New Ghost Dance 2

I have read a lot about the Ghost, or Spirit, Dance which was the teaching spread by Wovoka, or Jack Wilson.
My interest started a long, long, long time ago when I had first discovered that religion was not only what was on display in the "conservatories" of religion, nor had the horticulture of the age rendered all religious growth coppiced and pollarded, or pruned into static topiaries!

I had discovered Religions of the Oppressed by Lanternari, and had realized that religion, far from being well-defined and systematized, was on the loose in the world and was growing like some mad kudzu everywhere!

So when I came across Mooney's account of The Ghost Dance, I was enthralled. I never forgot the recounting of the story of the Prophet showing two men an old black hat: one saw an old black hat, the other saw the universe within the ambit of the sweaty brim! How different - I thought - may the Truth be to two different men!

Later, when Clarence Thomas was confronting Anita Hill, I saw the same thing. One day it came to me that both individuals were telling the Truth! I was amazed, truly amazed.
I was amazed at the set-up: we have two people who contradict each other. In our present scheme of things, one has to be telling the truth, and the other mistaken or lying. Typically, the one we feel political sympathy with is telling the truth.
The realization that both were telling the truth was stunning, not so much for the nature of truth that it revealed, but for the duplicitous nature of the set-up that we all mindlessly accept. We will never grasp truth as long as we start our inquiry beforehand by stating that the assumptions involved in the set-up are themselves already true.

(Mrs. Thomas recently placed a call asking Ms. Hill to confess to her misleading  testimony, and this was debated by our media representatives, which indicates that we mostly still believe in the set-up. The judicial system has a certain manner of conducting its business based on this type of winner-take-all logic which works for the judicial system, but this does not imply we extend the paradigm beyond the court room.)

I found that realizing both told the truth forced me to not take sides and to be silent, for what really could I add to the situation? Not a bloody thing! There was nothing to analyze if both sides are indeed telling the truth.
The fact that the two truths seem so disparate is our problem, not a problem of Truth itself.

I do not attack Truth. I do attack the way we deal with it. Truth does not lead to discord, it leads to amity. Truth does not lead to division, it leads to community. And Truth makes for a congress - a coming together - that is a concert of trust.

Truth will make us all Peace-makers. We are yet a long way from that.

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