"The Essence of All Life"

Lakota Indians

Source: out of copyright - in public domain

When European colonists travelled to America, some assumed that the indigenous American peoples were irreligious heathens, as they didn’t seem to have special sacred places for religious worship, like temples or churches. They didn’t seem to pray or have any concept of a saviour or divine entity who controlled their lives or who required appeasement and worship. This is one of the reasons why the colonists were so keen to convert the natives to Christianity. They saw it as their duty to save the souls of heathens who were destined for hell.

However, those who spent time with the Indians and attempted to understand their culture realised that they had a very strong sense of the sacred — only they didn’t confine it to special buildings or beings. They saw the whole world as a sacred place. In the 19th century, the Christian missionary Reverend Stephen Riggs spent more than 40 years living with the Dakota (or Sioux, as they are also known). He learned their language and even produced a Dakota dictionary and grammar guide. To the Dakota, all nature, as he described it, was pervaded with a spiritual force, which they called taku wakan.

It comprehends all mystery, secret power, and divinity…All life is Wakan; so also is everything which exhibits power, whether in action, as the winds and drifting clouds; or in passive endurance, as the boulder by the wayside. For even the commonest sticks and stones have a spiritual essence which must be reverenced as a manifestation of the all-pervading, mysterious power that fills the universe.¹

Another 19th century observer of the Dakota, Hanford Lennox Gordon, spoke similarly of "the everlasting, all-pervading, invisible Ta-ku Wa-kan — the essence of all life — pervading all nature, animate and inanimate."²

However, this concept of an all-pervading spiritual force wasn’t limited to the Dakota. Many other Native American groups had very similar or identical concepts. For example, the Hopi Indians referred to spirit-force as maasauu, while the Lakota called it wakan-tanka (literally, the "force which moves all things.") In the Northeastern woodlands, the Haudenosaunee called it orenda and the eastern Algonquians called it manitou; and so on. A member of the Pawnee tribe – who referred to spirit-force as tirawa – described it poetically as a force which "is in everything and…moves upon the darkness, the night, and causes her to bring forth the dawn. It is the breath of the new-born dawn."³

Other Concepts of Spirit-Force

It is striking how common these concepts are, not just amongst Native Americans, but amongst indigenous peoples all over the world. To give just a few non-American examples, the Ainu – an indigenous tribal people of Hokkaido island in northern Japan – used the term ramut, while in parts of New Guinea, the term imunu referred to an all-pervading spirit-force. In Africa, the Nuer people called it kwoth, while the Mbuti used the term pepo. The Ufaina Indians of the Amazon Rainforest called it fufaka.

All the above terms refer to an impersonal spiritual force that pervades all space and all objects and beings. This is clear from some of the translations that anthropologists used for the terms. The early German anthropologist, R. Neuhaus translated imunu as "soul stuff," while the British missionary J. H. Holmes referred to it as "universal soul." Holmes described imunu as "the soul of things ... It was intangible, but like air, wind, it could manifest its presence."

These concepts of all-pervading spirit influenced the cultures’ attitudes to nature. To them, natural phenomena were manifestations of spirit, and therefore sacred. As the great 19th century Native American author Black Elk wrote, to the Indians, "every object is wakan, holy, and has a power according to the loftiness of the spiritual reality it reflects." To indigenous peoples, there was no such things as empty spaces or inanimate objects. Everything was alive, and therefore deserving of empathy and respect.

Recapturing Native Spirituality

My contention is that these concepts of spirit were not abstractions but realities. They were not based on belief, but on direct perception. The very fact that the concepts were so similar – if not identical – across so many independent cultures suggests that they were a shared human experience. The concepts referred to a tangible reality that human beings were once naturally capable of perceiving.

I don’t have space here to address the question of why modern humans have apparently lost this awareness of all-pervading spirit. (It is the central question of my book The Fall.⁵) But perhaps it is an awareness that many of us are attempting to recapture, through following paths of spiritual development and practices such as meditation. And, perhaps, it is an awareness that we must recapture, if we are to safeguard our future as a species. Otherwise we will continue recklessly exploiting and abusing the natural world, until our planet is damaged beyond repair.