fact questing for a point of view on his own civilization and culture. He wanted to know how other cultures and their medicine people viewed his own civilization. He would find it in Taos, and a year later in East Africa amongst the Elgonyi. I know from my own experiences in S. Africa, central Mexican villages, and the Peruvian Amazon just what an education it can be. Mark Twain suggested that such travelling was a great way to get past one’s own prejudices and fears. Jung knew there was something wrong in the soul of Western civilization, and he felt indigenous people could help him see what it is more clearly.
Mountain Lake, whose birth name was Ochwiay Biano, welcomed Jung and they quickly formed a long-standing bond. In the course of their conversations, he taught Jung to see Western civilization afresh. In one of their great talks, Mountain Lake took Jung up several ladders, five stories high to a roof top on one of the pueblos. From that vantage point Jung saw the great plateaus stretching on the horizon between volcanos on the distant horizons. A blue sky and a blazing sun opened out above, and Jung noticed the people climbing up and down ladders, sitting wrapped in their Pendleton blankets, and facing the sun. Jung suspected this had religious meaning, and so he asked Mountain Lake about it. Mountain Lake responded by pointing to the sky and speaking slowly, “Is not He who moves there, our Father? Nothing can be without the sun.” Mountain Lake became silent for a spell and seemed to be looking within. Jung pondered these few words charged with conviction, in silence. It is typical of North American elders to not be too wordy, but speaking from within, to ponder and formulate their words mindfully, and to the sharp-edged point. In the silence Jung connected the dots. He had read up on Cherokee mythology (sacred histories as they are called), and knew about the union of Grand Father Sky, and Grand Mother Earth, an idea that runs throughout the Amerindian tribes of the North. He could see how the sun is vital to life on the planet, and truly worthy of being regarded as a divine source of life. So Jung said to Mountain Lake, “Everyone can see you speak the truth.”
Jung then asked why he could not join in the Turtle Dance he had read about, and Mountain Lake explained that these ceremonies were for his people, and that the waichus (white man) had not been friendly, and had taken away forty thousand acres of the ceremonial lands where the Pueblo elders initiate their youth. Mountain Lake explained to Jung that the old ancestral ways of the people are sacred. He told Jung that they live every moment and everyday of their lives in service of father sun. He said they do it for all peoples of the earth, human and non-human, and if they did not do so, within ten years the sun would no longer rise, the earth would freeze, and life on it die out. Jung admired them for the beautiful way of life that linked them to something bigger than themselves, to other species, and to the cosmos and what they viewed as its divine source. Jung saw this as a real psychological and spiritual advantage and he mused on how men like Mountain Lake, who were still living in an initiatory and mythological tradition had a fundamental understanding of their place in the cosmos, and of their role on the earth which the “white man” lacked.
One of the reasons for Jung’s indigenous “psychological expeditions,” was to learn from people who were still living initiatory traditions. Initiation being a process of transformation from one state to another was an archetype that Jung associated with the individuation process, and the Native American version of this is walking a heart-open and earth-honoring path. As he reflected on this he came to believe the solution was not for the white man to adopt Native American or any other indigenous culture, but for each culture to find its own solutions. Jung had already been studying mythology and noticed the role of the hero, and published on the topic which would later inspire Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist and formulator of the journey of the hero. In time Jung would see that the myth and ritual initiatory themes of Native American and African tribal culture matched the archetypal structure of ancient European myth and folk-lore, encoding the long-forgotten wisdom. He would conclude that the white man must return to these deep archetypal sources. From those deep sources perhaps it would be possible to spin a new more soulful and life-honoring myth to live by. But at this point in his dialogues with Mountain Lake, he became unsettled by the picture of the white man coming from Mountain Lake. Not denying it, but sensing the uncomfortable truth that was implied.
Thinking about the suffering the white man has been perpetrating on the Pueblo and other indigenous American tribes, Jung asked Mountain Lake to speak more about this. He told Jung that the white’s were always hungry, always needy and wanting something, without really knowing what it was they really want. He said, “We think they are mad.” Jung then asked him why he thought the white man was this way. Mountain Lake again looked inward and again slowly, spoke five words, “They think with the head.” Jung replied, “Why of course, what do you think with?” Mountain Lake silently gestured, gathering his fingers into the shape of the pendulum and touched the center of his chest, and while holding his fingers there, spoke three slowly articulated but revolutionary words: “We think here.” Those words hit Jung in a very vulnerable sport, like a bolt of lightning. He fell into silent musing on an entire pageantry of the bloody advance of Western civilization. He saw the Roman legions destroying and suppressing the ancient Germans and Celts with its golden claws. He saw Christianity being imposed by the sword and the spilling of blood. He saw the Conquistadors ravishing the Central and South Americas and bringing devastating diseases, murder, and thievery. He saw the white missionaries coming in and imposing their own mythologies on the indigenous peoples in sheer shadow foolishness and ignorance of the integrity they were destroying. He saw he had gotten from Mountain Lake the exact diagnosis he was seeking. He saw that Western civilization had lot its soul when it lost its heart. He saw the terrible imbalance in which the masculine principle suppressed and violated the feminine, leading to an ongoing source of sickness and madness that could only be cured by a soul recovery on a very wide scale.
Jung knew the direction lie in recovering of the heart and our capacity to think with the heart. He knew we needed a new mythology to live by, and rites of initiation if we were to find our own way of individuating, the equivalent of the Native American heart path. He knew all of this must arise in our own interior cores, out of our own depths, and not be merely taken from foreign soil. The restoration of the heart and our ability to think with it, rather than suppress it, would be an underlying theme as he worked out his own formal system of depth psychology, and in his own language and in a terminology and with practices that would speak to his time and place in history.
These words about living from the heart are very touching to me!
I may have a few moments within the heart. Yet, by and large, I live via my thoughts and conditioning from the mind.
So, for me, these words bring hope. A deep hope that within the heart lies a treasure to be discovered that leads to a truly authetic life. And through this journey, maybe I can eventually be a living invitation for others to do the same.
So, where does one begin this journey?