Journey to the Sacred Mountains by Flynn Johnson — Book Review

This heartfelt book urges its reader to re-establish our connection with the natural world as a way to come back to what is truly important and to re-awaken our souls from the slumber of forgetting our connection to what is sacred within us and all around us.  With respect to our youth, Johnson makes the argument that as a culture we must learn from traditional indigenous people who created formal rites of passage to honor and celebrate the momentous transition from childhood to adulthood.  In our failure to recognize the significance of this passage we risk losing our youth to drugs, alcohol, violence and self-destructive behavior.

Johnson intelligently argues that today’s world “does not provide young people with meaningful avenues for self-expression, self-identity and self-esteem.”   As Johnson points out, it’s not just our youth who are lost, but many of us in our fast-paced, consumer-oriented world find ourselves lost and questioning who we are and what is of value.  While he is not suggesting that we somehow embrace indigenous initiation ceremonies, he does show that these approaches contain an inherent wisdom from which we might learn and answer some of life’s bigger questions.

His book recounts many poignant stories of individuals who had profound experiences of healing and awareness while questing in the heart of nature, including the American Indian story of Jumping Mouse, whose quest leads him to the “sacred mountains,” which symbolically represent the core central to any spiritual quest.

Journey to the Sacred Mountains and the teachings of the native way show us, young or old, that we are not separate from the natural world and that within the orbit of this communion nature reveals itself both as a mirror of the human soul and a revelation of the divine.

“Flynn Johnson weaves together the three wisdom traditions of Native American spirituality, Depth Psychology and Buddhism to provide a deep understanding of the human soul’s journey towards an awakening in the heart of nature. Drawing on an untapped stream of indigenous voices and their insights into the way in which Western civilisation has fallen out of balance and the ways to bring it back. The book provides powerful ways to re-establish an intimate connection with nature to draw closer to your true nature and the sacred.
Originally published in Journey Magazine.

 

Reading this book is a bit like taking part in one of the author’s Vision Quest programs. He begins with a Plains Indian story about Jumping Mouse, whose quest takes him through many challenges until he reaches the Sacred Mountains where his old, conventional self becomes transformed. The author notes that our present culture offers very few deeply meaningful ceremonies of passage for adolescents or adults. Many people no longer recognize our need “to live connected to Spirit.”

This book explains how vision quests or other community rituals (he takes a close look at the Oglala Sioux Sun Dance) can provide a way for participants to discover their own core sacredness within that of Nature. One section, “Incorporation: Walking the Pathless Path Between Worlds,” reflects on the threshold our culture now faces as it moves from the principles and values of conqueror consciousness to those of spiritual consciousness.

With its ease of presentation and moving stories from participants, notes, helpful bibliography, and Appendix on the Medicine Wheel, this book is recommended for readers who wish to explore various wisdom traditions and understand how they relate to the discovery of the self.

— Richard D. Wright, Tranquil Things, Derby Line, Vt.

 

To order Journey to the Sacred Mountains click here!

 

Excerpt:

1

The Call of the Unknown

The main character of our story is a mouse. He is just one mouse among many other mice, without even a name. Each of us begins life in a somewhat similar place. We are born into a body, immersed in a family and a larger collective body, and ignorant of our true name—our true nature. The story of this particular mouse unfolds as a quest to discover his true nature. To do this, however, he must first free himself from his unconscious submergence in the mindset of the collective body. In the native understanding of the soul’s journey, he must begin to explore and integrate the powers of the four sacred directions of the Medicine Wheel, the wheel representing the Universe and its myriad life forms as an interdependent whole.

In the absence of a name, the mouse is described as just a “little” Mouse. His littleness stands out as an important detail. Little Mouse is little in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, he is little relative to the vastness of the world that surrounds him, a world of which he knows so little; on the other hand, he is little in relation to the unknown potential that lies within him, like a seed awaiting the right conditions to grow. The vastness of these two unknown dimensions of his life mirror each other and frame the life of Little Mouse.

In this regard, the story mirrors the human soul’s journey, expressing a paradox intrinsic to our existential situation. On the one hand, it speaks of our humble place in a vast Uuniverse that reaches far back into the beginnings of life and stretches ahead into an unknown future. It hints at the vast mystery that we find ourselves immersed in, the mystery of life itself, the miracle that there is something rather than nothing. On the other hand, the story calls to us to stretch ourselves beyond the small world that we know so well into the unknown possibilities of human consciousness. In this way, at the very beginning the story begins to weave together the inner and outer mystery that frame our Earth Walk.

The opening of the story finds Little Mouse “busy with mice things.” Like all the other mice, he is busy gathering and collecting seeds and nuts for the sake of his survival, for when you live off the land you must always be prepared for the harshness of winter. Rooted in a land-based indigenous culture, the story points to the reality that the basic needs of the body for food, clothing, and shelter must be met first before there is time for any other considerations. In spite of these material demands, however, anthropological studies show that indigenous peoples had more leisure time for socializing, play, and ritual than we moderns. Even so, the story warns the native listener of the danger of becoming overly caught up in the material concerns of life, at the expense of one’s spiritual life.

It is interesting that even in a pre-industrial world the tendency toward busyness was a feature of that life. Perhaps this tendency is common to the human experience, regardless of time and culture.

The busyness of a pre-industrial life, however, clearly pales in comparison to the reality of our fast-paced, modern, industrialized world. In many ways, busyness is a defining feature of our lives as we rush about from here to there in the midst of our own struggles for security and comfort. Our days are packed full with commutes to and from work, appointments, phone calls to make, e-mails to check and send, deadlines, planes to catch, children to taxi from here to there, and on and on, with little or no time to stop and observe what is actually going around us, let alone inside us.

We move through life so fast we can forget to really see, hear, smell, taste, or touch anything. As a result, our senses can become impoverished or even shut down. This is especially true if we live in an urban environment where we must shield ourselves from sensory overload.

But our senses are the windows of our bodies through which a vibrant, sensual, ensouled world enters—through which the many faces of Spirit approach us. Our senses form the invisible threads that connect us with life and whatever is other than ourselves. Ironically, even though our cultural orientation to reality is predominately materialistic, we have somehow left our bodies behind, except as idealized expressions of physical beauty or prowess. In the end, our weakened connections to a vibrant world and the stresses of our fast-paced lifestyle take a toll not only on our bodies but also on our souls.

To order Journey to the Sacred Mountains click here!