Science, Indigenous Wisdom, and Jesus -Chapter 3, Part 2
The Ancient Blueprint I Found in Indigenous Wisdom
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up!
You are in Chapter 3, Part 2, The Ancient Blueprint I Found in Indigenous Wisdom
Here are all Chapter 3 posts:
Chapter 3, Part 1 — Introduction and Transforming Evil – By Connecting the Good
Chapter 3, Part 2 — The Ancient Blueprint I Found in Indigenous Wisdom
Chapter 3, Part 3 — Facing My Shadow and Listening to the Voice of the Heart of Love
Are you trying to figure out Where This is All Going? Read an overview of the Symbiotic Culture Strategy — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.
Voice-overs are now at the top of each of my posts for anyone who doesn’t have the time to sit and read!
Also, find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on
Spotify and Apple!
Previously, at the end of Chapter 3, Part 1:
When you connect the light of the Transcendent, what was once a disorganized, chaotic “committee” of voices pulling in all directions without a sense of purpose or focus can be unified under the light of a higher-order Reality.
Meanwhile, my experiences meditating with the Tibetan monk gave some structure to my “out of this world” experiences that had begun when I was twelve. I recognized there seemed to be systematic practices to evoke those experiences and use them to grow.
I sensed my experiences were preparing me for something, but for what?
What they were preparing me for — at least in the short run — was a deeper understanding of applying the Transcendent in action, which came in a completely surprising way.
Chapter 3: Science, Indigenous Wisdom, and Jesus, Part 2
The Ancient Blueprint I Found in Indigenous Wisdom
One of the teachers I met at this time was a student of Zen and indigenous wisdom. He was the one who identified my experience at age twelve as a “kundalini awakening,” a term I had never heard of. As someone conversant with several parallel religious and spiritual traditions, at the time, he was the perfect mentor to help me make connections leading to the next steps.
It was through him that I met one of the most significant teachers in my life, Doña Catalina Mendoza. Doña Catalina was a traditional Curandera or Shaman — medicine woman — who simultaneously embraced indigenous Aztec wisdom and devout Christianity.
Her being and presence taught me more about the meaning of spiritual unfoldment than any book or workshop.
I learned that spiritual authority doesn’t come from titles or worldly positions, the number of books you’ve written or read, being able to memorize holy scripture, being pious,
or even doing good works.
It comes from humility, embodying the Transcendent, being of service to humanity,
and walking your talk.
The more your life is about service, exemplifying self-giving rather than self-serving love, the more you demonstrate your true spiritual credentials! As Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount, reflecting the Ancient Blueprint, in Matthew 7:20, “you will recognize (know) them by their fruits (spiritual qualities AND actions.)
My journey, which can best be described as an “initiation,” began one Sunday when I was invited to join a small gathering at Doña Catalina’s ranch in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico, one hour south of San Diego. Her ranch consisted of several acres of arid land with a well for water, and her house had dirt floors, no electricity, wood fires for cooking, and gas lanterns for light.
In the same region as her home was Mount Cuchuma, where native peoples had performed ceremonies for 5,000 years.
Since that Sunday was her “day off,” we had a relaxing time under the pepper tree with her, her children, and her grandkids. I discovered she had received her “calling” as a thirteen-year-old in Guadalajara. She shared how God spoke to her in a church and told her she would become a healer.
When I met her, she was 57, an herbalist and intuitive healer via a “discarnate” physician, Don Arturo. Through God and Don Arturo, she would receive instructions for herbal treatments for her patients. She used the branches of the pepper tree for healing, invoking traditional Christian prayers, asking God for help, “emptying herself,” and opening to the highest mission to be of service.
After returning home from my first visit, I felt very tired, so I went to sleep early. That night, I had a series of dreams.
The first dream was with Doña Catalina, where I was supposed to lead her on a path through a forest to get to a natural spring pool. We got there and saw many indigenous women bobbing up and down in a beautiful natural spring that bubbled up along a green forested edge. These women were ecstatic. White light glowed upwards from the bottom of the water while illuminating the whole setting. I could see that Doña Catalina was full of peace and joy. It felt like a direct “transmission” of the same experience.
In the second dream, I found myself in some high mountaintop cabin. Four young men and women had just returned from an adventure of a lifetime, and they somehow transmitted directly to me that they had found God. It wasn’t in what they said, but I was able to participate with them in their direct experience.
The last dream was of me sitting in front of a table with a large poster board with a series of diagrams. I was explaining the meaning of the charts to my brothers. The charts showed the origin of the universe and where we all came from, explained why we are here on Earth, why I am on Earth, and finally, showed a beautiful potential future (the first dream in my life where I saw color), though fraught with collective suffering to get there. More on this later.
Needless to say, those dreams made me pay attention, like they were a direct connection to a deeper reality, guiding me to my next step. They were so vivid that I literally awoke with a sense of purpose and peace. I sensed that it would take decades for me to make these powerful visions real.
How could I begin to honor these dreams? I had an unusual thought — I needed to spend some time in the cave on top of the small hill across from Doña Catalina’s property. Looking back, I recognize this idea “made no sense” from a linear standpoint.
It was the prompting of my Conscience and Authentic Self that had me ask Doña Catalina for her blessings for what could be described as my “initiatory vision quest.”
After she said yes, I packed a few belongings and drove to her land. I started up the mountain with only the clothes on my back and several water bottles for what ended up being three days of silence, fasting, meditation, and prayers. It was an isolated location — only sagebrush, lizards, chipmunks, ravens, and a local hawk.
When I emerged from my cave, I returned to Doña Catalina’s place, where I saw her sitting there as she usually did. She told me that while I was in the cave, a cloud settled over the mountain. She said that she had lived there for more than thirty years and that had never happened before. I asked what it meant to her, and she said that I must have had a “big healing.”
As a trained scientist who’d just finished a Master of Science in Biology, this was a bit of a stretch!
Again, in retrospect, I intentionally chose an experience that would catapult me outside the “ordinary” as a way to integrate the two worlds I found myself straddling – the Transcendent that I had accessed through my luminous experience and modern culture that deified science and dismissed religion/spirituality as obsolete forms of superstition.
At the time, and maybe more so today, we were living in an immersive Culture of Separation, a world of dualities that had yet to be integrated: science and religion, spiritual and material, masculine and feminine, western vs. indigenous. Despite my childhood experiences, I still identified as a “scientist.” That was a good thing because it gave me permission to observe, even as I was immersed in Doña Catalina’s unfamiliar world.
There is a term “liminality” – characterized by ambiguity, openness, and uncertainty -- that has been used to describe the initiation rite of passage of boys to men in indigenous cultures. That state of leaving the comforting status of childhood into danger and the unknown is a space where anything can happen.
That’s why I refer to my time with Catalina as an initiation – a disorienting experience that helped reorient me toward the path of service and community I’ve followed ever since.
I guess I must have been ready for this kind of stretching. After returning home, I had made my mind up: With her permission, I would move down to Doña Catalina’s property. I sold everything I owned then except my car, set up a tent on her land, and became her apprentice.
I lived on the land for about a year. I slept in a small tent, which was challenging during the winter when it got cold enough to snow and the fierce wind cut like a razor. There was no running water, just a well with sweet and clear water. There were no phones or electricity.
Taking a shower was quite an experience. First, you had to get the water from the well in a bucket. Then, you had to chop wood and make a fire to heat the water. Then, you would go into a building like a barn and get undressed and wet yourself, then soap and shampoo, and then finally rinse. Imagine doing that when it was 26 degrees!
While this doesn’t exactly compare to an indigenous youth being released into the wilderness without food or blanket, in many ways, I did find myself in a “world between worlds.” For one thing, I didn’t speak Spanish and had to learn quickly in order to communicate: How do I take a shower? Where's the wood that you want me to cut? How can I help you in the healing room?
Nothing I had learned in any classroom could have prepared me for this immersive experience in a completely unfamiliar worldview and culture.
And this experience changed my life and perspective in several ways. What did I learn in my year with Doña Catalina? I learned some of the information she knew, including methods of healing using literally hundreds of herbs, intuitive and spiritual healing, and what some may call “laying on of hands.”
By the way, you may be asking if I “believed in” any of this. As a scientist, I merely observed what to me was beyond “belief” or “non-belief.” It certainly expanded me beyond what I thought I knew!
And …what Doña Catalina “did” was less relevant to me than who she was.
Beyond any theoretical or even practical knowledge, what impacted me most was the direct experience of living with a human being who loved God and was
totally committed to being of service to others.
I received a direct experience of the essence of true religion and spirituality — Love and Service. It was all about connecting the Vertical/Transcendent and the Horizontal/Immanent nature of Reality — of the Logos.
The essence of my “initiation” was to be with someone who embodied the Transcendent. The fact that Catalina was both indigenous and Christian helped me see how completely different religious/spiritual systems, both reflecting the Ancient Blueprint, could harmonize in the service of others.
She never charged for healing. People, mostly the very poor, including the indigenous people from the surrounding mountains, came to heal their minds, body, and spirit. It was so heartwarming to see them bring a gift as an exchange for healing. They brought eggs, produce, milk, a pig, and many other gifts.
It was notable that these poor people weren’t “paying” for the healings as a form of barter, but rather, these gifts were given in a free exchange of energy and love —
just as Catalina was doing.
While I never attempted to do a scientific study of her work, I observed carefully with all my heart AND mind. She would begin her healing sessions as a Christian by praying to the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. She would ask God to make her an empty vessel so the Spirit could “fill” her, enabling her to help the person directly.
I saw many spontaneous healings, day in and day out, things my scientific mind could barely comprehend. My heart understood, however. Living with someone who allowed themselves to be an embodiment of God can have a direct effect on us, like osmosis — a direct transmission.
Around Doña Catalina, the strange became normal. Sometimes, in the healing room, I would have experiences like the sound of a gunshot going off inside my head. Other times, I would be flooded with feelings of love, joy, and even sadness. I learned directly what it means to have a heart for serving others, for accepting the suffering happening in others and the world, something others might call “sacrifice.”
Yes, living this way does require giving up some of the habits and preoccupations of our materialistic, everyday lives. However, I found the joy that comes from simple service and connecting with others authentically becomes its own gratifying spiritual pleasure.
So, while the world tends to think of someone like her or Mother Theresa as being selfless, we need to shift our frame of reference. A person who gladly experiences the joy of serving God by being of service to others in daily life is really the most self-centered person in the world!
Let me explain.
As we go through our daily activities, we tend to forget there is a place within us where acting out of love and compassion is normal and maybe the source of life’s most enduring pleasure. Mahatma Gandhi, who did much of his work in direct service to poor villagers, spoke of this.
A journalist once asked him if his purpose in serving the poor was altruistic. Gandhi replied:
“Not at all. I am here to serve no one else but myself, to find my own self and God realization through the service of these village folk.”
This certainly rang true to me as I observed Doña Catalina’s work and how I felt in her presence — as we help others, we are really helping ourselves. Every kindness, every act of compassion, every word spoken with love feeds us.
Why this is so reminds me again of St. Maximus the Confessor, the 7th century Orthodox Christian holy man discussed earlier, with his mission statement that bears repeating — to “Gather the Cosmos in Love.”
He described how we need to connect to the Transcendental Reality of the Logos, or Cosmic Love, to be able to practice the Virtues of kindness, compassion, forgiveness, charity, and so on.
But he also said that when we practice any single virtue, we access Cosmic Love.
It’s such a beautiful, virtuous circle of Reality where the Transcendent can become immanent as Virtues within us, but what becomes immanent within us can also connect us back to the Transcendent.
I would go as far as to describe Virtues as the “interface” between the
Transcendent and our day-to-day world.
The individual virtues, or what St. Maximus called Logoi, are “Transcendent energies” and reflect the cosmic organizing principle, the pattern of the Ancient Blueprint — they describe how the cosmos is an ordered, non-random pattern, even with non-material virtues. The virtues are really “fractals” of the Logos, fractals of Cosmic Love, the energies of the Transcendent — and serve to bring order to the chaotic drives within each human personality and heart and to the community in which we live.
I use the word fractal as it is the best way I can describe how I observed this to operate within myself. A fractal is a pattern that repeats itself at different sizes or scales. If you zoom in, you will see the same pattern repeatedly, and if you zoom out, you will also see the same pattern.
Back to the story!
I had many vivid dreams during my time with Doña Catalina, and one was life-changing, as much for her as for me. In this dream, I watched a group of people at the base of a tall sheer cliff that went straight up. At one point, I watched a woman in the group float straight up with the cliff near her.
When I told Doña Catalina about the dream, she said rather matter-of-factly that it meant she — Catalina — would die in six months. I had never encountered anyone who knew in advance the time of their death, and I thought it was an odd comment. It turned out to be accurate, though. She died six months later at her home.
During the last two weeks of her life, she ate very little and stayed in bed. She shared her bedroom with some grandchildren in two other beds, and this became the scene of our final vigil as family and extended family arrived. On the last day of her life, I returned to my tent and found many scorpions and a few black widow spiders on the tent’s surface. This certainly heightened my sense of impending death.
As I lay down to sleep, I had a waking vision of Doña Catalina as a large rainbow-colored butterfly landing gently on my tent, conveying a sense of peace, and I knew her time was at hand.
On her last day, the room was crowded with the people she had touched, all praying for her as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Towards the end, I was next to her and noticed her body was becoming very cool to the touch. Only her upper body had any warmth to it. At the moment she took her last breath, I was standing beside her and touched her forehead.
I had a profound experience that is as vivid right now as it was that very day. In my vision, I saw a glowing cross of light. Then, another line was added, what now looked like a glowing asterisk of white light. This light began expanding dramatically, and I saw the whole room fill with light. I burst into tears of deep emotion, as did everyone in the room, wailing for this beautiful person.
For three days after her passing, I walked around in a state of bliss, peace, and joy. While I can’t claim to have witnessed what happens after death, I felt myself vicariously experiencing her crossing from this world to the next. It was blissful and pure light. It was at that moment that I lost the sting of my own mortality and eventual death.
It was a strange, and yet peaceful, feeling. My one-year experience of her life and death revealed more pieces of the mystery to me. What began in Chapter One, being struck by “enlightening,” led to one level of embodiment of the Transcendent. That naturally led to the next level described in Chapter Two, where I could see the embodiment now within Creation, within nature directly.
Now, getting an authentic experience of how a woman like Dona Catalina, both Indigenous and Christian, became a demonstration of how the Transcendent embodied in a human being was the next step!
Experiencing Doña Catalina as a living, breathing expression of Cosmic Love set me on course for my life’s work as a space-holder and convener of symbiotic culture.
This unfolding tale you are telling couldn’t be better timed for the moment I inhabit in my own unfolding. Know that it touches powerfully --In many ways, but today most of all in the openness, the teachability, the willingness to see across and through these would be variants of science and spirit that you brought to these rich experiences. Mahalo Richard!