No one has posited that “spiritual matters are about a circle”.
All I have said, as far as circles go, is that there is a truth, to which we all can arrive, and to which none of us has the right to re-define.
Thus, you don’t get to say that you now are going to declare this to be a circle.
http://wiki.urbandead.com/images/1/1c/Square.gif
Nor do you get to say that it’s the capital of France.
We are all confined by the Truth. As well as logic and reason.
PR,
. How are you, old friend? Very well and happy, I hope.
. Your exploration of the circle and the square bring back meaningful memories for me. When my Lakota Sioux friends describe the clash of Indian and White cultures, they use the Circle and the Square to explain the extreme differences between the two.
. They have always seen the world as circular, continuous, and eternal. When the white men came, they brought them a “Book”, in rectangular shape. They built square houses, and schoolhouses, with rectangular doors and windows, and handed them more square or rectangular books.
. They sat them down in square chairs at square desks and explained to them everything about the world in these terms. They wrote Treaties on rectangular sheets of paper, telling them how honest they were and what their intentions were. When they got the Indian people to sign these square pieces of paper, they promised them that as long as the grass shall grow and the wind shall blow, they would keep their promises in these Treaties, all of which were signed “In the year of our Lord, 1868… etc”
. They swore on their rectangular Bibles that their words were true, then promised to let the Indians live on Reservations drawn on more rectangular pieces of paper, showing them where their borders were, with square edges on the maps.
. Then they built prisons with bars at the windows, lines on more squares for them to look out of whenever they crossed the lines of the squares they drew on the maps. If they dared to cross these borders, they were “lined up” and shot square in the heart.
. They were beaten as children for speaking a single line of their own language, deprived of cereal which came in boxes, until they were good. Yes, the circle was round. It had no predetermined edges. The natural curvature of the rivers and the skies was not beautiful enough. The buffalo were not right for the land, so millions of them were slaughtered and cattle were brought in to live in square fields surrounded by barbed wire fences, strung from one corner of a pasture to another.
. To this very day, I know of Sioux Indians who are afraid to cross these lines for fear of the people who speak of the one who profess to believe in someone Who was nailed upon a cross of horizontal and vertical lines. The soldiers came in lines to enforce these ever-changing straight lines of the ever-shrinking reservations. The prisons are full of the people of the Circle. The ones who did not fit into the little boxes made by people of the Square…
.God bless us all. We dearly need it. May Wakan Tanka forgive us for our sins and help us to better understand each other. May He hasten the Day of the One Fold and the One Shepherd, the Sacred Hoop of all Nations…
. Mitakuye Oyasin (All my relations…) Aho!
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