Dangerous Magic 5: Horse Magic, Horse Medicine, Horse Mystery

Dangerous Magic 5: Horse Magic, Horse Medicine, Horse Mystery

n. patedakis

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of Mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In this episode, we continue our contemplation of magic from the wisdom, love, and beauty archives.

Today we consider the magic of the horse. 

We should acknowledge at the outset that this contemplation might be most helpful for those who don’t have too much invested in horses. If you think to yourself, “Well, I’m sure horses are great, but I’m not super into them,” that’s actually helpful. Because people who have horses in their life, or feel any deep connection with them, can experience a lot more reactivity to philosophical contemplation about something they feel so invested in. 

We’re going to enter the territory of dangerous wisdom, and we’re trying to ask:  

How do we get close to an honest openness to the potential magic of horses? And what does it even mean? 

Either, we don’t have much to do with them, and then we wonder, “Well what do they have to do with me, I don’t have anything to do with them?”—or, if we do have a lot of obvious or overt connection with horses, then it’s more obviously charged. 

In either case, if we’ve made some kind of commitment to go to the places that scare us, to find the edge of our practice and then continue, that’s where we want to come from. 

But fair warning to horse people: We enter the territory of dangerous wisdom here, and all of us will have to walk carefully. It’s dangerous wisdom for all of us. And we’ll begin to see why in this contemplation, even though we’ll have to think much more about horses. There’s a lot of potential, and we may have to start with a pretty broad view. 

Something came to mind when I was thinking about the magic of horses and how to begin our inquiry. I remembered carrying a strange case of spiritual common law. 

Spiritual common law teaches us how to meditate—when we work with these cases . . . it’s not that we meditate on a case of spiritual common law in the manner of concentrating on an object, but that by caring for the question of spiritual common law, holding it tenderly but precisely in the heart, like a candle in our own karmic wind, our karmic wind stops all by itself, and we realize the mind of meditation. 

The strange case I carried was the question of why Nietzsche wept—the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. 

Nietzsche was not a sage, but he wanted to be a philosopher—not a professor of philosophy—he wanted to enter the heart of wonder, and really see the true nature of self and reality. He wanted to be a Western Buddha. He knew about Buddha, and the forensic scholars have showed that he read, at least twice, one of the only books about Buddhist philosophy available at that time. 

And he desperately wanted a non-dualistic philosophy, but he couldn’t really arrive at one—in part because he didn’t have access to any good translations of nondualistic philosophies that other cultures had developed, and he didn’t have the concepts and practices that other cultures had developed and specialized in, practices that could carry him to the most profound insights he sought. 

But he did have a lot of good insights. He had a brilliant mind and a courageous soul. 

His body was wracked with illness, and few people could produce so many works of brilliance under the conditions of illness and relative material lack that Nietzsche experienced. For any of us who might create excuses for why we don’t write our music, sing our song, make our works of art, or follow our spiritual path, Nietzsche stands as a humbling and also an inspiring example. 

He became an extraordinarily sensitive soul. He could sense storms days before they arrived. He was sensitive to sounds, sights, smells. Interesting person. 

He offered skillful and incisive critique of the dominant culture. He knew the roots of the culture well. And he was also a skillful psychologist as far as western [dominant culture] psychologists go. He was the first great psychologist of the modern west, and had a major impact on Freud, Jung, Adler, and other psychologists. 

Nietzsche wrote some incredibly insightful things. Also some remarkably stupid things. Some of those stupid things were about women. 

But his insights far outweigh his stupidities. As a critic of the dominant culture, he stands out. If we want to reflect on the whole of our culture and our own psyche, he’s a good companion. If we want to revitalize the dominant culture, he has some insights that we might want to sit with. And what I sat with was the image of his breakdown . . . 

If you don’t know much about Nietzsche, one thing to know is that he wrote about the Ubermensch, a kind of Oversoul. And this image came to him as a sort of vision. He was in the mountains, and had this ecstatic vision. 

The Ubermensch is like superman, in being heroic and essentially invulnerable. But the invulnerability of the ubermensch doesn’t come from being bulletproof. 

The ubermensch or Oversoul isn’t from another planet. They’re from here—rooted in the Earth. They have vulnerable flesh. They can feel, they have sensitivity. 

But they have arrived at spiritual wholeness, and so nothing can break them. 

Nietzsche sought this wholeness, this intimacy with life. And he struggled to fully realize it. And his body hurt, and he wrote brilliant works—but he had to publish them himself. And when he published them, no one would buy them. 

Imagine what that’s like: You know you’re doing good work, and nobody’s interested. And you know you’re critiquing your own culture in a way that matters, in a way that people could benefit from. And nobody will listen. 

And he kept at it, day after day, seeking philosophical realization, and struggling and suffering, seeing the insanity of the culture. 

He went outside one day, and he saw a horse being beaten 

And he ran to her 

It was a mare 

And he threw his arms around her, shielding her from this flogging, and he wept 

He just broke down 

And he never came back, mentally speaking. 

And for a time, I kept wondering about this. It was a touchstone for many years, and then I just carried it deliberately. 

And like any other kind of satori or kensho or spiritual breakthrough, something shifted, something shattered, and something breathtaking emerged, and I wonderstood that moment so fully. 

I don’t want to defile it with words, but the resonance of the horse, and of her being a mare, and of this particular situation creating the final spiritual emergency for Nietzsche—from which he couldn’t recover because he lacked the resources—felt so powerful. 

The simple story we may like to tell is that he was sick and he went crazy. But it’s too synchronistic for that, and if we know the work of Stan and Christina Grof, we know about spiritual emergency. And if we have studied the indigenous traditions we know about spiritual emergencies. 

We know that a shaman or sage can go through this sort of spiritual crisis, which can take on elements of illness too. 

And we know that when the Tibetan masters came to Turtle Island and held their first intensive meditation retreats, people ended up in the psych ward. The teachers began to realize the western psyche has real problems, things other cultures had never seen before. 

Jung recognized this too. That’s why he wrote that yoga and zen and not appropriate for westerners. 

And teachers from other cultures began to see things in us that they had never seen in their own cultures. 

The anthropologist Richard Sorenson wrote about this too—how some indigenous people, when shown photographs of anger from the dominant culture, they couldn’t contextualize it. They knew anger, of course, but certain photographs of angry people from the dominant culture left them shocked and disturbed, as if something was profoundly wrong. 

And if you had showed that same photo to a person from the dominant culture, they would simply register it as anger. But the indigenous people registered it as something shocking. 

The way we in the dominant culture can get angry, depressed, anxious … the way we can hate ourselves, harm ourselves, 

the strange sensitivities and fragilities of the psyche of the dominant culture . . . 

Of course, we all have a soul that cannot be defiled or broken. 

And yet we can experience certain kinds of traumas that are foreign to other cultural contexts, and these traumas can shake us in ways that aren’t necessarily normal in other cultures. 

And some egos, when taken to the edge of spiritual realization, create a breakdown in the soul. The Grofs called that spiritual emergency: 

It’s an emergence that wants to happen, and there is an urgency or crisis edge to it. It will either go downhill or we’ll get through it—we might navigate it . . . we might heal, and arrive at a greater wholeness. 

And Nietzsche didn’t have the resources for that. Most people in the dominant culture still don’t have them. LoveWisdom doesn’t thrive here. It’s not an ecology of realization for spiritual and ecological realities. 

Maybe it’s too bad that Nietzsche got enough Buddhist philosophy to want to become a western Buddha—and he got such a bad sense of it that he thought Buddha was pessimistic. 

Buddhist philosophy is profoundly positive, and not at all pessimistic. However, Buddha is honest, and his honesty can scare us. He’s like a physician who tells us plainly that we have a serious, life-threatening illness—and he also provides a path to healing. 

If we listen only to the diagnosis, and we think of the diagnosis as a judgment or opinion about us in some personal way, we may mistakenly react to it and say the doctor is a pessimist. 

But a diagnosis isn’t personal, and isn’t a matter of pessimism or optimism. And if the doctor tells us we can heal, then we may dislike the medicine, but we at least know we can take it and recover. 

All of this may seem a strange start, but it really will help if we can hold this image in mind. Let it rest in the heart—this image of Nietzsche’s breakdown, this image of a man wrapping his arms around a horse to protect her. It holds more significance than we may realize in relation in relation to what we want to contemplate: 

Here we have this critic of the dominant culture, whose critique goes all the way to the core of the dominant culture, and this breakdown happens at the sight of a mare being beaten, 

and we look around us, look at the world we have, and everything we see in the world we have wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the horse. 

Obviously the horse didn’t directly create everything we see, it’s just that we got here on the backs, on the bones, on the flesh and blood and suffering of horses. 

So talking about the horse isn’t easy, for any of us, and we have to keep going mindfully, as mindfully as we can. 

We have already said that contemplating the horse offers nourishment for all of us, and it presents dangerous wisdom that’s also good for all of us. We have to try and confront it if we’re going to get right with ourselves and the world. 

If you don’t have horses in your life, that might make the initial provocations a little gentler . . . 

Nevertheless, speaking about horses, honestly, carries us all into the wild landscape of dangerous wisdom. Because of the archetypal energies of the horse, and also because of the long history of horse-human relationship—which goes back to the strange roots of the dominant culture, that makes all of this highly charged. 

When we’re talking about the roots of the dominant culture, we’re talking about going all the way back to the speakers of a Proto-Indo-European language, the root tongue of most the languages of the dominant culture—the root of the most dominant languages of the dominant culture. 

So all of us in the dominant culture, and all of us affected in any way by the dominant culture, will find some dangerous wisdom in the horse, and it can make us reactive. Anyone who gets any benefit from the dominant culture may find reactiveness here, because of these ancient patterns and relationships. 

And, again, because of the archetypal energies of the horse, all human beings can experience both the existential threat the horse presents to the ego, and the incredible potential the horse offers to the soul. 

We may not want to believe in these things, in mysteries and magic and the horse as a mirror and vehicle for the soul. 

But people do long to experience magic, and millions of people in particular long to experience the magic of horses, or think they have already experienced it. 

And yet, when it comes to confronting the shadows and other obstacles of ignorance that keep us from the fullest possible experience of life and its wonders, we often balk, tense up, rationalize, get defensive. And we typically do this precisely under the guise of being rational, or standing up for ourselves or our experience, or any number of other maneuvers of the ego. 

This creates so many challenges, because the dominant culture oppresses all sorts of people, and then they don’t feel seen, and we get this whole language of needing to be seen. But in many cases the thing that wants to be seen is some aspect of the ego. 

What is our essence? Is it an object? Is it a story we can tell about an experience we had? 

We may insist that we are NOT being defensive or rationalizing. And that’s exactly how the best rationalizations work. We call them reasons, and we call them knowledge too—including self-knowledge, knowledge about horses, knowledge about business, politics, and the world. 

I see this basic situation all the time. It’s not like I got a new client yesterday and suddenly saw this unique phenomenon of how people get defensive in the face of dangerous wisdom. 

We’re talking about this because it has to do with all of us, whether we like horses or not. And horses can provoke it. 

And what I see in clients—the same thing other philosophers have seen—is that it’s challenging to fully enter the unknown. 

We always want to insist on what we know. But Sophia insists on our not-knowing. 

We can think of that as a hyphenated word. We’re not trying to get intellectual here. We’re trying to be precise—trying to get at experience, and experience is always more precise than our words, and that’s why we sometimes fiddle around with the words. So “not-knowing” is one hyphenated word, and it differs from “not knowing” written out as two words. 

The not-knowing we mean is a practice of suspending ourselves in the mystery. 

Sophia—Wisdom . . . she’s an image, not a concept—Sophia insists that we quit behaving as if we have no unconscious, as if we know exactly what our problems are and how to solve them. 

Our politicians behave like this, and so do our tech gurus, our economists, and so on. They will save us because they think they understand our problems and how to solve them. 

But if we really understood ourselves so well, we wouldn’t have the problems we have. And horses wouldn’t have the problems they have. Horses suffer because humans think they know. 

In his personal journals, the great philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Clinging to what you have learned is worse than not learning it in the first place.” 

We had a line from Auden in another one of our contemplations that expresses this too. He wrote, 

“We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.” 

Many poets and philosophers have expressed this problem. 

If we don’t think we know anything about horses, or think we know very little, then contemplating them can help us a lot, because it can help us let go of the things we think we do know. 

Through this subject that feels a little less charged, we might see something we couldn’t see with something more personal and charged for us. The danger will come, but not at first. 

On the other hand, if we think we know something about horses, however profound—because we could have years of experience— 

and the horse world is like so many other worlds. I’ve been in many worlds, as have many of you have too. 

I’ve been in the tango world, for instance. I’ve seen the celebrity dancers, and all the experts. They have the experience, and they have danced for however many years, and they’ve done performances, and so on. And they feel very confident: This is how you do tango. 

It might be wonderful teaching, or it might miss a lot. In the tango world, many times all the right answers leave out most of the spiritual potential. 

And in the horse world we find it very charged. Everyone feels they know what they’re doing, and because many of them care a lot about horses, and there is a sentient being at stake, it becomes kind of intense at times—full of judgmental and defensive attitudes. 

And people may have some good intentions too, along with all the shadow material, the unconscious stuff that gets pulled in. They want to feel they are doing right by the horses they love. 

But however well-grounded we think our knowledge, the threat may come right away. And it makes us defensive. 

And so, we can only ask ourselves, “Well, if I know so much, why is it that I’m not free? Why is it that I’m not just enlightened?” 

That question might seem crazy. Is that really relevant? Yes, because we can sense that the facts about horses are relatively boring, and anything interesting about horses, anything profound—well that carries us into different territory. 

Socrates tried to get at one aspect of this. He was asking Euthyphro if the gods ever disagree about anything. And if they did disagree, it wouldn’t be about anything obvious. It would have to be about something subtle and profound. We’re not going to argue about how many legs a horse has. If we want to get abstract or obtuse about it maybe, but it’s the profound and subtle stuff that really challenges us. 

And the profound stuff puts the observer and the observed into nonduality. That’s the key. 

Once we get to the areas that might be profound with respect to anything—the horse, dancing, painting, life—then claiming knowledge there means claiming self-knowledge, which means claiming wisdom, love, and beauty. 

That’s such an important matter. Once we get someplace interesting, we have broken down the duality between observer and observed, and if I started to claim, “I know about this,” I have claimed spiritual insight. 

If we have ANY possibility of growth in the realm of wisdom, love, and beauty, any chance we might become more wise, loving, and beautiful, then something about horses remains both unknown and potentially threatening to our ego—maybe even humiliating to our ego. Isn’t that funny? 

It applies to everything—and it appears in interesting ways in my work with high-level performers. Someone who is not truly exceptional at something can get more defensive if we try to help them, because they want to insist on what they know. 

But the most exceptional performers can at times—because of their profound commitment to excellence—they can at times show a willingness to attempt almost anything that can take their performance further. 

Of course, a beginner’s mind can appear in anyone. Any of us can become willing to suffer the humiliation of not knowing. And we may see that what we have been doing our whole lives or our whole careers doesn’t work as well as nondoing. 

So let’s take a deep breath, and observe our reactivity, and see what we can let go of. 

But we’ll take a broad view. To really get a sense of the magic, we might have to first zoom out, try and get some perspective. We can try to sense the possibility of magic. 

Maybe we can’t touch the magic directly. But maybe we could arrive at a question that can put us at the edge—the edge of the wild, the edge of the magic. 

Once we admit that we have some space for wisdom—a little more wisdom, a little more love, a little more beauty and grace—then we can admit that, however pleasant, however ecstatic our experience with horses or anything else, we might yet find ourselves cut off from a deeper magic and mystery that letting go could let us experience. 

People can take MDMA or LSD and have a marvelous experience. Doesn’t mean it really healed them—or not completely. Maybe it helped something. Maybe it helped nothing—just a powerful, wonderful experience, that didn’t reveal anything truly helpful about the nature of reality. 

It takes more than a powerful experience. It takes learning, rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty—that means a philosophical context. And learning means a movement into the unknown and from the unknown. That’s the movement: Into and from the unknown. 

We have to be in the unknown. A mind of not-knowing. 

And with the horse, we not only have to admit that we might not know anything—not anything really important, or at least something might be left out—but more than that, the horse will present an existential threat, including the threat to what we unconsciously fear we might have to give up or renounce in order to fully experience the magic and mystery of the horse and the world. 

To add to the challenge, we contemplate this in the midst of the dominant culture. The horse presents an existential threat to the whole culture—the whole shebang. 

We cannot think we can live in this culture and have no infection from conquest consciousness, that nothing in us reacts on behalf of the culture. That’s because every single one of us gets some kind of benefit from the dominant culture—even if it’s a questionable benefit, an ambivalent benefit, an ambiguous benefit, and delusory benefit. 

To enter this unknown means forgetting everything we think we know and having the courage and vulnerability to stand naked in the presence of the horse—naked in the wilderness of dangerous wisdom. 

The horse is dangerous wisdom embodied—symbolically, archetypally—and in their very sacred presence, the Horse defies conquest consciousness, 

so profoundly that even people who love horses, deep down somewhere get nervous, because we’re all complicit in their continued oppression. 

And we all have a responsibility for the karmic wounds of the past, the memory, the memory of what human beings have done to the horse, done through the horse, done with the horse, 

how we have used the horse to oppress 

how we have used the horse for violence and aggression 

and how we put violence and aggression onto the horse, into their bodies and minds, into their world. 

And again, this includes people who, who proclaim love for horses currently today. 

This movement into the wild wisdom of horses happened during our contemplation of magic and memory. So, in terms of getting a broader perspective, maybe we should consider some of the memory. 

One thing to keep in mind, especially for those of us living on Turtle Island, is that the mutual memory of this land and the horse beings goes back millions of years. The primate lineage may also have started on Turtle Island, with a being called the plesiadapis, but the primates, it seems, ended up travelling to Europe and then Africa. 

In contrast, the horse did most of its major evolution here, on Turtle Island. 

We should perhaps mention that some indigenous people see their ancestors as always having lived on Turtle Island. Maybe so. But at the very least, we find growing support for the possibility that humans have lived on Turtle Island for 100,000 years or more—100,000 years or more—which means they didn’t come on that Bering Land bridge, because glaciers blocked the passage before the timeline that had held sway for many years. Some scientists now argue that humans might have come to Turtle Island maybe 130,000 years ago or more, and they may have come by boat. 

Either way, humans lived here on Turtle Island a very long time, thousands and thousands of years, during which the place remained astonishingly abundant with life. 

We know this. When people in Europe read accounts of Turtle Island, they couldn’t believe it. They thought it was fiction. 

And within just a few centuries, an incredible amount of degradation happened as a result of conquest consciousness. 

For much of that period of degradation, the conquest people had the idea that horses were a foreign species—maybe we would even call them an invasive species, one that came with the invaders. But, unlike the European humans, horses were coming home. This place belonged to their ancestors, and they evolved here, proved themselves true survivors and innovators—innovators who helped the place flourish, not like in conquest consciousness, with innovators who make a place decline (that’s what “innovation” and “progress” and “development” mean in conquest culture). 

If we want to speak with clarity, we need to say that horses didn’t merely evolve here—as if the place was just here, and the horses were in it. No. They made this place. It’s their place. Their magic conjured it. There magic still throbs in the hills and plains, waves with the grasses, falls with the rains, sits quietly with the Earth. 

The very early horse is sometimes called the Eohippus, which means Dawn Horse. Perhaps it looks a little more like a modern horse than the earliest primate looks like a modern human. You know: If you went back and looked at that little primate, who might have been our ancient, ancient ancestor, and you looked at that little horse ancestor, the little primate might look a little less like us than the horse’s ancestor looks like they do now. Who knows? 

The Eohippus emerged over 50 million years ago. And it’s interesting, because we can look at all of the branches of the tree of life, and we would see our ancient ancestor appearing at around that same time. 

It took over 40 million years from that emergence of the Dawn Horse for the modern horse to appear, what we call Equus Caballus. 

These beings helped make Turtle Island over the course of 50 million years. Horses survived great shifts in the climate, and also shifts in vegetation, as C4 grass evolved from C3 grass. Horses and grasses go together, as do horses and plains, horses and the whole of Turtle Island, horses and the whole of the world.

One of the things we might want to consider about this land—and about land in general—are the concepts of good land, wild land, and sacred land. 

Gary Snyder contemplates these terms in his collection of essays published as The Practice of the Wild. It’s a marvelous collection. Maybe every U.S. citizen should have to read that book. Throw out some of the supposed classic literature. Forget Ben Franklin; read Gary Snyder. And at the very least we might all do ourselves the favor of reading the first essay in it, called “The Etiquette of Freedom”. Wonderful stuff. 

But we’re thinking now of an essay called “Good, Wild, Sacred”. 

We won’t try interpreting Snyder. You can look that one up if you like. Let’s just contemplate together. 

Good land. What’s that? In practice—what is “good land” in practice? It seems to be land we can fence off and do with as we please. It means land we can extract from. 

Wild land means land we can’t extract from, or haven’t figured out how to extract from, or just haven’t yet extracted from. It usually means a landscape we don’t live in. 

Sacred land is often wild, maybe usually so, except in cases where a plot of land has been cultivated in accord with ritual. 

The wild and the sacred usually belong to no one, while good land means land someone fenced off, or could fence off if they bought it. And then they start invading it with their agendas. “Good land” abides our agendas. 

All of this got encoded in the philosophy of the dominant culture as philosophy went from LoveWisdom to a matter of opinions and proclamations and arguments. That’s not to say we shouldn’t give each other reasons, or that we can’t analyze and discuss and think critically. But things got derailed. 

John Locke is a good example. Very highly regarded in the dominant culture. Kids have to read Locke in college. 

He was a townie, not a nature person. He grew up in a market town near Bristol, and was educated in London and Oxford. In any case, he comes from the dominant culture, and a land long removed from wildness. 

In a passage from his Second Treatise on Government, Locke writes that 

40. it is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing; and let any one consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco or sugar, sown with wheat or barley, and an acre of the same land lying in common, without any husbandry upon it, and he will find, that the improvement of labour makes the far greater part of the value. I think it will be but a very modest computation to say, that of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labour. Nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expenses about them—what  in  them  is  purely  owing  to  Nature  and  what  to labour—we shall find that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labour. 

41. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life; whom Nature, having furnished as liberally as any other people with the materials of plenty—i.e., a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet, for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniencies we enjoy, and a king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England. 

We’re being a bit cheeky with Locke, but . . . this seems like an extraordinary expression of ignorance. 

Surely we could imagine more ignorant things to say. We could imagine dumber things to suggest, but this ranks up pretty high as a symptom of ignorance. 

This kind of thought suggests that the land doesn’t have any value in itself. And what we should do—apparently—is look upon the incredible beauty of Turtle Island, and immediately ignore the Bible. That’s really what this comes to, because Locke could just as well have quoted the Bible, and we would have been better off. 

And you might know what I’m thinking of. So many of us know the famous passages from the Sermon on the Mount. What does Christ say there? 

Those who aren’t Christian can listen to his teachings as LoveWisdom, the teachings of a philosopher, a sage. So, let’s just contemplate. Christ spoke to his students saying, 

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life” 

That line alone shines, doesn’t it? Do not be anxious about your life. What will anxiousness add? What will it help? 

It is a state of mind that makes us behave improperly, unskillfully. 

Let’s hear the rest of it. Jesus said, 

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. . . And which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit to the measure of your life? 

28 And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 

30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” 

Isn’t that marvelous? We can see how the door to spiritual materialism certainly opens there. But if we really listen, we can hear that the command is to root ourselves in sacredness, root ourselves in the miracle, the magic of life, the interwovenness of things. 

Jesus totally contradicts Locke, and gives us more ecological wisdom than we find in the core of the dominant culture, in its style of consciousness. Jesus tells us that the indigenous people of Turtle Island were in some sense better Christians than the missionaries who tried to convert them. We might ask, “Convert them to what? To Christianity or to conquest consciousness?” 

Many of the missionaries ended up acknowledging that the indigenous people lived wisely and well, and maybe the genocide got fueled in part by the resentment of seeing people live in accord with teachings our culture was supposed to revere, but couldn’t live by. Instead, we live by hope and fear, anxiety and craving, clinging and reactivity—exactly what Jesus asks us to give up in these teachings. 

And yet, we can’t add a single cubit to the measure of our life by means of our hope and fear, our anxiety and craving. Our agenda will never accord with the divine will, because the divine will isn’t an agenda. 

In talking about the measure of our life, Jesus wasn’t just talking about the length of our life. We don’t have to narrow it like that. The measure of our life is not its length alone. That was precisely his point we could say. 

He tried to get us to appreciate the value of life—the whole of life. We cannot make life itself bigger or more valuable than it is, and we cannot make our own life matter any more than it already does. We could say the value of our life, and the value of the world as it is, scares us. 

That’s in part how philosophies like Locke’s can get a foothold. We want philosophy that justifies conquest consciousness—once we’re locked into it. So, John Locke at least tells the truth of conquest consciousness. It’s the gospel of conquest. Locke gives us the voice of the delusion, the voice of the profane view of life. 

Locke says, “Well, you come upon the incredible beauty of Turtle Island, and instead of standing in awe, instead of entering the sacredness of the place—as Jesus said, root yourself in righteousness—it’s much better if you just go in there, knock everything down, invade it, cut into the Earth, and plant some tobacco and sugar.” 

And isn’t it marvelous that he picked those in particular? The dominant culture hungers for the sweetness of life because conquest consciousness cuts us off from life’s sweetness. The dominant culture seeks stimulation—in any form we can find it, and certainly tobacco. Why? Because we lack a sense of belonging to life, to each other, to all our relations, to all our teachers in this world. We feel cut off from the inherent wonder of wildness, the awe of sacredness, the thrill of the magic and mystery at work every moment. 

So, we take sacred land and wild land and we turn it into “good land”. 

Meanwhile, some indigenous people are saying, “Well, this land you’re talking about is sacred. Why do you think something’s wrong with it, or that you need to extract some kind of value from it—or, apparently put value into it? According to Locke, it doesn’t have value on its own. We have to put value in it. Why do you think you can possess it? How can you possess or improve upon the sacred?” 

Locke expresses the vision of the dominant culture, which seems extraordinarily narrow, short-sighted, fragmenting, and fragmented. 

And meanwhile, other philosophers would not say things like that. Certainly many indigenous philosophers would find this confused thinking. And I can’t even imagine Buddha saying something like that because he was the philosopher of interwovenness par excellence, and Locke here shows fundamental ignorance of interwovenness. 

Locke’s view means we can put fences around things and we make things better by cutting into the Earth, putting in a monoculture . . . forget diversity . . . knock everything down and stick some tobacco seeds in the ground. 

And an indigenous person might say, “Well, yes, we plant things, but first of all, tobacco is a sacred plant, and the Earth too is sacred. You don’t just plow up the Earth, cut into the earth and stick a bunch of tobacco in the ground. That’s not at all working with a sacred medicine or a sacred plant, and it’s not working with the Earth. So there seems to be some kind of confusion here about how the world functions. Doesn’t seem clear that you know how to work with a plant, how to listen, how to relate to it. 

“And when you smoke it, it doesn’t seem like anything ever happens. There’s no ceremony. You don’t have much of a relationship to it. Somebody else grows it and harvests it as a commodity. It ends up being a matter of machinery and economics invading the land. It doesn’t make much sense.” 

And in the dominant culture, on the other hand, the notion that land could be sacred doesn’t really sit well. Sacred land would be held in common by a people. Locke wouldn’t understand why we would hold land in common and not do something with it. 

And one people should respect another people’s sacred place—or, if you have two peoples sharing a sacred place, they have to find a way to navigate that, to be in harmony about that and not try to possess the sacred. 

But in the dominant culture, the land is only “good” if we can put a fence around it, and do as we please. I might do nothing, but it’s still “mine”. 

The notion of the commons has already begun to break down by Locke’s time, and he shows no deep regard for it. 

We contemplate all of this because the horse illustrates the same kind of challenge to the logic of the culture, in a variety of ways. 

When we think of Jesus’s words, we can think of a horse’s mane—even tangled and tossed in the wind, it looks more beautiful than anything we can get from the fanciest hairdresser. Their coat, even covered in mud, looks better than the finest suits and dresses. 

Horses are beautiful creatures. We just recognize their beauty. 

More importantly, horses know what to do. They have a job, and they know their job. 

When we see horses anywhere in, let’s say non-wild situations, we often see that the horses look bored—because they have this very big, important job to do that they don’t get to do when we confine them. 

The horse cultivates the whole of life onward. And that phrase tries to allow for a positive sense of cultivate and culture, and to tries to evoke a sense of the non-duality of nature and culture. The horse’s Culture is Nature. And Nature is the horse’s Culture. 

And so a Cultured horse is one who is a Natured horse, one in attunement with Nature, in attunement with wildness, one whose activity nourishes the whole of Nature and contributes to the flourishing of life. 

A Cultured horse is a magical horse. The Horse conjured Turtle Island, by cultivating the whole of Turtle Island, without having some kind of personal agenda about it. 

Human beings get driven by agendas. Captain Clock, Colonel Calendar, and Admiral Agenda (and Commander Capital too)—those are our leaders. And one of those agendas is “We’re going to cultivate the land, we’re going to develop the land.” And we’re “developing” and “innovating” all the time. Those words: Development, innovation, growth. 

And we apply it to ourselves too. We’re gonna grow. 

James Hillman once said, “How big are you gonna get? Are you gonna be 25 feet tall? Are you growing tomatoes in there?” 

What is this growth metaphor? What does it really mean? Maybe we need to be letting go. Maybe that’s what we need to mature at this point—letting go of agendas. 

And our agenda is not to cultivate the world. So “cultivation” takes on a far more narrow meaning. And so a “cultivated” person is a person who’s not wild, who’s not connected with Nature. That’s often what it means. A cultured person . . . someone in New York somewhere, who has tickets to the ballet. And we’re not saying the ballet is bad. It’s that we’ve created a duality. 

And so sometimes it may be better, then, to say that the horse’s job is to practice the whole of life onward. The horse doesn’t “cultivate” in the narrow sense, but there’s a practice, a practice of the sacred that Gary Snyder correctly names—an etiquette of the wild, an etiquette of freedom, an etiquette of sacredness. 

Horses know that etiquette. Horses know the etiquette of freedom. 

People rooted in wisdom, love and beauty—people who live as indigenous—live in accord with the etiquette of freedom, with the etiquette of sacredness, the etiquette of the wild, they practice the wild.  They live as a practice of the wild, a practice of the sacred. 

That’s magic. Magic is the practice of the wild. Magic is the practice of the sacred. It’s how we conjure the world. 

We always practice the whole of life onward—either skillfully or not. 

We learn by practice. We make things real by practice. 

Practice and realization go together. 

We realize what we practice—and as we practice, so we realize, so we bring to fruition. Bringing to fruition by means of ecologies of realization—ecologies of insight and inspiration—like living in a forest of inspiration. 

The best of those ecologies, properly seen, abide as sacred and in some way, as wild. 

Indigenous people on Turtle Island practiced the whole of life onward, and as part of that they did work with the land. They tried to work in accord with the land, in accord with the etiquette of freedom. 

Not every nation on Turtle Island necessarily lived in full attunement with reality. We don’t have to assume that somehow what we would think of as indigenous to Turtle Island automatically means totally rooted in wisdom, love and beauty—as if no human beings in an indigenous culture could be victims of ignorance. 

Wisdom can appear in a non-indigenous culture, and wisdom can be lacking in one we would generally refer to as indigenous. It can happen. 

Some indigenous cultures did create ecological degradation and consequently, usually because of the ways things worked, that would mean potentially the collapse of the culture. Or it could mean that the culture had to move someplace else and try to figure it out again. 

In the case of the dominant culture, it seems like we have this secret wish that maybe we can go somewhere else and try and figure it out again. So the only thing left for us is to wish we could go to another planet, and our science fiction brims with this wish. 

We keep having new story lines about how we’re going to get to a new planet. The aliens will come here, or we discover ancient alien technology . . . a whole set of stories about new worlds being discovered. And in many of them we just see conquest consciousness going in yet another form. 

In our world, conquest consciousness has spread everywhere in this world. And the consequences might mean the collapse of the conditions of life period, such that the human species faces real risk, as do countless other species. We’ve already made species extinct by means of our ignorance, and others are going, every day. 

And, so, while wisdom has appeared in the dominant culture, the ignorance has become overwhelming—certainly at least in its consequences. 

We don’t have to think of the dominant culture as monolithic. We might see it as a loose collection, a family of cultures with a certain style of consciousness, a style of thinking, an industrialization, a mechanization, and an approach to Earth and to life that has conquest, extraction, degradation, and all sorts of personal agendas as its modus operandi. 

We might therefore say this collection of cultures, or one kind of overarching family of cultures, practices an overall style of consciousness. The traditions of the dominant culture have had plenty of wisdom appear in them. But overall, the dominant culture doesn’t root itself in wisdom, love and beauty, and thus lives out of attunement with ecological reality, and cannot consider itself indigenous.

 

On the other side, a culture may appear indigenous in some ways, but may have significant lack of attunement with reality—however we might characterize a lack of holistic and coherent rootedness in wisdom, love, and beauty, and in ecological realities. 

And at this point, the pervasive presence of conquest consciousness has made it so that even many traditionally indigenous people may also have to reindigenize, in the sense that they have been affected by conquest consciousness. It’s like getting a virus and admitting, “Yeah, I got a fever . . . I have to get well again.” 

And also that the Earth has changed so much due to conquest consciousness. It’s not as if we can just go back to some practice that used to work on Turtle Island. Maybe it doesn’t work here anymore because it changed so much. 

All of this taken together, in light of our interwovenness, means we all can think of ourselves as reindigenizing together. That’s not to say some people aren’t way at the front of that. There’s a leading edge there, and a lot of times it’s in indigenous people—clearly. 

And the dominant culture might have to give things up, might have to give up a lot more, relatively speaking, might have to renounce some aspects of itself in favor of teachings from cultures it has conquered. And we use that term relatively, not in the sense that they’ve been defeated. They weren’t defeated. They survived. 

But in the relative sense that they fell victim to this domination, that they were invaded, attacked by it, and they were to some degree affected by it. 

And now that invading consciousness, in order to heal itself and all the wrongs that have happened from it, might have to attune itself to ways of living that the indigenous cultures can teach, an indigenous culture could teach, because that’s the only way we become indigenous. 

We don’t become indigenous by forcing the American way of life onto Turtle Island. 

You might think, “Where are we going with this.” But we’re getting close to a larger view of the horse and the magic the horse may offer. 

The horse knows how to live here; Americans don’t.As a general description, Americans are on the wrong track. Things are continuing to degrade: Losing soil, pollution levels still high, species being lost, crazy storms, polar vortexes. 

We behave as if we can just dig in deeper into the American way of life and just keep forcing it onto Turtle Island. 

That’s part of what the wild horse roundups represent. For those who don’t know about this, the Bureau of Land Management regularly does round-ups of wild horses. These are brutal and traumatizing experiences, usually involving helicopters chasing wild horses, sometimes killing them just in the chase, and then herding them into pens. Families get broken up. Horses suffer. And then the horses might get auctioned off for as little as a dollar. It’s easy to get a wild mustang for 25 bucks. 

If the horses don’t sell, they get sent to massive boarding facilities, which kind of function in the style of the industrialized agriculture model. 

It’s illegal for the horses to go to slaughter, but some of them end up slaughtered. Its being illegal is not going to stop someone who can buy a horse for 25 bucks and sell it for slaughter in Canada or Mexico. 

So we need wild horse rescues like the one where I now serve as philosopher in residence, because the horses need to be saved from slaughter or a life of confinement or a life of abuse, once they’ve been rounded up. 

Why do we round them up? 

The roundups illustrate a pattern of insanity, because the Bureau of Land Management could invest lots of money and resources into the ecologies where wild horses live. They could make those ecologies healthy, and they could do all sorts of things that would help reduce the need to round up so many horses. But, they can’t, because they are forced to spend such a huge chunk of their budget on the horses they have already rounded up, that the only choice is to round up more. 

The round-ups represent the perpetuation of a style of consciousness that won’t give in, that won’t renounce. It’s an addictive style of consciousness. 

And by renounce, we go back to a touchstone of LoveWisdom, which Chogyam Trungpa put so beautifully. All traditions of LoveWisdom demand renunciation in some way. And Trungpa said, Renunciation means realizing our nostalgia for our own suffering is full of shit. Realizing that our nostalgia for our own patterns of insanity, our own ways of living in the world ignorantly—that we have a nostalgia for our own ignorance and our own suffering. 

And then finally just saying, “You know what . . . that’s enough. I need to get out of this pattern of insanity. And so I’m going to renounce the things that part of me wants to cling to.” 

Now we have a larger mandala here. We’ve taken a larger view of land: What’s the nature of land? How does conquest consciousness view it? And what does the horse represent? 

And we can start to approach the bigger magic of the horse. 

The horse demands renunciation from us, and that scares the hell out of parts of us—the parts that cling, the parts that are anxious. We go all the way back to Jesus telling us, “Don’t be anxious. You’re not going to add a single cubit to your life.” 

But we’re out there trying to add cubit after cubit. And our “thought leaders” and tech gurus, the billionaires—you know the people—they’re trying to add cubit after cubit. 

We can act like we don’t cling. I see this again, and again, and again in clients and students—it’s all throughout the history of psychology and philosophy, LoveWisdom throughout the world . . . people can’t seem to admit that they have an unconscious, that the ego is not just conscious, that clinging and self-centeredness and delusion all operate on an unconscious basis. So, unless we’re fully enlightened, the horse demands renunciation from us. And that gets provocative to the ego. 

Let’s get a little bit clearer. Let’s consider what happened when horses returned home, to Turtle Island. 

When horses returned home, the conquest peoples tried to keep them under control. The conquest people didn’t know the horses had returned home. And of course the horses ended up escaping in various ways. 

And when they escaped, they thrived. Because this is their place. They made it. 

ispersal—and it happened in: 1680

The conquest people knew that their domination depended on the horse—it’s so easy for a person on a horse to dominate people who don’t have horses. So they tried to keep indigenous people away from their horses. But over time, as more and more horses got imported or were born here, the conquest people needed the indigenous people to become stable hands. 

They had to institute the same hierarchical model that conquest consciousness loves. It’s like the early corporations. It’s the same model that we have for corporations today. We’ve gotta have the janitors. And we’ve gotta have people learn how to drive Teslas, so they can park them when I need valet parking. 

So we need to have the indigenous people take the horse into the stable, because I’m not going to do that—that’s what the conquest people thought. So, over time, indigenous people started to learn about horses. And they realized the horse was key. 

And in: 1680

Over the next two centuries the wild horse population on Turtle Island went from possibly zero—it’s not clear they were totally extinct here, but let’s assume pretty small numbers—to maybe two million or more. Millions. People reported seeing vast oceans of wild horses in the west. Incredible. 

And the thing about those horses is they were no good. Just like land, if you can’t fence it in and extract value, it’s no good. 

For a while, the horses could be made good. You could capture them, fence them in, sell them off. So, people started to try and take the wild and the sacred and turn it into “the good”—both with land and horses. 

And what did horses do? What did the wild horses do? 

The wild horses—they invaded the invaders. That’s right. It’s remarkable. The wild horses trampled into these places, knocking down fences and liberating the horses who were trapped. Some of them might have been fully domesticated, maybe for a long time. 

The horse came from a place of sacredness and wildness. A place that says, “Who do you think you are that you decide you can possess this place and these sentient beings? Who do you think you are, to decide you can put up a fence here, and call this ‘mine’ and ‘these beings are mine, my property’?” 

Wolf said the same thing. And conquest settlers began to hate the horse the way they hated wolves. Horses got bounties put on them, the way wolves did, and people went around shooting horses—just killing them. Eventually, the bounties went away, and horses got value extracted in even more brutal ways. Mainly, they got almost totally exterminated by being turned into dog food. 

The magic of the horse—in order to receive that magic—demands healing all of that, and radically changing our relationship to the horse and beginning to really listen to the horse, so that the horse can help us reindigenize. 

Reindigenizing means renouncing what doesn’t work, and learning from people who know how to live somewhere, people know how to live—a culture that knows how to live in a manner rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, in a manner attuned with ecological and spiritual realities. 

The horse knows how to live here. Horse Culture is Nature. Why not listen to the horse?—rather than listen to the human beings who want to manage the land, control the land, “cultivate” the land, make it “good land,” and keep eliminating wild land, keep trying to add cubits to the measure of the value of their life and the world? 

That’s the history of conquest, and we’ve seen it get inflamed recently, this continued push on Turtle Island to go from wild and sacred to “good”. Conquest consciousness tries to open up national parks and wildlife refuges for extraction and development—still marching in step with John Locke’s philosophy of ignorance, still rejecting even Christian LoveWisdom. 

In this style of consciousness, land isn’t “good” until we get rid of the wild and the sacred. And in the dominant culture, the very notion of sacred land doesn’t really have a place, doesn’t sit well. 

Sometimes I think of the Highlander movies. The characters can’t fight on holy ground. Is that ever a forest? No: They can’t go into a church and fight—they can’t go into a building, something constructed—that’s the “holy ground”. Or maybe a place where we buried people. 

But the notion that there could be a sacred grove or a whole sacred forest . . . that started dying out a long time ago. 

And that’s what the story of Erysichthon illustrates. Erysichthon couldn’t stand that the existence a sacred grove, and couldn’t stand the existence of a divine tree in this sacred grove, and that the workers wouldn’t cut it all down so he ccould extract the wood and make money. He wanted to put his labor into it, to make it “better”. 

And this tree was massive, so it was a big pile of money to him.  He wanted it all cut down, and he went in and cut the sacred tree himself—and it bled. 

Similarly, Gilgamesh destroys a sacred forest. Gilgamesh is one of our oldest mythological figures. 

So in dominant culture, in conquest consciousness, we get stories instructing us that this is what happens: The wild and the sacred have to be destroyed, the land is only good when we invade it and cut into it. 

And then the women who go to the wild and the sacred, they eventually had to be hunted down. Hence the witch hunts. Because the women were probably the main keepers of ecological wisdom and attunement with wildness. We have some clear historical support for that notion, that many women were healers, keepers of the knowledge of the wild, that they were in touch with nature. So this whole oppression of Nature, Horse, Woman and Earth, they all go together. 

And our sensitivity to the magic and mystery of women goes all together with our sensitivity—and, and by that, I mean, reactivity—to the magic and mystery of horses and Earth. 

The reactivity around magic is the reactivity around the feminine and the equine. It has become that way. It’s not necessary. It’s just that the associations became natural, given the development of conquest consciousness in tandem with the use of the horse, because patriarchy probably goes much more easily with horses. 

This is an anthropological argument. You know, you’re going to send a guy out on a horse to watch the flock, and he’s the one who’s gonna raid and so on. 

And this kind of strange going together of patriarchy, domination over the horse, violence toward the horse and with the horse, and domination of nature and women and people close to nature, and the attempt to push magic out of our minds, push magic into the shadow, push it into the disreputable . . . it’s all rather curious. 

And the witch hunts show this too, they reveal some of that all going together with men as the hunters and the inquirers, the inquisitors, it’s all strange stuff. 

But again, we’re trying to get at the way in which really listening to the horse has to do with learning from a being who knows, who made this place, who knows how to live in this place—what an incredible idea. 

And usually what happens with horses is that there’s just a human agenda. The most powerful magic we could experience gets lost. 

We’re in the territory, similar to when anthropologists went to the Amazon and they found out about Ayahuasca. 

They couldn’t understand how the indigenous people figured out the process for making Ayahuasca medicine. The medicine involves a leaf that gives visions. But if you eat the leaf, nothing happens. We have an enzyme in our stomachs that breaks down the medicine. So the shamans had to combine the leaf with another plant that inhibits that enzyme, and it all has to be processed and cooked the right way. 

Now the problem is the sheer volume of species in the Amazon. In the Amazon you find more species in an acre or two than in the whole of what we call North America. 

So the anthropologists said, “Given all those species, how did these people figure out?”

 

And the answer indigenous people give is, “The plants taught us what to do.” To conquest consciousness, that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t compute. 

And anthropologists who have wanted to support indigenous peoples have found this challenging, even the ones who would later became convinced. 

Jeremy Narby talks about this in his book, The Cosmic Serpent, which is an excellent read. He talks about how he wanted to show the dominant culture that the indigenous people knew very well how to manage their resources. 

We use the phrases like “managing resources,” and we get to impose the dominant culture agenda on these ignorant people who don’t know how to properly manage the resources. 

That’s a horrifying way of thinking. 

And Narby wanted to say, “No, they do know how. They can manage their resources just fine.” And he wanted just to try to show that they had a lot of knowledge we didn’t even have. And he found himself kind of stuck because he couldn’t tell the powers that be that the reason they know these things is because the plants teach them. 

So the people listen to the plants, and by listening to the plants and other beings—like Black Elk, listening to Coyote . . . you can find it all over the place . . . human beings, actually listening to the land, to elements, to plants, to animals. 

And even that word “animals,” you know . . . humans are animals. I remember when I was a kid and it was second grade. 

I remember it clear as day. One of those memories that will always be with me. And the teacher said, “Who here thinks they’re an animal?” And this kid in front of me raised his hand. And I always thought of him as a little goofy, you know, like he was just like a little bit of a class clown. 

And when he raised his hand, I laughed, you know? Because I thought he was being a clown. And the teacher looked at him and she said, “That’s right. Human beings are animals. We are all animals.” 

And it shocked me that I had thought immediately that there are humans and then there are animals. It’s automatic. I was really shocked. 

And then I thought, “But of course!” because when I relate to my dog—who, when I was a kid, he was my hero—I didn’t relate to him as if he were just an animal, but as if he were a person. 

Notice that incoherence. Why did part of me think that way? A part of me thought of a division between humans and animals, and for another part of me, the most important person in my life aside, maybe from my mother, but the most important person in my life was my dog. 

He was my best friend. I loved him so much. And like so many children, my dog at times offered more solace than even my own mother. 

So I was incoherent. There was a part of me that related to my dog as really an important person, a person I loved and a person I wanted to learn from.

And there was a part of me that thought he was just an animal. 

And if we want to figure out how we heal on Turtle Island—how all the people heal, how the land and all the beings heal, and how humans can begin to reindigenize—what if we have to ask this question: Could we learn from the horse, and how would we do it? 

And it would mean turning the entire industry of horsemanship on its head, because everything that I’ve ever seen related to horses, including equine therapy, is not really studying the horse and asking the horse how to live in this world. 

Even in equine therapy we have an agenda and a personal problem. We have a person suffering. They have a problem. And then we go through some sort of exercise. Often in a round-pen. 

So now we’re going to the very thing that is completely unnatural to the horse, to wildness, to sacredness. We go to a fence. 

We’re going to stick you in this circular area with a horse where the horse has no choice but to deal with you, to relate to you. 

And you’re going to have your project, your psychological problems, and the horse is going to help you with them. 

Clearly the horse has such incredible psychic presence, such incredible presence in the soul of the world and our soul too, that this works—it actually works!—even if we do it in a manner out of attunement with ecological and spiritual reality. The horse does this, not the human running the show. 

We can go into a round-pen with a horse and we can have an incredible experience and we’ll say, “Well, that was magical.” 

And then we get back in our SUV, and we drive however many miles—maybe we’ll drive to an airport and we’ll get a fast-food burger. And we’ll get on an airplane and fly back home to New York, and go about our life with a wonderful memory. 

And that leaves everything lost, because maybe the horse wanted to say, “Okay, I’d like to teach you how to live in attunement with this place that my ancestors made.

This is our place. This is our home and you come here—and, yes, I appreciate that you’re suffering and you’re anxious and you’re depressed, and these things have happened to you, and that’s all important—but you are making your healing separate from mine and separate from the healing of this place and everything that has happened here to my ancestors, to your ancestors, to the indigenous people’s ancestors.”The horse had boundless magic to offer, and we settled for something that might have seemed momentous to us, but which in some scary sense may have cheated us, the horse, and the Earth—the whole community of life. 

In other words, we got hooked by the self-help catastrophe. 

We need a lot of sensitivity here. We know that people with severe trauma, PTSD, depression, and many other challenges and ailments have found life-saving medicine in Horse. We want to honor the Horse Medicine and honor those suffering beings. 

And the best way to honor all of that might be to ask what happens if we shift our relationship to the horse more radically. We might heal PTSD, but we leave the cause of PTSD intact, so others will still get it. And the horse might heal THAT. 

The self-help catastrophe means we get our help from the horse and we don’t become indigenous. We don’t become ecoliterate. We don’t understand the nature of mind or the mind of nature—not deeply, not profoundly better. 

We might understand some parts of our mind better. We might have helped our mind a little bit. 

We might’ve helped our heart a little bit, 

but we’ve treated something. We haven’t healed. 

If we let go of the duality between our healing and the healing of the world, a bigger magic and medicine can open up. 

And so everything we do with horses—racing them, riding them, doing therapy with them—all of that seems to live on a totally different track from coming to the horse and saying, 

“Okay, will you teach me how to live in this world? Because I have to live in a place when I live in this world, and you and your ancestors made this place, and we are lived by powers we pretend to understand, and you, Horse, you are one of those powers in my soul. So will you teach me my soul? 

“And along the way, you know, if it’s possible, if it’s okay, I know that I’m going to see more clearly if I can deal with this anxiety and this depression and my addictions and all of that. 

“And maybe as part of that, I can learn . . . I’ll learn how heal those things too, how to let them heal themselves. But I see that it all goes together, and I don’t want you to have to be cut off and your wounds and what you’re carrying to be cut off from what I’m carrying.” 

Could we say all that to the horse? 

Could we say to the horse, “I have come to you after doing all the preliminary work.

I learned some LoveWisdom. I learned compassion meditation. I began to understand the nature of mind and the mind of nature. I started to meditate and to study ecology. I started to do the work so that I could be in your presence, to have a mind and heart and body that can listen to you, that can receive your teachings.” 

And really we wouldn’t even have to say all of that because, if we’d done the work, we would just be in their presence in a way that allowed them to teach us something much bigger than what ordinarily happens in our interactions with horses, even though, admittedly—again, we can say this a million times and has to be said—even though the things people experience with horses already seem profound—the world needs more. 

Our situation demands the impossible. 

We have to let go of what is already possible. We have to find what’s impossible. 

Finding what’s impossible means the horse could save America. The horse could save our souls. Not as blasphemy, but as a practice and realization of our own religious and philosophical traditions. 

And there are people out there trying to work to save horses. Those people have to let the horses save them, and it won’t come just from the obvious things. 

It’s important, of course, when the horse opens our heart and just—wow. We get this broken-openness, and it could be so incredible and so healing and important in a relative way. 

But what about the further, what about the more, what about practicing the whole of life onward? The way the horse ancestors did to make this place here for us. How do we touch that? How do we let go enough? 

Okay . . . we’ve taken a broad enough view that we can begin to sense the magic horses might offer. We haven’t gotten too directly provocative, because it can help to ease into these sorts of things. 

We will go into more details in other contemplations, but if we can sense the radical nature of what we’ve considered here, then we can fairly reliably say to ourselves that, whatever we think we’re doing with horses, however we relate to them, there is yet more, and that more might stand in contrast to how we are now. 

In other words, something we’re doing right now in relation to horses, in relation to ourselves, and in relation to the world does nothing more than cut off a magic we might otherwise experience. 

And perhaps most importantly  . . . we can go back to that image of Nietzsche. We can ask if we aren’t all like shamans, if the dominant culture itself hasn’t become like a young shaman, with sickness in the body, with a mind unstable. And the image of the horse, the presence of the being who has defied the dominant culture, maybe that being can trigger our spiritual emergence, can help us finally get free from the pattern of insanity that Nietzsche himself critiqued. 

Horses transcend all our words and concepts. We used all the words we did only to make space for what we didn’t say. We didn’t say what the magic and medicine of horses is. We didn’t even really ask what the magic and medicine of horses is. Instead, we tried to begin to ask how to ask that question, and we tried to create the spaciousness of 50 million years in our souls to begin to receive the vastness of Horse and her mysteries. 

In other words, we’re seeking a way to ask how the horse can initiate us into magic and into sacredness, into a sacred space. 

When we see people being incoherent—and certainly as the incoherence approaches or enters into breakdown—we can understand a person or a group of people as seeking a sacred space, perhaps we could call it an extraordinary space, a space that can hold the process of transformation they need to undergo in order to mature, to evolve to the next level of their development. 

The dominant culture has become more or less bankrupt in terms of any serious and spiritually effective initiation practices. 

The horse as a vehicle for the soul could carry us into sacred spaces, could initiate us into our own transformation. 

We could look at the whole history of the dominant culture, at the behavior of the dominant culture, as the behavior of a person experiencing a mental breakdown, the behavior of someone we might call insane. 

Plato suggested that we can understand the soul by looking outside of ourselves. Plato taught that the soul is subtle and difficult to perceive. And so, while all traditions of LoveWisdom teach us to go inside, so to speak, Plato thought that we also needed to learn by looking outside ourselves, at the world, so that we could learn something about the structure of our own soul. 

So we can imagine the dominant culture as a soul, as our collective soul, and we can look at its behavior, and we can say, “This is a crazy person, because this soul is wrecking the conditions of its own existence. It’s totally incoherent. It’s in crisis.” 

And how will that soul heal? 

Well, this soul is in spiritual emergency. It needs help. It has to get help. It needs to enter a sacred space in order to rediscover sacredness. It needs to enter an extraordinary space, and go through a process of transformation and healing—like the hero’s journey, that Joseph Campbell described. 

That means each of us will have to do this—not every last person, but a significant number of us will have to do this to save the culture from itself, to evolve ourselves and the culture into something more vitalizing, more healthy, more alive and alove. 

In the dominant culture, when a person enters spiritual emergency, they can become a danger to themselves and others. That’s why people around them get scared, and they end up going into an institution. 

But there’s no institution for the dominant culture to go to. We can’t send the culture away to grow up. 

The dominant culture needs to seek initiation from a healer. Who might it be? It might be the horse. The horse might teach us. 

Of course we have human beings who can help us navigate this space and this process. Some humans have attained a greater level of maturity, and have become more rooted in certain wisdom traditions. There are humans with very deep practices, and we can seek initiation from them, and we can also ask them to help us seek initiation from the horse. 

We can’t just think we can seek initiation directly from the horse, because the dominant culture is a little too incoherent for that. It could maybe work out, but it involves unnecessary and unwise risks. 

We can’t just sit in front of a horse and think the big transformation will come. People try that, and what they get are little transformations that feel really big. 

To get to the big transformation, we’d have to sit the way Buddha did. Buddha didn’t just sit down under a tree. He got training. He went to teachers. He learned LoveWisdom, philosophy and meditation, and when he sat down under that tree it was the Cosmic Tree. He sat down beneath the Cosmic Tree and became fully initiated into the mysteries of life. 

We have to sit down with the Cosmic Mare in the same way. We have to get training first. We have to learn a little about the nature of our mind and the mind of Nature. 

We have asked how we can begin to approach this. We have asked if there is something subtle and profound in the horse, something we haven’t yet seen, no matter how much we have seen already. And how would we prepare ourselves? How could we shift? 

And the first thing is just to let go of what we think we know, to stop behaving like knowers and doers. We behave as if we are the exception, as if Socrates could question us, and we would have all the answers. He would never pin us, he would never discover any ignorance in us, not even a hint of ignorance—or would he? 

Socrates tried to show that even people in their supposed domain of expertise have ultimately fragmented views, partially correct opinions. The partial truths had some truth to them, of course. But people think they KNOW. 

And Socrates tried to show us that in relation to life, what matters is wisdom—not just experiences we have had, not just facts we can cite, not just things we think we can accomplish, not that we could get a horse to do this or that, or make a billion dollars, or whatever. 

He asked, “Is this human wise, loving, and beautiful? Have they transformed and healed? Have they matured and deepened into the mystery?” 

How can the horse help us do these things? 

This episode is dedicated to Aragon and Rio, and to all their ancestors and their kin around the world.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories of magic to share, get in touch through wisdomloveandbeauty.org and we might bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.