Secrets of the Talking Jaguar

(excerpt)

"Over the last two or three centuries, a heartless culture-crushing mentality has incremented its progress on the earth, devouring all peoples, nature, imagination, and spiritual knowledge. Like a big mechanized slug, it has left behind a flat, homogenized streak of civilization wherever it passed. Every human on this earth...African, Asian, European, Islanders, or from the Americas...has ancestors who at one point in their history had their stories, rituals, ingenuity, language, and lifeways taken away, enslaved, banned, exploited, twisted, or destroyed by this force. Now what is indigenous, natural, subtle, hard to explain, generous, gradual, and village-oriented in each of us is being banished into the ghettos of our hearts, or hidden away from view onto reservations inside the spiritual landscape of the Earth Body. In shamanic terms, our minds are being taught to believe whatever we can think is actually the center of a person's life, just like a conquering culture, or a modern culture which thinks with the mind, not with the ancestral soul. Meanwhile, our natural souls, which are like....rare waterbirds, know that our souls should be working together to maintain or replaster the crumbling heart of life. Instead our indigenous souls are being utterly overlooked and pushed aside in the bustle of the minds' competitive activity, until our true beings feel just like a tribesman in a big, trafficky city: unwelcomed, lost, and homeless....We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones lies an ancient singing couple who just won't give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won't end if we can find them."

from the book "Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village" by Martin Prechtel