In many world culture and their cosmologies, there exists the idea of the axis mundi, a certain something that represents the center of the world. In shamanic cultures, the axis mundi often turns up as a tree or a mountain.
Yggdrasil, the "World Ash Tree" or the tree where Odin found his enlightenment is one such symbolization. The concept of the axis mundi seems to be common and relatively universal. When I began doing shamanism, I didn't start from a tree to go to the Lower or Upper worlds as many do, but in my personal cosmology there are tree roots in the ceiling of the Lower World, and my Upper World teachers live in the branches of an enormous tree house. Years later when I found out about the universality of the tree/mountain depiction, I had to laugh at this. My starting point is a mountain that lives in Colorado.
I remember an electrifying lecture by one of my shamanic teachers in which he stated that one of the functions of calling the directions and opening sacred space in that manner is to reaffirm that while we do shamanism, we stand at the axis mundi, the center of the world. We literally are the center point of the world. Of course, the universe is infinite, so therefore we all stand at the center of the world. All the time.
While reading about Ho'oponopono the other day and watching YouTube interviews with Dr. Hew Len Ihaleakala, it came home with gravity that also in this teaching, we are the center of the world. In fact, Ho'oponopono takes it one step further into a very shamanic concept: we are the world - Dr. Ihaleakala maintains that everything exists inside us; it is not "out there". And that that is exactly how and why Ho'oponopono works. He asks us to act as though we are 100% responsible for everything that has manifested in our existence: the war in Iraq, pollution, elections, poverty, teen suicide ... everything.
When I began really thinking about this and taking his teaching and practice to heart, the enormity of it was staggering. I know that everything is alive, aware, communicative, responds and changes, and I know that all things are manifestations of Creator, of whatever you call Divinity, the 10,000 Things. And yet I cling to the idea that "I" am somehow separate from it all, that there truly is differentiation.
This idea was gently prised open two days ago when I and my partner, both 600 miles apart at the moment both did some journey work for his sister, another 2,000 miles away. Both of us had the same difficulties getting started with the work, and our difficulties manifested in an identical way. After just having read the Ho'oponopono stuff and after comparing notes with both Honeybear and with his sister, Firecracker and getting identical stories, I began to have the sneaking suspicion of a huge idea: that I was the situation in its entirety. Well, that and coupled with the reading of a Terry Pratchett book, whose body of humorous, brilliant fiction is chock full of this idea anyway.
So I began cautiously asking myself the obvious questions: are my journeys depictions (implying a separation) of what is going on in the "real" world? Or are my journeys the "real" world? Up until this year I had operated on the model that my journeys showed me stuff, and that I had to do something to "fix" a problem. After taking a truly transformational shamanic course back in March of this year, I began to see that sometimes the change comes from inside and that one doesn't have to do anything in the external world.
There is a story about a village that hadn't had rain in so long that the crops and thus their lives were endangered. They called for a very well-known Taoist monk to help them. He arrived and said, "let me be alone in a hut, all by myself. Leave food outside the door." And so they did. Three days later it began to rain again, and the monk emerged. The villagers asked him, "what did you do to make it begin to rain again?" His reply is telling: "When I arrived, I noticed that I was not in balance with myself. I spent three days regaining balance. The rain is the proof."
Change yourself, change the world.
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