Paul Ghost Horse is a Lakota ceremonial leader who lives in western NC and teaches and conducts ceremonies throughout the country. His spiritual grandfather is Lakota elder and author Wallace Black Elk, and he continues his family’s teaching tradition by sharing some wisdom with New Life Journal readers. We are honored to offer his words.

PGH: Years ago, when my grandfather was a young man, he went on a hill for hanblecheyapi (vision quest), crying for a vision, and an Eagle came to him. The Eagle gave him a song, and when songs are given to native people, it’s always given in ceremony. The song connects spirit to spirit; and so when the spirit gives us song, they don’t give it with words. They give it with sound, so the information is transferred from spirit to spirit, the spirit messenger of Creation to the spirit of human being, through the medium of sound vibration. So the Eagle came to my grandfather and gave him this song, and there are no words in this song because people fight wars over words and get into theological debate over meaning, but this song is a song of encouragement for the two-leggeds, so that they never give up in the struggle to become human beings. The Eagle said this song is going to fly around the world, and so this song has been sung in North and South America, in Europe and in Africa. It’s been sung in Hawaii and Russia. And it’s the song of the Eagle. There are no words to this song because it’s still a new song. It’s still in a pure state; it has not been contaminated with words and impressions about what it means.

As I was told: long ago, there was a people and they lived in a place of paradise. They were very happy with themselves, and they lived in the spirit of this garden. They had all they wanted to eat and they needed no clothes, and everything was fine. And the Spirit said, “Well, you can have anything in this garden you want, but don’t eat from my apple tree. This tree here: this one is mine. You can’t eat from this tree, but all the rest, they are yours.”

So the two-leggeds, being as they are, were attracted to that apple tree, so they ate from that tree. They blamed the snake and they blamed woman. But both man and woman were lured to that tree. The snake was an unfortunate bystander. So the people ate from that apple tree, and they had an understanding, they had a knowledge. They knew they wanted to start building, creating, they wanted to be like Creator. And the Creator was upset and chased them out of that garden for disobeying, so they left in pain and guilt.

But they left that place with new eyes to see and they traveled all around the world with that pain and with that guilt, and they passed it on to other people like a virus. All around the earth, passing it on from person to person. Many of them wandered in the desert and they prayed and prayed and a spirit came, a war spirit. They prayed to this war spirit, and it gave them success in battle. They learned technology, and they started drifting away from the earth. They started traveling around the earth, conquering other people.

This place where we live is Turtle Island. This is our paradise, this is our place, our Garden of Eden. The Creator never chased us out of the Garden of Eden. We have not one story in all our history of disobeying our creator and being punished. If something so important had happened to us, we would remember. Original sin, that is someone else’s story. It is not ours. These people who came with guilt on their soul, they passed that on to the people here and chased the people here out of the Garden of Eden. They came in pain and trashed our paradise. It is said that there is a holy land across the ocean, but this land here is holy and sacred and everything here is that paradise.
It is still here under the pavement! My Grandfather says that we are the sixth generation to live beyond the end of the world. Some people are talking about an Armageddon coming, almost with relish and enthusiasm. Six generations ago—seven generations now—the last of the free buffalo were killed and the People were put in concentration camps called reservations. Everyone was given a number, registration and pedigree. The prophecies were that we would be living in square houses and that the earth would be covered in stone, and so here we are living in that age now where there are roads everywhere and we can no longer drink from the earth to cleanse ourselves, and the air itself is dark and smoky. We are the sixth generation to live beyond the end of the world. And we are trying to find our way. We are trying to understand how to live in this life. The hunting is gone, so the new hunting is in jobs, and we live in debt. We are trying to figure it out, trying to find our way.

Everyone is born with an instruction in this life. As little children, we are still connected to that spirit. We are born with an instruction for what we are supposed to do in this world, the little puzzle that is our life and how it fits in place. And then we lose our way very shortly after because of the way we are raised in our society. All of us are damaged now by the way we are educated and because the food we eat is tortured and contaminated. This hurts our body and our spirit.

For thousands of years, we’ve been drifting away from creation and the original understanding of fire, rock, water and the green. Those are the four elements in the Lakota way of being. So we have drifted very far from that place. Where we are going, we don’t know.

We have prophecies, and they shoot off into the future like an arrow, but those things can be changed. Everything changes. There is an old Greek philosopher called Heraclitus who said, “All things are becoming.” There is an old Stones song that says, “All things shall pursue,” which means that everything changes. The only constant in the Lakota way of being is that everything is going to be different tomorrow. Everything changes. So we sit in the middle of the wheel; hochoka, we call it. That circle with the cross at the center. We sit in the center and watch the universe all around us changing from day to day in this kaleidoscope. Our grandmother, the Earth, how she is clothed: her dress is white, her dress is brown, her dress is covered with flowers, her dress is green and is ever-changing. And our Father in the sky: his robe is blue and he wears that crown of stars over his head. Knowledge and wisdom: that is the Earth and the Sky. Grandmother and Grandfather: they are one and the same thing. In Christianity there is a heavenly Father. But where is Mother? It is a motherless religion. The Catholics made Mary into Mother of God. So now who is God’s father? Jesus becomes son and father? Catholics carry the most guilt of all.

So when we are born into this creation, we have four parts of our human soul. In the English way, people ask what is a soul, what is a spirit? No one knows. They try to count the angels on the head of a pin. In the Lakota way, there are four parts of the human soul, and there are no words in the English language to describe those four parts. And I wonder what information has been lost in the European way of being, because those people were Earth People, too. Long time ago, they had their songs and their ceremonies, and they gave up their songs and their ceremonies for someone else’s. Someone came in and conquered them and convinced them that their way was better, their songs were better, their spiritual ways better, and then they passed that guilt of eating from that tree to new people. They were convinced that they disobeyed the creator too.

None of my people ever carried that sin. It was never part of our being. But it was given to us, and we don’t accept it. That’s not our history. Our way is the way of the fire, rock, water and the green. We have our seven ceremonies and four virtues. Buffalo Calf Woman came many, many generations ago and she brought the ceremonies and teachings that gave us the option of becoming human beings. We have a culture that had developed without a prison system because we had justice. We had no need for prisons. There was never such a thing as an orphan, we never threw our old people away in retirement centers because we valued them. We had a culture that seemed to have no government, yet everything was orderly. Most native cultures were matriarchal: the grandmother’s wisdom was respected by the people and had great influence. Men would hunt and fish and protect their territories, and they would come into camp, and in every home there was a woman. And the woman would say such and such happened while you were away and this and that needs to be done. The men would meet and say such and such happened while we were away and this and that needs to be done. So the men, they all felt good because they decided something.

So, that’s the way of balance. It was never a battle of sexes between the native people; that’s a contamination from across the ocean. The women did not want to be men and the men did not want to be women, but everybody had their own power and understanding. They were born a certain way and they learned the power of that way. We are all one, but once we are born, we are separate in the duality of life, male and female. Men and women each only see half the circle. Together, we have understanding.

The chununpa (pipe) is bowl and stem, male and female, and when you put them together, it’s a creation, a creation of the world, a creation of the universe.

NLJ: Thank you, Paul. You just talked about ways that native people understand and what people who have become disconnected from their lineage have lost. Many people are searching for those ways and desiring that connection to the Divine and to the world around us, that magical connection that makes the world more alive. Can you tell us the first steps for reclaiming that connection?

PGH: Well, I don’t think the way for most of us can be found in religion because in religion, there is dogma. You have to find it in spirit. A person can be spiritual and still religious, but it’s still in your spirit that you have to find this. You have to take the time to go inside. Start each day with a prayer, something so simple. Just observe this creation and look forward to this day. Give a little offering of tobacco or chocolate or a piece of your hair or something for when you’re beginning the day. Wonder about the adventure that’s going to be in front of you and the challenges, and ask for gentle teachings. Be conscious. I think the best way is to try to be conscious through your day in all the little adventures. Everything manifests from spirit and goes outward, so whatever your prayer is for the day, that’s how the day is going to unfold, as an answer. Whatever you ask for, whatever you project into the day, it’s going to start coming back. It’s like, you drop a pebble into a pond and the ripples go out, and in a little while, they bounce back. So you are waiting for these things to come back. Half of prayer is listening, so when you make that prayer for your day, what happens through the day is the listening part. And then at the end of the day, when you are lying safely in your bed and you review your day, you look at all of the successes and all of the little failures, and hopefully there are a few more successes than there are failures, but the failures are good because you will learn something. Failure is a good teacher. So you give thanks for that day.

When a human being is born, they are not complete until they take that first breath. You know, we come from the elements of the earth. It makes up our body. There is a spirit and there are angels that come and help us, and everybody has these spirits, these angels. They are with us, but very few people use them. Very few people ask them for help. Everybody seems to have somebody around them, maybe it’s a great grandmother or someone, that follows them around and kind of watches out for them. Some people are kind of dead to this, and they don’t realize something’s there, but most everybody has had the feeling that somebody has been present alongside them at certain key moments in their life. So we thank these spirits, these helpers that are near us, sometimes with little gifts, maybe sometimes give them a little food or something like that and encourage them and just say, “Thank you for watching over me.” So they help you to be conscious.

When we take that first breath with our life, we become something that has never existed before in the world. That person that is there looking back at you when you look at your driver’s license—that person has never existed before, and it has come into being, it’s living in this robe, this body made from the earth, for a short time.

You have to drop this robe back into the earth. There is another spiritual place, a spiritual dimension, a spiritual world that everyone goes to but you can’t take your body with you. You have to leave that behind because you can’t enter with your body. We live in a 3-D world, and the spirit place is a 4-D world. The 3-D has to be left behind and that one part moves into the next and how you cultivate that life, how conscious you are, determines how conscious your spirit is in that next life. We know this by the ceremonies. My grandfather was thrown in a crazy house for praying and healing, and my father was thrown in jail a number of times for praying in a land founded on freedom of religion. Back in 317 A.D., Constantine made Christianity a legal religion, supposedly free from persecution at that time. In 1978, Jimmy Carter passed the Freedom of Religion Act so native people can no longer be persecuted for praying. We can legally honor our young girls for becoming women. We can have give-away ceremonies again. We openly conduct our Sundance Ceremony.

So when people want to live their day with a consciousness and listening, that spirit will guide them. And maybe the European people will find their old songs again, because everybody’s family had their songs. Everybody’s village had those sacred songs that connected them to the Spirit. And those things haven’t disappeared from the earth; they are just kind of lost for now, and people have to find them again. All things have their song, and it just has to be dreamed again.
So, that was the short answer.

Look for future issues of New Life Journal, where we’ll share tradition of the Inipi, the Lakota sweat lodge, which Paul shared with our editor Erin Everett.

Back to New Life Journal..