The right road is where all roads merge. There are many faces on the heyoka path. Your heyoka face is an unusual one. Humanity usually knows the heyoka as a beggar, clown, coyote, fool, trickster. The Buddha was a great heyoka. First there is the Grandfather Sun, who was young once and is now a grandparent of great powers, but the sun will one day go into the void. And that is the power of the heyoka---the void. Heyoka respects no ritual, philosophic system, or belief. History is contained within this power. To take you into history and make you live it is a heyoka power. To become Crazy Horse or George Washington. It's the power of death---corruption of the body by flame and going back to earth. In woman, man, or vice versa, the heyoka has been the great lover of children, healing them and protecting them. To someone who is not part of this tradition, a heyoka Indian will seem to work in strange ways. Heyoka people will come and beg for food during a ceremony. The medicine woman wouldn't dare bother them, because a heyoka has the power to destroy the ritual. He is the disturber of ritual, the trickster, he tests your beliefs to see if they're real. To be a heyoka you have to be enlightened---being a heyoka makes you a backward woman or man because you see the reflection of life, like you saw by walking backward and holding a mirror.
Imagine you are leaning over a pool of water--the first mirror. You dive into the water and your reflection comes up to meet you. What happens to your reflection on the plane of the surface of the pool?
You can see that's a kind of crossroads--if you can unravel that, you can go beyond the crossroads. The end is where seven roads fork the dream. Choose one of the roads if you want power, or you can run back and say, 'I've gone too far.' When you look down you see seven auras--pick up crooked, twisted arms of heyoka and know love and trust.
A heyoka has the power of hot and cold. She can reach into bubbling hot meat in a kettle and, taking it, she can eat it without being burned. The world has a powerful need for understanding this way because it's the power of void, of women. Men teach women--women, men. No other native tradition teaches the opposite sex. We need to heal the woman in us all.
We're like the water. Heyoka has to do with primal eroticism that comes from the beginnings of life, forms your cells. Our cells contract and expand and produce regeneration and life. We, as life forms, reproduce this effect in love and in knowledge. Sometimes we use plants to break through a mind barrier into the inner lodges. This is so that the phenomenon of expansion and contraction can be understood in love. Because the heyoka has to do with love. It's the womb, the void. If we're the lake--as I see you in me--I'm in you.
We're the great mirror. We're nothing but the reflection of each other. If I didn't have anybody around, I would only have myself to define myself. Black holes in the universe are symbols. Everything is backward to itself in a heyoka vision. Life is bad, death is good, because we've been tricked into our own illusions. The way has to do with the paradox of life---I love you means I hate you on some level. You can easily be confused by a heyoka into thinking they are black magicians, because they deal with the void--death and rebirth. But they are not. One reason this medicine is so powerful is because it's the destroyer of heroes. Heroes fear the heyoka, because the heyoka can see through them, can see their feet of clay. People who define themselves only by themselves often are powerful, but they have no womb. They need wombness to be sisters and brothers over and over.
The heyoka will always take a new and different step. I'm sure it sounds strange, but this is the most powerful way if you can understand it. It is a way of beauty and love. They say that a heyoka remembers the trail and takes a different one. So? If you meet a heyoka, you want to shut your eyes and quickly walk by, because any confrontation will change your life forever. They come from this idea--heyoka is an awake one--they walk backward because they know God is behind them. Trust and fall backward--they know the Great Spirit will catch them. They make you see yourself and all your illusions. They dance the peace dance in a time of war.
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