Closing the Circle

First, let me thank you for having come thus far with me on the Journey through my Nine Directions.  In closing this exercise, I wish to reiterate that the elements and applications herein represent my personal understanding of them. 

Historically, the ceremonial traditions of America’s Indigenous Peoples have recognized Seven Directions.   As I have come to understand them (The East, South, West, North, Mother Earth, Father Sun and Creator), are acknowledged in their Medicine Wheel practices.  They are recognized as energies, expressed through those metaphors, which are both external and internal to ceremonial participants. 

To those traditional Seven, I have added two Directions, and rank them as co-equal partners with the traditional Seven, this in service to my continuing inner journey to Self Knowledge.  They are, as you have seen if you have followed these comments from the outset, All My Relations and The Void.  I acknowledge these additions as a significant departure from traditional practices. 

However,  in no way should they be taken as representative of any specific practice (though I borrow liberally from several), as I see them being appropriate metaphors that apply to the basic concept of my “directional insights.”  I do so for the purpose of Self-Awareness, and its hoped for attendant behavior, i.e., a Self Actualized Hu-Man Being.  In short, they are each components of what I aspire to in my Spiritual Life.

A significant element of that Spiritual life and its pursuits has been via the Red Road.  To be clear though, my Directions are not an Indigenous practice.   For my purposes, they are the Directions that I use for Ceremonies.  

A Ceremonial Application of the Nine Directions

It is my experience – in feeling, thinking about, and working with The 9, that I come closest to experiencing my life as them  when I understand them as me in Ceremony.  For me, my Ceremony opens onto a profound relationship with each of the Directions, and with them as the whole me.  Seeing that multifaceted personage offers me a glimpse of Who I truly Am.   Consequently, it is in Ceremony that I feel myself most become the All That Is, which I see as the end result of the quest to “Know Myself.” 

While I have come to this conclusion, in part, through my understanding of the Medicine Wheel, these Nine Directions do not rely solely on those Indigenous traditions.  They also are drawn from elements, applications and the nomenclature found in ancient Egyptian and Greek rites, widely acknowledged, ages old Wisdom, Gnostic and Pagan teachings and New Age beliefs – along with a smattering of contemporary physics and my own astrological knowledge.

The avowed purpose of The Harmonic Concordance Blog is to provide a platform for our “Family of Voices” to share the knowledge and practices which they have found to be of practical use in their own Spiritual Quests.  The Nine Directions are one of the practices I apply in my own Quest.  I offer it here on the Concordance Blog in hope that doing so may contribute to expanding our collective Spiritual Literacy. 

Finally, may I share the comment with which we end all of our own Ceremonies in our backyard Medicine Wheel (pictured above):

“The Circle is open, but never broken.”

In Gratitude and the ONE Heart,
Johnny Mirehiel

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