The people on the plains, the hunters, the people in the forest, the planters-are participating in their landscape. They are part of their world, and every feature of their world becomes sacred to them.

The sanctification of the local landscape is a fundamental function of mythology. You can see this very clearly with the Navaho, who will identify a northern mountain, a southern mountain, an eastern mountain, a western mountain, and a central mountain. In a Navaho hogan, the door always faces east. The fireplace is in the center, which becomes a cosmic center, with the smoke coming up through the hole in the ceiling so that the scent of the incense goes to the nostrils of the gods.

The landscape, the dwelling place, becomes an icon, a holy picture. Wherever you are, you are related to the cosmic order.

Again, when you see a Navaho sand painting, there will be a surrounding figure-it may represent a mirage or the rainbow or what not, but there will always be a surrounding figure with an opening in the east so that the new spirit can pour in.

When the Buddha sat under the bo tree, he faced east-the direction of the rising sun.

Sacred Places don’t exist.

There are a few historical spots
where people may go to think about something important that happened there. For example, we may go visit the Holy Land, because that’s the land of our religious origins. But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the land- scape itself of the energies of the life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.

That’s what the early settlers of Iceland did, for example, in the eighth and ninth centuries. They established their different settlements in a relationship of 432,000 Roman feet to each other (432,000 is an important mythological number known to many traditions). The whole organization of the Icelandic land- scape was in terms of such cosmic relationships, so that wherever you go in Iceland, you are, so to say (if you know your my thology), in accord with the universe. This is the same kind of mythology that you have in Egypt, but in Egypt the symbology took a different shape because Egypt is not circular, Egypt is long. So there you have the sky goddess as a Sacred Cow, two feet in the south and two feet in the north-a rectangular idea, so to speak. But the spiritual symbolization of our own civilization is basically lost to us.

Going to visit holy places are secondary things:

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe any-body, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation.

At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.