I’ve attended ceremonies where, in the Native American tradition, the four directions are invoked before an event gets underway: a poem of homage to the natural world.
I don’t have a practice that pays respect to the four directions—although I have done a Tibetan yoga exercise called “Bending in the four directions” for decades—but I appreciate the four elements, the four seasons and the four life stages attributed to the four directions in Native American tradition: East (air, Spring, birth); West (earth, autumn, adulthood); South (water, summer, youth); North (fire, winter, old age).
In the past few days, I’ve been reading a book, Keys of Knowledge by Tarthang Tulku, where I encountered another way of looking at our life in those four dimensions:
“In the east is awareness; in the west is consciousness, with its capacity to remind us of the way things are. In the south are the activities of mind: temptations, the exhibition of the sensory fields, the busy-ness of minding, and all kinds of distractions. In the north are the spies who make sure all is proceeding according to plan, as well as the ones who dictate the rules we follow.”
I don’t immediately see much correspondence between the four directions (as attributed to native American tradition) and the four directions (as outlined in a book by a Tibetan Buddhist lama). The former identifies the spectrum of natural and human cycles in terms that relate to our life in the world; the latter is presented as an anatomy of the dynamic of life and suffering. Without trying to reconcile the vocabulary used by these two distinct visions of the human situation, perhaps I can learn something from both.
Awareness (in the East)
It seems I only notice awareness when it is already present. But where does awareness come from? I sense the presence of awareness when it shows me what is happening inside and outside, here and now. Like a wind blowing into my mind from across the sea, I notice its presence when I become aware of something moving in that breeze. In the indigenous view (air, spring, birth–in the east), awareness is celebrated as it shows up in the fresh air of spring, as the season of birth bringing new life into the world.
Consciousness (in the West)
Consciousness needs awareness to be present, in the way that a chick needs its mother bird to be there to feed it. Consciousness recognizes, aspires, and remembers. Without consciousness to catch the waves and store some of the energy they carry, there would be nothing but an endless agitation on the surface of awareness. In the indigenous view (earth, autumn, adulthood–in the west), consciousness brings awareness down to earth, and as adults, the potential of new beginning ripens into autumn’s responsibilities.
Activities, Temptations, Sensations (in the South)
Our lives in the world inevitably lead to us engaging with others, wanting more than we are destined to have, and discovering that we don’t feel completely at home either in our own bodies or in a world into whose midst we have been dropped, like a cuckoo’s egg deposited in a swallow’s nest. But we don’t see any other place for us to live, other than in this body and in this enveloping world. If we are fortunate, we notice possibilities in the interactions between ourselves and others, and start to develop their potential. In the indigenous view (water, summer, youth–in the south), we float along in a world already in full flow, and we begin to notice that others know things that we don’t.
Living under the Regime of Mind (in the North)
Mind is a word we sometimes use to describe the greater whole that underlies our embodied being. In eastern spiritual traditions, everything is considered to be mind, so that our individual mental capacities are viewed as local instances of a coherence and aliveness integral to the entire cosmos. This wider vision of mind is a welcome alternative to the idea that we are subservient to an autocratic regime that has molded us and now curtails our independence. Recognizing our compliance with the dictates of the social regime that has conditioned us, we realize that it us up to us to use the gift of awareness and consciousness and allow what inspires us to guide how we live.
In the indigenous view (fire, winter, elders–in the north), the season when sunlight is on the retreat, death is closer, and the warmth of summer is all but absence, we need understanding and patience to believe that spring will return.
Those of us who are elders, in the sense that our lives are now mostly in the past, may wonder what we can do in this winter of our soul’s journey. As elders, we may wish that we were part of a tradition in which our experience, and the earned perspective that has been tested by life, were sought out by others to guide them as they struggle with the challenges we have already survived. But I don’t think many older men and woman in our society find that their communities want their advice on how to live.
If we have been given a task at this time, now that we have reached the wintertime and are living in the northern snowfields of our lives, perhaps it’s to demonstrate that human beings don’t have to live in the shadow of “the ones who dictate the rules we follow”.
We have little reason to expect the young to turn to us for guidance on how to live their lives. The world is changing too rapidly for us to keep up, let alone guide others as they try to do so. But we can honor what is good in the world. If we live in harmony with water, air, earth and fire; if we know how to live in the four phases of our lives without stumbling before the demands of the regime; if we appreciate the different gifts of the four seasons; then when winter comes, we will be able to see the light that shines across the fields of time. Then, when we see the light shining in another heart, that may be the recognition they needed to hear in the winter of their own soul.