"During the last twenty years, many people have begun to realize that unless the human race listens to the 'voices of the first world,' the voices, that is, of those original human cultures that lived in naked and reverent intimacy with nature, it may well die out. These 'voices' still speak to us in those tribal cultures that have survived against immense odds into the modern era — in, for example, the Kogi of Columbia, the Aborigines of Australia, the Hopi and Navaho of North America, the Eskimo of the Arctic Circle, and the nomads of the Himalayas.
"What do these voices have to tell us? They tell us of our essential 'inter-being' with nature; they tell us of the mystery of the world we inhabit, which they know to be everywhere sustained and saturated with divine presence; they tell us of the necessity of profound respect for everything that lives and happens; they tell us of a peace that is the birthright of all those who honor the Great Web of Life; they tell us of the urgency of humility before the majesty of the universe; they tell us again and again of the depth of our responsibility as human beings to be guardians of the natural world. 'All life is equal,' Oren Lyons, chief of the Onondaga, informed the United Nations in 1977. 'We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are after all a mere part of the Creation . . . We must continue to understand where we are . . . We stand between the mountain and the ant . . . as part and parcel of the Creation. It is our responsibility, since we have been given the minds to take care of these things.'
"Such a radical, egalitarian vision not only reverses the arrogance of modern materialism but also implicitly challenges the world- and body-denying mysticisms and their often elitist and hierarchical modes of transmission that were to develop later. My own belief is that as consciousness of the Mother grows in our culture, we will increasingly turn to our ancestors for guidance on how to live with her and in her and for help in developing new egalitarian and 'tribal' forms of transmission. We cannot go back to a tribal world, but we have many necessary lessons to learn from its 'voices' and its humble practice.”
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