In Lakota traditions, Wakan Tanka is a term for "The Great Spirit" which resides in every thing, similar to many notions of God. Every creature and object has a wakan, such as wakan tanka kin, the wakan of the sun.
This incomprehensibility and unpredictability of the universe, anything difficult to understand, is called 'wakan', which also connotes the animating force of the universe, the totality of which is 'WakanTanka'.
WakanTanka is the sum total of the personified powers that brought all things into being; sometimes it is embodied as the Six Grandfathers.
The circle was indicative of life itself and was thus held to be sacred (wakan).
WakanTanka as Father is the Great Spirit considered in relation to His manifestation, either as Creator, Preserver, or Destroyer, identical to the Christian God, or to the Hindu Brahma-Saguna.
In the old times the Lakotas believed that WakanTanka was everywhere all the time and observed everything that each one of mankind did and even knew what anyone thought, that he might be pleased or displeased because of something that one did.
This presence of WakanTanka, and one's consciousness of it, is that which the Christian saints have termed "living in the moment", the "eternal now", or what in the Islamic tradition is termed the Waqt.
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