This past weekend, I saw, “Coco”. It was as inspired a film as I’ve seen in a long time. It was constructed around the Mexican holiday, Dia de la Muertos. A night when the dead return to the land of the living, through memory and ritual. The European version of this is of course, Halloween, derived from the Celtic festival Samhain. As Halloween has its roots in Celtic Paganism, Dia de la Muertos , which most people think of as a Mexican holiday, reveals itself through its imagery to be rooted much further in the aboriginal Aztec and Mazatec religions of the Americas.
Each celebration supposes that there is a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and in the proper circumstances that bridge may be crossed. This identical archetypal imaginative creation rose up from the deep unconscious of two separate aboriginal cultures on two separate continents. It reveals a model for understanding reality that transcends the bifurcation between life and death, an ontological question that is really about the reality of consciousness beyond the ego, which we will all be released into when our biological nervous system no longer contains us.
Dia De Las Muertas is an American Aboriginal mythology birthed out from a native consciousness, that has inhabited the Americas for between ten and fifteen thousand years. The migration that originally populated the Americas took place across the Bering Strait land bridge that over time brought a nomadic procession from Northern Asia into Alaska all the way down to the bottom of South America. The “Native Americans” were actually genetically and linguistically more like Mongolians and other inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau. What we think of as “Native Americans,” are actually the Americas original immigrants from Northern Asia. The religious mythologies they brought from Asia most resembled the pre buddhist influenced Bon Shamanistic land based tradition that existed throughout Northern Asia.
Just as they had in Northern Asia(that’s another story) the migrants found visionary plants to support their religious rituals. In the Northwest North America and in Central Mexico, they found Psilocybin Mushrooms. In the Southwest United States and Northern Central Mexico, they used Peyote, and when they populated the Amazon they discovered and utilized Ayahuasca. All of these were part of the local fauna and were consumed in religious rites to bring the individual into accord with their physical and non physical environment.
These medicinal plants sprung from the Americas ground. In many ways, they were composed of the land. When Europeans brought the second wave of migration to the Americas in the eighteenth century, they brought Christian Sects, that despite their own (forgotten) mystical origins, tried to douse the fire of the established religions that the American Aboriginals. One needs to only examine how thin the crust of Christianity in Nazi Germany was burst through by the Wotan Forest Cults that had been the native religion for thousands of years. In the Americas, the best the second wave of migration was able to accomplish was to have the native religions merge their rituals and mythologies with the Christianity that was forced upon them. They forbade the use of local sacramental plants, yet in in the places where indigenous religions were wholly replaced by Christianity, alcoholism replaced the native mysticism and medicinal plants and decimated the native populations.
As history marched forward the consciousness of the land, always lay psychologically, and spiritually dominant below the feet of the American migrants, no matter what superficial cover of customs, histories, and family stories, were laid over the indigenous soil. The land of the Americas North, Central and South America, according to physics, isn’t just a physical place but a state of consciousness. The present day religion of the United States is Keynesian Free Market Economics. The election of Donald Trump, a real estate investor, is the purest expression of this . He has no values, or consciousness, or concepts about reality that are not rooted in free market commerce. For a population to vote him into the Presidency, his values are recognized as the most sensible for rule. His call to “Build a Wall,” that was chanted at his rallies was the ipso facto proof of what his constituents seemingly fear the most: Mexicans. But what they are talking about really is indigenous consciousness, the consciousness of the land. What the followers who chant build a wall, wish to have a wall built for, is to keep out the native consciousness of the land beneath their feet, which doesn’t recognize the abstraction of Keynesian Economics.
Ignoring the land, is ignoring the quantum consciousness that we all spring from. But this consciousness continues to speak to each and every one of us, and it speaks a lot louder than the chants of “build a wall, or even, “lock her up.” While Trump and his cronies continue to harp on about the economy and national security(and deny that global warming poses a threat) all of California has been on fire for three months, with no end in sight. The plan is to hypnotize the population with an ideological war in the media between the right and the left, or between those who recognize Trump’s criminality and those who choose to ignore it. But what is really going on, is occurring all around us. It isn’t coming to you on the internet, it isn’t on television, it is right outside. your door and inside the room you are in right now.
Dissidence cannot just be political. Dissidence begins with perceiving the reality around you, that is giving birth to your experience in every moment, without any intermediaries. It preceeds the information you are getting through media and social interaction. It speaks to you, and has an opinion about you, that is a priori before any information that you are receiving through channels that are less primary than the source of your own consciousness. The physical reality around you shares the same source that your own consciousness does. Relate to it, sense its’ experience of you, feel inspired to care of it, as it cares for you. Achieve this, and no wall can keep you from the experience of your indigenous reality, which will nurture you, communicate with you, and inform you in every moment. Fight for it. Share it with others. This intelligence lives when it is alive in you and shared with others. It dies, when you lose contact with it. We are all birthers of this indigenous intelligence.