The Two Paths: Survival and Extinction
Greed and death, or generosity/gratitude and life. It really is that simple.
Thomas Banyacya, Jr. was the last Hopi Messenger of the 4th World. He died in 1999, at nearly 90 years old.
His job, while alive, was simple: to share the Hopi Prophecy regarding the end of the 4th World with people who were willing to listen.
My husband was one of those people. He was able to hear Mr. Banyacya share that prophecy as he was meant to do so, orally, in person.
“The time has come to join in meaningful action. Destruction of all land and life is taking place and accelerating at a rapid pace. Our native land is continuing to be torn apart and raped of its sacredness by the corporate powers of this nation. We do have an alternative to this. Mankind has a chance to change the direction of this movement, do a roundabout turn, and move in the direction of peace, harmony, and respect for land and life. The time is right now. Later will be too late.” —Thomas Banyacya speaking to the United Nations, 1992
I did not hear Mr. Banyacya speak, nor am I Hopi, so it is not my place to share the prophecy. I cannot be entrusted to represent it accurately. But I would like to share what I understood from it, how it guides my life.
My understanding is that, at some time in the past, the human race’s journey split into two paths, two lines which mostly parallel each other in these last days of the 4th world. One of these lines is very thick and strong, representing modern Western colonial society, global capitalism, technological domination and exploitation of nature.
The other is a thin line, representing the traditional, indigenous way of life.
There are 3 bridges between the two lines, opportunities for people living in one lifeway to change to the other.
Mr. Banyacya told my husband and others with him that we are now in the time of the last bridge. I don’t know how long “now” lasts. It’s been nearly 30 years since Mr. Banyacya made the journey. But I hope we are still there. I hope that “now” has not passed.
Because after the third bridge, the thick line of modern technological civilization begins to stutter. First it becomes dashes, then dots.
And then it ends.
The line representing the traditional Hopi way of life, while never as strong or dominant, continues past the 3rd bridge indefinitely.
These lines represent to me two means of achieving security: greed and generosity/gratitude.
Greed is born of civilization, which itself is born of large-scale grain agriculture, and it requires the illusions of separation and self-sufficiency to flourish.
The agricultural production of grain on a large-scale made possible the first hoarding and accumulation of wealth. A source of food which doesn’t immediately expire but can be stored up, even for years, means that whoever controls that food possesses power over others.
This made necessary the creation of priests, laws, and kings to control the wider community so that a few people could hoard that wealth, keep it under lock and key, and exploit its control. It also allowed the enslavement of millions to labor producing the grain, so that a small few might live in luxury.
Fast forward to the present and the existence of the nation-state, police, religious ideology used to control human bodies, and global capitalism.
Today wealth is only rarely found in food, more often in more virtual forms of so-called value which practically enslave millions to a system keeping them forever in debt, laboring in jobs where they are exploited, dying from lack of access to health care, clean water, decent food, shelter, frightened and miserable.
Generosity and gratitude, on the other hand, are born of a radical embrace of reality, namely, the biological fact that one can only be as healthy and secure as one’s community. That there is no such thing as self-sufficiency. Everyone needs others to survive. We are not separate from our community, but necessary to it, and vice versa.
In traditional indigenous societies (not those which became empires) the hoarding of wealth was frowned upon and cultural norms prevented it. “Giveaways” —for celebration, mourning, gratitude—provided a way for excess goods acquired by one household to be redistributed to the community as a whole, rather than hoarded by individuals, preventing centralization of power and class disparity.
By framing this redistribution as a giveaway, societies cultivated generosity and gratitude as sacred communal values.
“When nature became owned, it forced systems to create unnatural laws to control people and nature.” —Thomas Banyacya, Jr.
The development of greed evidenced by the hoarding of food makes perfect instinctual sense but absolutely no rational sense.
Animals have evolved to see prey—food—as inconsistently available in the natural world, and therefore its acquisition an opportunity not to be missed. If the wild world brushes up against the domesticated world, illogical behavior can then ensue.
When my husband and I interned on a farm in Loveland, Colorado, we witnessed this first hand. A coyote broke into our chicken coop and killed 21 chickens in a night—far more than he could possibly eat. Obviously a coyote doesn’t have refrigeration or another way to preserve the chickens until he’s hungry again, so his “hoarding” was wasteful. To me his behavior made no sense.
My farm director explained.
In the wild, in its natural state, when a coyote encounters easy prey, he takes it because he doesn’t know when he’ll eat again. In the wild, he would almost never have the opportunity to kill and acquire more than he could eat. While a coyote attacked and ate one animal in a herd or flock, the others would likely escape.
But a chicken can’t escape from a locked coop. Ergo, the coyote nonsensically became greedy, killing more than he needed or could use.
We have seen the same thing on our farm, when a bear broke into a coop and killed a bunch of chickens in one night, but left most of their carcasses behind. In the wild, he would never encounter such a buffet, so he had no “shut-off” mechanism telling him he didn’t need to keep killing.
As a species, it would seem, we still have not developed a rational “shut-off” mechanism.
The development of large-scale grain agriculture created the illogical and irrational idea that instinctual greed and hoarding provide security.
Before that development, and outside of it, societies found security in their relationships with one another, in an egalitarian, interdependent life. Those societies created sufficient security for their people that a “shut-off” point wasn’t needed because individuals were acting on reason rather than instinct.
These are, to me, the two paths from which we have to choose.
We can continue on the path civilization is built and premised upon, the hoarding and control of resources as wealth to provide us lasting security.
Or we can return to our natural state of recognizing that generosity and gratitude—greed’s opposite—provide us security through interdependence with our community and the Earth.
“Hopi and other Native spiritual leaders are greatly concerned with the conditions of our Mother Earth. They have watched the white brothers systematically destroy the Native peoples as they did natural resources. According to our beliefs and prophecies, if this destruction continues, man’s existence on this world will soon be ended.” —Thomas Banyacya, Jr., speaking to the United Nations, 1992
Both ways of being exist on the dominant line, but they are forever at odds with one another. Capitalists fear and work to destroy traditional indigenous societies, primitivists, collectivists and socialists because they subconsciously recognizes that their way of being has no use for greed and therefore cannot be pressed into its service. One 19th Century American went so far as to describe “Indians” as “insufficiently greedy,”
Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century British intellectual, originally coined TINA, “there is no alternative,” to defend classical liberalism and free markets. In the 1980s, the term gained notoriety in politics, notably used by Margaret Thatcher to defend free-market policies. When I was an economic justice activist in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the forces of globalization of capital used this motto to justify their wholesale theft of the commons.
This is a lie, of course. Propaganda spewed to frighten sane people into submission to a system which robs them of their lives in exchange for their survival.
It is also a lure for lemmings. Everyone cannot become a billionaire when the very idea of wealth requires theft of the commons, and the violent prevention of access to resources by all but a select few. There is no such thing as infinite growth in a closed system, which the Earth is.
There is an alternative, one which far pre-dates so-called civilization and which still exists.
If the third bridge still stands we must cross to the non-dominant line, the one which continues indefinitely, not only because it is morally right (greed creates wars, famines and untold suffering; generosity ameliorates suffering), but because the greed-based world is headed off a cliff.
The survival of the species literally demands we abandon greed as a source of security and instead return to one another. There is no time to waste. The cliff grows closer hourly, and the bridge is closing.
“Man must learn to serve man and share freely from now on. We must bring back the level of life where land is free, water is free, there are no boundaries and there is freedom of spiritual understanding.” —Thomas Banyacya, Jr.
In every decision, let generosity and gratitude be your guides, for they will not fail you. Resist greed as a source of security with every fiber of your being.
Val's husband here, Mark. I was honored to meet Mr. Banyacya in the spring of 1991, on Shoshone land next to the Nevada Test Site west of Las Vegas. If he knew what the third bridge was, he did not share with us.
All of us assembled to hear his talk speculated on what the third bridge might be.
35 years later and I feel fairly confident the third bridge is the internet/digital world. This allowed many people access to ideas especially in the earlier years of the internet.
Moving into this so called artificial intelligence (AI) realm of the civilized world I think puts that exchange of ideas behind us now as AI is just another colonizing force attempting to take over the final vestiges of relationship civilized humans have with the natural world.
Civilized people are being taught to trust a very narrow spectrum of corrupted information and to distrust their senses, their 2 million year old brain and heart which knows better. Civilization was always precarious and its sustainability rested on its ability to constantly exploit and rape other lands and people AI is cementing civilization's own demise.
Mr. Banyacya told us when the blue star appears to the naked eye, the 5th World will be ushered in. Another messenger will be born to the Hopi people and traditional ways, as enumerated by Val, will continue.
Thank you so much, Val, for this profound reminder of where we are headed and what we must do as told us in the Hopi Prophecy and the words of Thomas Banyacya. I wish this could be spread far and wide across the land and the world. With the insane increase of ever powerful weapons of destruction and wars of profit for those few, it does not feel like we, the life loving collective, have very much time.
The Indigenous peoples hold so much of Earth's wisdom! In the face of the West and continuous US aggressions for oil/profit, I think of the Iranian spiritual teachings and the fatwa all of these years against building nuclear bombs. What will happen there now, under existential threat, I do not know.
I wanted to share this article on the U'wa Tribe in Amazonian Columbia. This is part of their declaration issued in 1997: https://www.lifegate.com/uwa-resistance
"... Respect for that which is alive and that which is not alive, for the known and for the “unknown” is part of our law: Our mission in the world is to narrate it, sing it, and to fulfill this law in order to maintain the equilibrium of our universe...."
"We know that the Riowa (non-U’wa) have put a price on all that is alive, even the stone itself, he trades with his own blood and he wants us to do the same with our sacred territory, with ruiria, the blood of the earth which they call petroleum …All the economic offers for what is sacred to us, like the earth and its blood, are an insult to our ears and a bribe to our beliefs … From us, there will be no betrayal of our Mother Earth... Neither will we betray the pride of our ancestors, because our land is sacred and everything in it is sacred. If to defend life we have to give our own, we will do it."