Rick,

In a New-Age approach to spirituality, a lot of people have picked up Black Elk Speaks and tried to take the words, translated by Black Elk's son and others, mediated by John Niehardt, and take meaning for their own lives. It can be seen generally as a rather pretentious approach, to appropriate someone else's spirituality. I see people trying to take shortcuts to what they see as an admirable world view and a what they naively see as a innocent or unburdoned (back to Eden?) approach to the world. In fact, many religions have what can be viewed as an "environmetnal component" and it might serve better if they look within their own culture and religion to find those things.

You will find that American Indians hold a wide range of opinions regarding Black Elk and his visions, and Neihardt's book is not the only source of those kinds of visions. It isn't a dead end, though for many EuroAmericans it is seen in a "historic" chapter in America's story. Different cultures and portions of society view dreams differently in level of importance. Waking or sleeping dreams or visions, as described in stories and ethnographic and anthropological texts can be taken in any number of ways, depending on who does the dreaming. I take power naps when I'm working on difficult papers because after what amounts to a brief period of deep relaxation and meditation, my thoughts sort themselves out and my task becomes clearer. I consider those times vital to how I think and work. Dreams that occur during long periods of sleep (REM) are what keep humans healthy and sane. Dismissing dreams and visions as a source of inspiration in any age is short-sighted.

What makes ideas formed during "conscious" time any more important than those that come from the unconscious? Some might say that the dreams are more honest, if reported honestly, than the things that men dream up in their waking hours. I can not represent the entire field of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in this thread, and the history of the interpretations of dreams, but there is much more to this than Freud and his take on dreams in the power structure of the Victorian-era.

In long (since "in short" rarely applies to my posts!) I'm not willing to toss religions because of anything to do with the origins of the content. Whether the content comes from human dreams, from spider prints on the sand, or from stories told by speaking rocks and animals, those origin stories of a people's spirituality are all important. I think the Bible is one of the most heavily mediated and altered (for purely political reasons) texts on the face of the planet so must point out the obvious--anyone using THAT as the "standard" of how a religion should operate is already starting with a crumbling foundation to their argument.

Wolfgang was responding to Little Hawk when he said Of course you can insist that you use any word in a completely different sense than dictionaries do. But by using the same word for different things the differences do not go away they only get blurred. Using only the word 'apples' for e.g. apples and oranges will not make differences disappear.

There isn't enough time this afternoon to give that marvelous observation the attention it diserves. This is getting to the core of so much human understanding and at the same time lack of understanding. It's the comprehension of the baggage that our languages contain, and the wonderful world of nuance. I will simply remark here that this field of Semiotics, of understanding the sign and the signifier and the signified (see about de Saussure here and here), has puzzled and intrigued scholars for decades, and has helped with a great deal of understanding of cultures "Other" than the one of reference (by whomever is casting their gaze at Others). Ruth Underhill, the famous ethnologist who wrote, among other things, Papago Woman, has a marvelous story that works here. Her "informant" was Maria Chona, a woman of what is now called the Tohono O'odham, who tired of so many questions from Underhill. At one point she told Underhill "the song is very short because we understand so much." In other words, the few words of the song contain all of the vital meaning necessary to convey everything needed, since all of the people who speak the language understand the concepts behind the few words. We can't do that in the global culture in which we live today. Just because so many of us speak English doesn't mean that the same pictures pop into all of our heads with the speaking or writing of certain words.

What "image" pops into your head with these words?

Tree-- what do you "see?"

Automobile-- what kind of vehicle pops into your head?

House--   what constitutes a house?

River-- how much water, or does water even flow in it year round?

Green-- what shade of green?

Spicy-- I think you get my drift--what constitutes "spicy" for you may not be the same for anyone else on this list.

Religion-- what practices constitute being called a religion?

god-- now there's a tough one.

SRS