The word NIERICA is from the language of the Huichol Indians, the indigenous people of the Sierra Madre region of Mexico. It means sacred or cosmic doorway, a passageway into the numinous, and it represents much of my work
When you walk through a doorway you are passing from one room into another. Doorways of the material world, the world our ordinary senses see and interact with, take you from one physical space into another space. Nierica doorways are portals, openings from one state of consciousness into an expanded awareness that sees into the underlying ordinarily invisible reality from which all that we see with our eyes births forth. Call it cosmic consciousness, transpersonal dimensionality, spirit, the Tao, God, Goddess, Allah, call it mystery since 96% of it our scientists can not figure out, call it whatever you want but it is a totally different state of being than our ordinary state of day to day consciousness.
Sometimes those portals can open through an act of grace which happens spontaneously – a beautiful sunset that stops you in your tracks, the birth of a child, the birth of a lamb, a puppy, the unfolding of a simple bud into a magnificently colored and shaped flower moving ever-so lightly in the flow of a soft breeze.
The doorway can also be opened intentionally by those who know how. Huichol shaman, and other shaman around the world, go through demanding initiatory rites learning how to open and enter the nierica to come and go at will.
The many mystical traditions of the world teach their members tools of transformation by which to open the portal to the sacred, as do spiritual practices through meditation, prayer and ritual.
In the Huichol tradition anything or anyone can be a nierica, an opening into the sacred mystery, it depends upon the relationship you create with it. Below is a picture of a rock served up by the Pacific Ocean. Within its center is an opening, a hole. See if you can use it as a nierica, a portal opening into another dimension, the deeper underlying reality of the …. mystery.
all blessings, tomás