Awakening Spirits by Tom Brown Jr. presents a unique perspective on religions. The book tells the story of how Tom’s teacher, Stalking Wolf, came upon a simple truth of all religions. The vision of this truth was passed down to him from his great-grandfather Coyote Thunder who had interacted with the white man’s religions and as a result saw that there was something beyond the ceremonies and rituals of all religions. Stalking Wolf’s philosophy is best depicted through the story of “hairs”. In the story there is a man who wishes to have the powers of a shaman so he captures a sorcerer and in exchange for releasing him he would be given the demon that does the work of a shaman. The sorcerer agreed only as long as the man could keep the demon busy at all times, otherwise the demon would eat him. The man agreed and the demon he received would accomplish his tasks as soon as he demanded them. As he ran out of tasks to give the demon it grew bigger and meaner. Luckily the man found a shaman that helped him. The shaman gave him a curly hair to give to the demon with the task of straightening it out. The man did so and the demon straightened the hair only to find that it would curl right back up. The demon then shrank in size and became tame again.
The demon here represents the physical mind. The hair represents the crutches that man uses to distract the physical mind in order to access the pure or spiritual mind. Crutches are things such as meditations, rituals, ceremonies, or hymns. In place of hairs that are dependent on things occurring outside of the self such as having a ritual performed in the right way or a hymn sung in the right way, Stalking Wolf suggests internal hairs. Internal hairs could be things such as focusing on the breath, anything that is solely reliant on the self. Eventually though, even these are to be discarded in replace of the ultimately simple “choice” to enter into the pure or spiritual mind.
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