I had stated I would be giving away ‘medicine secrets’ in this series initial essay. Here is something almost no one knows or understands anymore.
The bird you have affinity with is the one that ‘talks to you.’ You can make a small experiment to determine this. When you walk in nature, allow your thoughts to be free, to roam where they will with no concentration to control. A little bit like daydream but no specified subject. If it happens there is a bird calls at that very moment a point is made, seen or discovered in your wandering thoughts, a sort of conclusion, this bird has just spoken to you (in the mind, not only the ear.)
The birds are the messengers who can pass understanding of events to you, to (among other things) know if a thought is correct. If you can learn to do this in such a competence as to become ‘easy’ or ‘natural’ with the experience, it is the bird most often speaks to you, is your affinity. There you have it, how people were integrated to nature in times past. This is example of what had been ‘normal.’
To learn to accomplish this in practical reality would be difficult for many within the modern mindset. Men, particularly, would experience difficulty with this exercise in ‘female intelligence.’ The reason is, Judeo-Christian cultural shaping, mental stricture and taboo on the exercise of a feminine understanding of reality in Western Civilization (which has taken over the world.) In order for there to be a ‘rise’ of civilization, people had to come under the control of male dominated thinking or ‘hierarchy.’
Mosaic law is one example, where there is prohibition of sorcerers and necromancers, a crude demonizing of female intelligence to preserve the male hierarchy. Examples related to this sort of control would be (about equally) Saudi Arabia executing women as witches and western science panning any understanding of female intelligence that cannot be achieved via the constricted logic of empirical method; both science and religion are firmly rooted in a cultural system that fears and condemns or persecutes anything which threatens the ascendancy of male thought (and hence male hierarchy.) Civilization and ‘civilized man’ are both determined this understanding of the female ‘Nature’ is not to be acknowledged because it is a threat to male dominance. In the greater male hierarchy’s endeavor to suppress the feminine, the gynophobic Plato and the God of Abraham are peers, little different to the misogynist Confucius who serves this same purpose.
So, to understand the birds is tricky, it is important not to fool oneself, with how this works. The most common mistake (in the modern mentality) is when the bird makes its call, this can evoke another thought instantly from the self (not the bird) and you miss what the bird said, the thought the bird has brought has already been pushed aside by your thought and the real information is missed. This mistake is consequence of male oriented culture shaping the modern mind (regardless of skin color, we’re nearly all ‘apple indians’ these days.) Simply put, the alien (to original native thought process) ego won’t shut up and will be in your way. Why thank you, Jesuits and the boarding schools, for making the males, nearly all of us Native males, into modern whore-boys who, when we’re not busy chasing skirts while trying to get our dicks wet, only know how to run our mouths and cannot know how to listen. The consequence likely will be males who think they actually get this, are only hearing what their subliminal ego entity wishes them to hear. Those women with less male shaped mentalities, particularly those women less educated in science and least indoctrinated in religion, will have better outcome in overcoming the modern mentality obstruction, and more likely achieve understanding of this natural phenomena.
It cannot hurt to recall here, the modern ego construct mentality, considered normal in western culture, is a construct which had been diagnosed and treated as a mental disorder in the ancient Plains culture. Modern Indians who most suffer from the modern mentality are least aware they suffer the problem and this is ultimate irony because it is those Indians who most loudly strut the proposed idea they are ‘traditional’ are those who most suffer from the modern mental disorder (and you can forget about the western anthropology program euphemistically named ‘native studies’ altogether.)
Another mistake is to expect you can discover something you wish to know with this. This second one is a mistake because it is not about what we think is important to know, but rather what nature (the spirit) thinks is important for us to know. This is again, the western culture’s male ego issue, unknown in the native past. This is why the point is made to NOT control the direction of thinking, for the process to actually work.
As for broadcasting versus receiving (the modern mind is stuck in broadcast mode and mostly cannot receive) et cetera, there is much, much more to know, but I expect this is challenge enough and will end it here, renamed ‘Birds 101’