From the Lake Atop the Mountain
What Happened to the Heart? Part II: The Innateness of Indigenous
Last week, I asked the question “What happened to the Heart?” as a kick-off to a series revolving around recent insights and teachings sparked from Chinese medicine & indigenous wisdoms. In this second part, we’ll be looking at perspectives on the meaning of indigenous & misrecognition as the root of our spiritual crisis.
Consider subscribing to stay up-to-date for the next part: The Art of Innocence in Spirited Away!
indigenous, adjectiveBorn or originating in, native to a land or region, especially before an intrusion. [from 17th c.]
In particular, of or relating to a people (or their language or culture) that inhabited a region prior to the arrival of people of other cultures which became dominant (e.g., through colonialism), and which maintains a distinct culture.
Of all the definitions of “indigenous” above, “innate” is the word that resonates the most on its own, the only word that feels rooted in something deeper than political context. The other definitions depend on “intrusion” and “colonialism”, defining indigenous in relation to a deep historical wound. While this is significant, this definition will always place us at a distance from “us” to “them”. We’ve let the history erase the meaning of indigenous, only to insert itself as the lens through which we now view it.
But what could indigenous mean outside of colonial history and intrusion, and outside our projections of what a “distinct culture” might look like? How is indigenous innate?
There are two main perspectives I can provide on this — one stems from pre-contact Colombia, a representative of the Kogi Elders (Mamo), the other from Hawaii, a practising Kahuna. Both are first hand accounts. Sometimes, I’m still stunned that I was able to converge with them. Both perspectives are under threat for teaching and sharing their knowledge to outsiders, so I’m asking that you read what follows with care. Thank you for being here!
Of Mountains, Mountain Lakes & The First
Kaguba means the ones that came first. That’s why we are the elder brothers. Mountain lakes are also Kaguba, and there are trees, rocks that are Kaguba, too - that came first.
You know, most peoples haven’t actually figured out what they’re doing on planet Earth. Hawaiians have said, since day one, we’re here to spread Aloha, we’re here to help Mother Earth transform negative into positive.
We’ve done this many times before, and when we’re done here,
we’ll do it somewhere else.
Though miles apart, the Kogi, as well as the sacred site of Hawaiian creation, draw their core wisdom from the mountain, though not just any. These are mountains that correspond with water — a specific lake, a specific ocean. Not in geography, but in the choreography of their composition.
And: what else do these two accounts have in common?
Or if I may be so bold as to switch around the question, let me ask you, then:
as a representative of your culture, could you tell me of your origin and the purpose of your ancestral existence? What is it that you and your ancestors have agreed to do on Earth?
The Clarity of Purpose
There’s a cosmos to explore from both quotes above, but let’s begin by noticing how clear and aware both standpoints are about their own origin and purpose. Alan Ereira, an anthropologist who was invited to stay with the Kágaba (Kogi) tribe and dedicated a book, a film, and a foundation to their messages, says:
They have tried to be fully conscious of their own culture, and that is, I think, very unusual. I don’t think we’re particularly good at it. But the Kogi mamas have made it their business through the last several generations to be aware about themselves, their culture and their history in a very clear and well-organised manner.2
I would definitely agree: we (meaning the globalised Western culture we live in at this juncture in time) really suck at it. The awareness that was brought to the current dominating culture is still emerging in and unfolding in very specific areas. But actually, I would go so far as to say that everyone and everything else around the dominating culture has to find ways to fit into its vocabulary, imagery, worldview, societal structure, and science in order to be taken seriously, rather than being placed within a relationship of equity. And this only adds to the diminishing self-awareness.
Shifting the Weight of Wounds
It’s tempting, and understandable, to lay blame solely at the feet of Western culture. But I’ve learned that such a view, while emotionally justified, is incomplete. I have to say this because I wasn’t so clear about this first myself.
What was my purpose?
What did I agree with my ancestors to come here for?
Nothing, apparently. I was torn between answers that came from the place of my upbringing and ancestral memory — things my parents had brought to the table and expected me to sit by, while I participated in a world that had both saved and harmed them.
My purpose was quite confused. It had been from the moment I was old enough to realise that something about my family was different from those around us.
Why was I here?
The dialogue with my roots was opened, and Mengzi found me, in a green book given to me by a German philosopher. Mengzi’s teachings echoed through me in Chinese characters and German, a language my father associates with alienation, and that for me, became the key to reclaim my origin, not in words, but in frequency. Mengzi spoke so much about the heart and our return to it. As Mengzi spoke about greed, war, about ideas that were dominant without geographic origin: neither Western nor Eastern, I began to ascertain purpose in my origin. As early as he lived (371-289 BCE), he observed how there was a phenomenon of alienation going on amongst the people, a tendency to be taken by rituals without substance and form without life. He wrote about the heart not as a romantic, but because he was alarmed.
And even he wasn’t the first: Daoists had criticised artificiality early on, had pointed out that many lived lives in abstracted forms of the natural intelligence, in sickness, desperation, at the mercy of lords. And that there were consequences. Growing up in a Chinese household, I learned that that was kind of their thing. I just had no idea what it actually meant.
The heart is referred to as the Emperor in Chinese medicine for a reason. Everything that is an attack on humans is an attack on the human heart. It’s a dynamic that has returned to shake our world for thousands of years. Artificiality leads to a confusion of the heart, a crisis of misrecognition.
If all of us were defined by a sense of innateness once, if all of us were indigenous once, then we have to investigate the root of that separation.
Tale of the Automaton Artisan
Knowing that I can’t possibly contribute something new to the discussion of AI, how I contribute something old? How about the possibly earliest literary depiction of an android or automaton, appearing in the Daoist text “Liezi”?
Once upon a time, King Mu of Zhou travels westward and crosses the Kunlun mountains. He turns back before he reaches Mount Yan, and on his way encounters an artificer named Ning Shi. The next day, Ning Shi presents a humanoid dancer at court. Upon placing his hand on various body parts, the automaton sings, dances, and does everything in the fashion of a real artist. The King and his concubines are fascinated. They can hardly tell the difference to a real man. But when the dancer seems to blink at the women, the King gets angry and demands Ning Shi’s head, who pacifies the king by taking the machine apart. Everything that seemed like a real human is in reality made from leather, wood, lacquer and coloured elements. Put together, the elements would appear like a real human. The king tests the automaton himself: taking out his heart, the dancer can’t speak, taking out the liver, he can’t see. Taking out the kidneys, the dancer is unable to walk on his feet. The king asks: how is it possible that we can measure our skill with the art of the creator’s?
And thus, the king orders a special carriage, puts the dancer on it and leaves with him for his ancestral home.
The reaction of the crowd to the machine dancer is the interesting part here. The invention would be utterly unspectacular without the madness of humans breathing life into the phenomenon of something that is in itself, unliving. The unspectacular becomes a spectacle by the projection of the onlookers: there is an urge to test the machine in how realistically it can imitate life. In other words: there is entertainment, for the human side, in being fooled, like looking into the mirror for the first time, barely or just realising that it is yourself who is looking back. This awareness, by the way, is a process that happens in humans sometime between the age of 18 months and two years.
Does any of this remind you of reactions to AI? The way we look at AI the same way we look into the mirror, expecting a response either akin to its original, more beautiful or strangely, more accurate?
The entertainment of being deceived turns into a fear of being replaced, because the accuracy is just too daunting. But the fear seems, in some cases, entertainment as well. Many people are already getting “bored” at the topic of AI.3 But the topic is a great way to clarify the confusion at the root of the heart, when misrecognition threatens our human value. Because, what do we risk when we stare into the mirror for too long?
Mirrors and Misrecognition: Narcissistic Petrification
“Merged with the imago of himself, and precisely because of that a stranger to himself, the body of Narcissus wastes away.”
When I was completing my studies in art & image history in another life, I came across a fascinating take on Ovid’s tale of Narcissus, that placed not self-love at the centre of the story, but the obsessive self-awareness of Narcissus seeing his own image “see the world”. In the context of how we develop awareness about our mirrored image as children and our urge to control this image, it’s what the French psychologist and psychiatrist Lacan labelled as “narcissistic petrification”5. Watching ourselves in this way creates a strange fixation on how desirable we can seem to ourselves: we see us staring back at ourselves and are fascinated, while we never quite get in touch with someone else—or for that matter, someone real.
We forfeit the capacity of our heart: Connection in resonance through the reflection of that which is around us, issued from the heart. And personally, I think we were made to have the land reflected in our lake, not just ourselves.
And what if it was our natural inclination to respond to this reflection by studying the land? What if we were meant to learn of the numerous ways to care for it? The thoughts? The body of land and the spirit of land. Mountain, and Lake.
Eventually, the people of land.
Beyond the realms of men
Everything in darkness supports the life in the light. From darkness, all creation arises.
— Kágaba Thought.
In the Kogi as well as the Hawaiian tradition, no spiritual work is done “inside”: there is no man-made structure that holds ritual or offering. All the sacred sites I have been to, either here or on the Big Island, have in common that they honour the innateness of earth-made. They are kept in the way they’ve been given by an act of creation beyond the realms of men. This distinction from surroundings that originated from human hands and motions, from those that are not, is absolutely crucial.
For the Kágaba, this is a spiritual task. The life of the Kogi in the Sierra is quite consequential in maintaining a lifestyle and culture that is dedicated to what the mother (nature), not men, tell them.
It is important that this does not mean that “man” is disregarded in any sense, like the focus on the “holy spirit” in medieval thought has neglected or negated the needs and nature of the physical (female) body, for instance. The idea is that when spiritual work is done, we don’t want to be encircled by any surface thoughts. How are we ever going to protect the mother if we don’t learn her language, her needs? In the sphere of the Kágaba, this is why she is spoken to directly. When we met, they asked how we speak to her here. When they were told that we don’t really, they looked like they’ve missed the punch line.
We tell you how to do it, and you’ll learn! They don’t understand our separation from the mother and our obsession with machines, although they sense it, and feel it, too. In the innateness of those who call themselves The First, there is no distinction made between man and nature. Káguba is what I say to refer to the tribe of the Kogi, but the term itself refers to any living thing that came first, and this is how they themselves see it. This is their indigenous legacy.
Imagine how radical this thinking would be for us. Imagine if our language understood however we referred to us not as exclusive to the human race, but indicating an order of arrival that eclipsed the separation of man from nature altogether.
Heights & Depths
I remember when I travelled Scotland for the first time. As the train rattled through the Highlands, we passed landscapes that had the wilderness, and innocence, of land that had never sustained cultivation.
In an inexplicable sense, the land did seem more talkative. Who do we hear beyond the realms of men?
I promised an antidote, but I want to end with an impulse to explore the mountain.
You don’t have to literally climb a mountain (but please feel free to, if you’re around one). For those of us who live in flat lands (like me), the mental image will have to do.
Mountain is height and depth at once, and this paradox is joyful.
What’s your favourite mountain or one you dream of?
What’s one you’d wander as a hermit, a travelling poet, or happy spirit? (This one, please share with me!)
What’s a question you’d take with you? (This one’s for you to keep.)
If you don’t think at all you can get into a fantasy of mountains, where can you take your best creation story?
Notes & Further Reading
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/indigenous
Bringing the Land back to Life. 16 June 2023, besharamagazine.org/well-being-ecology/kogi-indians-bringing-the-land-back-to-life/.
Side note: I’m sorry but how scary is that? Humans created something that has the power to eradicate the resources of the planet and our biggest problem is that we are bored by the topic altogether?
“Harmut Böhme: Sinne Und Blick. Zur Mythopoetischen Konstitution Des Subjekts.” Hartmutboehme.de, 2025, www.hartmutboehme.de/static/archiv/volltexte/texte/natsub/sinne.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com. Accessed 11 June 2025.
“Das Spiegelstudium: Mit Lacan Durch Das Online-Semester - Kulturpraxis.” Uni-Hildesheim.de, 2020, www.uni-hildesheim.de/kulturpraxis/spiegelstudium/?utm_source=chatgpt.com. Accessed 11 June 2025.
Thank you, Lucia.
You ask: <<What’s your favourite mountain or one you dream of?>>
Well, I wrote a whole book about my favourite mountains!!!! 😀
Counterpoint to the valley lake