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Remembering Our Purpose
 An Interview with Malidoma Somé 

By Sarah van Gilder

In the village, houses are built with entrances that are doorless. That is the first sign that the people have a very, very different sense of one another. When I go home and want to take a nap, there are some questions as to what is wrong with me. And if I want to spend even a little time by myself, everyone wonders if there’s something the matter with me. In the village, everything is at the same time private and public.

I don’t think that there is any need to create in the West the kind of community that there is in the indigenous world. But there is certainly a need to come closer together and to learn about each other sufficiently so as to bridge the gap that separates us.

Sarah: What you’re talking about goes to the very heart of Western culture. Privacy and freedom are held very dear to many people.

Malidoma: The sense of privacy people have in the West is a very lonely privacy; it is a very frightening privacy. The freedom that goes along with it is of pretty much the same nature; it is a freedom that is weighty, that is a burden.

Within the context of real community, privacy and freedom are not lost. Community provides a greater sense of freedom — a freedom based on a deep understanding of each individual’s purpose. When people lose their soul’s essence, they have to borrow the vision of some ideologist crippled with separatist visions of freedom.

Sarah: What do you think it would take to convince Westerners that it’s in their interest to give up some of that privacy and isolation?

Malidoma: Progress as it has been unfolding is excruciatingly painful to the individual; the individual can no longer afford to live by values such as the systematic accumulation of material goods as the yardstick by which to measure happiness.

The spiritual thirst that is latent in everybody can never come to a place of fulfillment unless people begin to think of each other as potential brothers and sisters. Otherwise, they can never reach on the inside the same level of wealth that they’ve reached outside.

In this case, the dying indigenous cultures all over the world have something to offer; not something that will help them survive, but something at least that will survive them, because modernism has stabbed mortally in every indigenous culture.

Sarah: When you look to the future, what do you think are humanity’s prospects?

Malidoma: It’s not good. Compulsive denial, arrogant paternalism, and hollow pretense have become viral infections endangering the future. The direction of the world, at least seen from an indigenous point of view, is like something that is in a direct collision course with catastrophe, and the more an indigenous person understands this culture, the more he becomes baffled by the direction it’s heading.

But in the middle of that are people who are waking up slowly, people whom I like to call the new shamans, the new healers, the new energy, the repair people.

So at a spiritual level, we’re witnessing something extremely fascinating. People are becoming more aware of the values of nature, are becoming more respectful, more sensitive to the purity of the origin. These people are those whom I call the modern indigenous persons. And these are the people who are gradually forming what I’ve called the new tribal order — that is to say a brand new unity, a brand new circle of people who are living by the very values that modernity had to do away with in order to affirm itself.

As more people join, it’s going to build up into an energy field, a force field strong enough to act as an antibiotic, a force field capable of sustaining a much brighter, healthier situation in the future.

I think that this last decade of the Twentieth Century is very pivotal in that sense. And I’m really fortunate, probably, to be in the midst of it.

 A Metaphysical, Spiritual, Holistic Publication   |   In Light Times   |    May, 2002