From: momotaro@cwis.unomaha.edu (Bryan Stack)
Subject: Re: Indian & European Spirituality
Organization: University of Nebraska at Omaha
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1992 21:40:46 GMT

beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!anchor.esd.sgi.com!lyn (Lyn Dearborn) writes:

>I don't think I can be classified as a traditional native american 
spiritualist, nor do I have much hope of "finding" one,< 

I believe you have made a very important point here.  
Those people whose spirituality grows out of the tradition of 
pre-conquest native beliefs and practices are no more
traditional Native American spiritualists than devotees of Roman
Catholoicism, Greek Orthodoxy, or Armenian or Coptic Christianity are
traditional Christian spiritualists.  We live here and now, in
conditions far removed from those of our ancestors.  We should learn
from their ways, but we cannot live the way they did even if we want
to. The only exceptions to this are those people who have maintained 
a cultural distance from the modern world, such as the Hopi 
traditionalists, and they are few, far between, and hard to find 
(that's what helps them preserve what they have). 

> . . . I find myself unable to understand 75% of some of the
messages ....and here I am admitting I don't understand what is meant bY
>>putting it more in the mystical tradition of something like Christian
Gnosticism.<<  or  >>on an experiential understanding of deity than on 
codified belief<<  or  >>There can be no empowering change without a certain 
sort of spiritual experience, and codifying allows practical objective 
evaluation in the material world. The danger is that codifying alone can be 
empty and hypocritical if it essentially denies the reality of the spiritual
experience by refusing it.<<  or maybe the problem is that I didn't study 
religion or philosophy to any great depth.... but..... I find myself 
intimidated by messages like this and unable to get from them the value they 
contain.  I do not mean this to be disrespectful to those writers represented 
above (whom I like/respect as individuals), BUT if there are many traditional 
Native Americans reading this "stuff", I hope they don't feel "inferior" just 
because they might not be able to understand the content .... or maybe the 
problem is only me and my inability to read between the "big words" and dense 
lines. My only concern is that Indian kids, new to the net, might also feel 
intimidated and think they aren't qualified to participate .... in the mean 
time, I'll hunt down my BIG dictionary.<

Having completed a Master's degree, I have learned to slog through such
"academese", but never to enjoy it.  How refreshing it is to find an
expression of complex thought in as direct and simple language as
possible.  Sometimes big words and dense sentences are really in order,
there being no more precise way to express a concept.  But often it is
either habit, developed in college because they always make you write
that way if you want a good grade; or pretentiousness, putting on a show
of being educated, or hiding the impreciseness of your thinking behind
difficult language.  I am not referring to anyone's writing in
particular here, just making general observations.

After all, these statements above which you (and I) have difficulty with
all boil down to the idea that spirituality must be lived and not just
talked about if it is to be more than so much hot air.  But you can't
get your dissertation approved if you say THAT . . . after all, that
would undermine the foundations of the halls of academe.  But perhaps
more about that at another time, depending on how well I weather the
response to this.  Bryan

>>>====================>
   Bryan Stack 
   Omaha, Nebraska, USA
   momotaro@cwis.unomaha.edu

Newsgroups: alt.non.sequitur,alt.destroy.the.earth,alt.cascade