A DEEP DIVE INTO SHAMANISM
In the complexity of trees, stars, atoms, electromagnetism, architecture, planes, quantum computing and on and on, there is only one thing, one event, one field, one process, one flavor that is so cosmically broad in its reach that to taste this flavor remains eternally beyond reach. From the ancestral through the contemporary moment, there is a living shamanism.
Shamanism primarily references ‘cultural’ shamanism that shares general characteristics across various cultures as well as practices unique to each culture. The term, shamanism’ tends to be popularly associated primarily with ‘indigenous’ and ‘primal’ and ‘first nation’ societies that are closely enmeshed with natural unbuilt landscapes. ‘Spirits’ are viewed as actually existing in the form of gods/goddesses, deceased relatives/ancestors, flora/fauna, stars, and natural forces such as wind. Spirits are viewed as resources to address group and individual physical and emotional/spiritual health. ‘Shamans’ ‘barter’ with spirits to get direction and resolutions rather than control spirits. A practice that is referenced as ‘shamanism’ is a societally-shared group process, so that ‘healing’ might engage ‘family,’ which can involve both blood relatives and the larger community of non-related ‘aunts and uncles.’
The critical focus of cultural shamanism is upon (a) individual ‘spiritual crisis’ such as possession, psychopomp [to guide the soul to the land of the dead]. There is also (b) intervention on behalf of the community such as meeting expectations of a new year or a sense of a shortfall of resources that provokes shamanic journeys for information to powerful entities to receive gifts or to be given direction.
To a far lesser degree, “shamanism’ also references practices in contemporary societies—almost as a reaction against the contemporary separation of modern life from the natural landscape, and as such is not broadly culturally shared. This contemporary shamanism often relies on cultural appropriation of traditional shamanic approaches and folk medicine, but may also integrate modern technology or be artistic expression.
To the deeper dive:
[The following is a short sketch There is a persistent human experience that is worth a strong look when considering the core of action related to the term ‘shamanism.’]
NON-CULTURAL
The term ‘shamanism’ does reference a non-cultural, innate, universal core experience in any era of human development that is spontaneous and pre-culture. This experience is provoked more by the landscape, by something akin to the Japanese term yugen, involving the experience of a profound, mysterious immersion and INSEPARABILITY in the hidden depths of landscape. A primary functional objective of this experience is on sustaining and optimizing a ‘state of wildness,’ which is to say, attentiveness to the changing conditions of existence to remain in harmony/balance, to remain ‘fitted’ with landscape, rather than with culture to be optimally healthy and adaptive. It is a persistent affection with place that tends to diminish to the degree that culture tends to dominate human attention to the point of perceiving human life as separable and above landscape. This innate experience opens identity beyond self, as inseparable and as an expression of cosmos rather than as separate and above.
Cultural shamanism retains this profound experience of the natural world. Typically, immersed historically in natural landscapes, traditional societies assume that human life is inseparable from landscape. However, cultural shamanism is a tactical intervention for individuals in traditional societies to address physical and psycho-spiritual dilemmas and societal economic concerns (involving access to resources). ‘Inseparability’ in cultural shamanism essentially describes ‘relationships between parts’ of the landscape. And rather than just the physical landscape, the priority is interaction with separable ‘spiritual beings’ in efforts to ‘healing’ individuals and the society. Traditional shamanic interventions can involve interventions such as psychopomp [assisting deceased in safe journey to the land of the dead], divination [seeking knowledge of the future], soul retrieval, de-possession [extraction of internal harmful or misplaced spirit-other(s)].
In non-cultural ‘shamanism,’ inseparability is different. And, as just above, it gets culturally appropriated and given meaning.
Comparing cultural and non-cultural focuses, traditional work is individuated soul work. A ‘soul’ is individuated and continues indefinitely.
A non-cultural focus is an inseparability emphasis, where a person is not in a relationship with other events, but rather is an inseparable facet of landscape.on ensoulment where an individual object or plant or animal is an expression of overall oneness that continues infinitely and the individual event does not continue, nor does any event anywhere in the cosmos. The ‘soul’ of ensoulment is the animating spirit or universal life force akin to more cultural expressions such as the ‘world soul’[anima mundi] that animates the universe, Hindi Brahman/Atman,the Gnostic Sophia [the collective soul] or amore generalized cosmic consciousness.
A non-cultural shamanism is an effort to remain in contact more than to analyze or know, or strengthen self. It is a ’tuning in’ without defining or analyzing or healing—a sort of ‘seeing in the dark’ in a cosmos that is beyond our capacity to ‘know.’ We can have ‘objective truths’ that we operate with, and yet these are all subject to change.
In ‘ensoulment,’ there is an essential self-critical check on thoughts and emotions that are taken as fact in traditional practices as well as even in science. ‘Knowing’ is cultural appropriation of an experience. We look at the moon and see two moons, the direct experience-moon and our cultural descriptive-moon that are detailed in physical or esoteric terms. Ensoulment is primarily a technique to ‘open,’ to receive, to non-resist, to blend, to not make ‘I.’
Ensoulment attends to identity as the ever-changing cosmos, not as self-identity 'with' or between parts in relationship to events as external and separate.
The focus is on the process as that which exists—the inter-experience/ inter-being—the field—and not on a landscape of objects and events. The fundamental, core process is spirit, not spirits.
‘Spirit’ references the connectivity of all events without final definition. “Spirits” vary by culture and fi with cultural needs. The snake means this here and something else there--fabrications.
The fundamental non-cultural action is to stay ‘wild’—open and receptive, asking questions more than reaching answers in a vast landscape beyond our capacity to even begin to imagine, where our most rational measure are gradually overturned.
In this approach, landscape is identity—not individual—‘humane’ as a process more than being ‘human,’ Earth-centric rather than anthropocentric, and the term, ’homo-sapiens’ referencing ‘Earth-taster’ more ‘wise being.’
Non-cultural ‘self’ is more a ‘gerund’ than a noun—a ‘verbing’ wherein all experiences are flowing and changing even when appearing solid and separate.
ACULTURAL SHAMANIC PRACTICE
Attune to place as ‘field/process’—events/process rather than objects/things—‘oneness’ more than holistic (that leaves room for events in relationship).
This deep original approach is a method of experience and not a shared belief system or a dream of return to an idealized Pastoral.
- Open-listen-attend—de-conceptual presence, no fabrication
- Repetitive actions to tie into autonomic system vs. words, concepts, cultural bias
- Skeptic, live questions more than answers; self-critical of thoughts/and generated images
- Contact without expectation of reward or healing or knowing: meaningfulness over meaning
- Step out of cultural dominance in all societies to Earth centric
- Identity open; humane as more than human to be optimally healthy; integration, creatural
- Harmony as an objective
- Beyond culture as timeless and essential vs archaic
- No fabrication as a result of this non-cultural process. Human life is not the focus of this practice.
- Simply, keep pointing at the landscape
- Ensoulment vs. soul work
- Totemism
‘Totemism’ references “a natural object or experience as an emblem.”
In non-cultural activity, presence and direct contact: stones, bones, feathers as
dynamic rather than as decoration or relics or as ‘talismans.’
Walking among a field of stones, ‘forest bathing,’ observing glints in late summer sunset backlight— all meaningful without needing to reveal meaning that is likely to be culturally colored. The quietness of the mass of flowing rivers, the flow of leaves into the soil, the wind-blown curves of snow, rain on the roof…
For all of our development, we are incapable of having a true sense of reality. ‘Oneness’ offers connection only—connection experience is the essence of spiritual experience and with a non-cultural practice, connection is all, and enough. Our most rational measures are eventually overturned. We fabricate purpose in a dynamic that does not reveal purpose.
Here lies the original first ‘shaman’ that is inherent in everyone in the moment of yugen —Earth-taster, not a belief, not an entheogenic action [Research here, Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques Of Ecstasy], and not even, finally, worded.
SUMMARY
Facing cultural biases and therefore being self-critical of our thoughts and emotions,
avoiding cultural-specific fabrication emerging out of our presence,
stressing autonomic repetition, so that
facing the thousands of times faster rate of natural background extinction rates, in the “Sixth Extinction” active in the present moment, the Renaissance-level need in this “Anthropocene epoch of the Holocene’’ [Stoermer/Crutzen] is, as ‘geologic Thomas Berry suggests in The Great Work, to integrate with the larger Earth community. Unfortunately, past cultural renaissances have required more than a century to fully develop, due to both cultural resistance and cultural ambiguity about process.
“A deep dive into shamanism” is a brief sketch of a core non-cultural experience in approaching an Earth-centric reality that is inherent, yet secondary, in traditional shamanism that is worth giving a strong look to be crucial in challenging cultural resistance and cultural ambiguity (where traditional shamans can be the most conservative elements of a society’s religious traditions [Mircea Eliade] and contemporary societies identifying as separate from and ‘above’ landscape) with regard to process as a way to ‘see in the dark’ to, as Barry Lopez admonishes us to “Embrace Fearlessly The Burning World.”
