Traditional Aboriginal teaching beginning in childhood involved learning to see all things as interconnected. The lesson was to connect yourself in nurturing ways to everything and everyone around you, all the time. Children had to learn to see themselves not as separate individual beings but as an integral component of an endless web of interdependencies with other people, animals and the earth itself.
In his book “Returning to the Teachings” author Rupert Ross explains that the first obligation of an individual was to look for connections and relationships that surrounded them and try to understand things from this dynamic perspective. “All things are interrelated. Everything in the Universe is part of a single whole… It is only possible to understand something if we understand how it is connected to everything else.” The goal of life was to accommodate yourself to the way things worked rather than trying to dominate or change it. The goal was to ensure harmony between all participants of the whole.
This viewpoint of the world and your place in it extended to wrongdoings and crimes. The belief was that incarceration worked against the healing process as an unbalanced person was moved further out of balance. The threat of jail prevented a person from coming forward and taking responsibility for the hurt they were causing to others. People could not heal in isolation as isolation and alienation were seen as the problem. Accepting responsibility in front of all those who were affected was seen as being much more difficult and more effective than a jail sentence.
Ross tells a wonderful Ojibway elders story that illustrates this point: “If
someone consistently refused to follow the teachings and was contributing negatively to the community, he might be placed on a blanket held by a number of men, then repeatedly tossed in the air. At some point they would let go of the blanket and he would fall”. Less an instrument of punishment, this was an experience in trusting your fellows and a realization of how much you needed the assistance of others in order not to come to harm.
Imagine if we still viewed the world and our fellow citizens through this lens of interrelatedness? Imagine if our goal was to maintain harmony for all even while embracing change? Long ago, I was told by a great guru: “There is no ONE thing, there is only EVERYTHING.”
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