Culture> Review and Comment

Indigenous qualities exist everywhere

By Peter Buffett ( China Daily ) Updated: 2014-06-20 11:02:42

In my last column, I wrote about the strong feeling of indigenous culture I experienced in China. I would like to describe what I think that indigenous quality is in any person from anywhere - and what has been done to disturb it.

As I know it, being "Indian" - as indigenous people have been called in the American West - means being deeply aware of one's relationship to everything. Knowing that an unseen force appears when we live this way, one begins to understand that the divine lives inside of relationships - which means that everything you are in relation to is sacred.

While difficult to practice in every moment, just striving for this ideal creates a better world.

So what has disrupted the indigenous way of being in relationship?

Here are two quotes that may be clues:

Albert Einstein: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Lao Tzu: "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."

Something happened to us humans. Something that changed how we feel - or don't feel - about the things we're in relation to.

We started to feel smarter and more powerful than nature itself. Nature can be harsh. We learned how to tame it. We grew crops that allowed us to live through the winter. Nature became something outside of ourselves that we could control; it had power we could use.