Indigenous

Indigenous spiritual traditions represent humanity's oldest continuous wisdom, knowledge accumulated over tens of thousands of years of intimate relationship between human communities and the living world they inhabit. They are not a single tradition but countless distinct traditions, each rooted in specific places, languages, and relationships.

What these traditions tend to share, and what makes them so significant for the perennial conversation, is a vision of radical interconnection. The world is not a collection of separate objects but a web of relations in which all things are kin. The Lakota phrase Mitakuye Oyasin, All my relations, is not a sentiment but an ontological claim: the rocks, the rivers, the animals, the plants, the stars are all relatives, all expressions of one underlying web of life.

This vision is Indra's Net in experiential rather than philosophical form. It is what Shinto calls the Kami in all things. It is what the Gospel of Thomas points at when Jesus says the Kingdom is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it. Indigenous traditions have maintained this perception continuously, without the interruption of institutional religion's tendency to relocate the sacred to another realm.

Black Elk's great vision, the center is everywhere, may be the most succinct statement of the perennial philosophy in any tradition. Not the center is in Rome, or Jerusalem, or Benares. The center is wherever a conscious being stands and opens their eyes to the whole.