themselves have an expression which sums up the proper relationship of human beings to ‘the stone people’ and other natural allies: mitakuye oyasin – they are ‘all my relations’.
Having drummed or danced or chanted his way into a quiet and reflective meditative state, the medicine man would then turn the rock to one of the faces and hold in mind a question that he or his people needed an answer to. ‘Why, Who, What, How, When, Where?’ questions were all fine; those that required a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer were somewhat more difficult since the otherworld, the formless web of energy that we now call holographic, does not operate in the same way as human beings and polarities such as ‘Yes/No, Light/Dark, Right/Wrong’ are human constructs by which a non-judgemental universe does not operate.
The diviner would look to the first face of the rock and ‘dream into’ it until four symbols revealed themselves to him. These might be anything. He may see trees or birds or clouds, for example, emerging from the rock as shape and shadows within the contours of stone. These four symbols would be noted and he would then move on to the next face until all of the sides had given him four pieces of information in this way.
His next step would be to journey into the symbols, making himself a ‘hollow bone’ for the information they contained, so that his imagination was allowed free reign and the rational mind, with its tendency to interfere and over-analyse, was subdued. Through this intuitive link to the stone, each symbol would reveal its purpose and provide more detailed information in answer to the questions asked of it. Finally, the medicine man would combine all 16 pieces of