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 there is a living shamanism.
Shamanism primarily references ‘cultural’ shamanism that share general characteristics across various cultures as well as practices unique to each culture. The term, shamanism’ tends to be 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 are viewed as resources to address group and individual concerns such as basic resources, physical and emotional/spiritual health. The orientation is toward ‘shamans’ ‘bartering’ with spirits to get direction and resolutions rather than completely solve or ‘save.’ It is a shared group process in societies that are very group structured, 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.
To the deeper dive:
ACULTURAL
The term shamanism can also reference an non-cultural core experience in any era of human development that 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. The primary focus is on optimizing a state of wildness, which is to say, attentiveness to the changing conditions of existence that emanate primarily from the cosmos to remain ‘fitted” and optimally healthy and adaptive. To do this requires opening identity beyond self, as inseparable and as an expression of cosmos rather than as separate and above.
Cultural shamanism retains this including in a natural world but attends more to issues in societies; physical and psycho-spiritual dilemmas and societal economic concerns involving access to resources with interventions. Cultural shamanism intervenes with ‘spiritual beings’ in a landscape and focuses on ‘souls’ interaction to resolve concerns.
The focus is on individuals and the society with interventions being primarily psychopomp [assisting deceased in safe journey to the land of the dead], divination [seeking knowledge of the future], soul retrieval, depossession [extraction of internal harmful or misplaced spirit-other],
Traditional work is soul work. An acultural focus is on ensoulment with focus in shamanism on a lost connection and deepened connection for optimal health in recognizing the present of this inseparability and coming into harmony with landscape rather than recovering something lost or stolen. A ‘soul’ is individuated and continues infinitely. In the sense of ensoulment, 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. Accordingly, there is no place for a even a dust speck to finally settle eternally anywhere in the universe or the more open term of cosmos, since we do not really have boundaries on the observable universe that could be one of many ‘structures’ that are referenced with the term ‘universe.’ The traditional work objectifies the landscape into parts. Ensoulment has already operant, in which we are an expression and deeply lost, and more something that we bring to our awareness as a vastness in which we are ‘ensouled’ and a facet of, and in which we a more like a current or wave in an Oceanus.
Ensoulment attends to identity as the ever-changing cosmos, not as identity 'with' or between parts or 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. And the fundamental 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 anthropocentic, and the term, ’homo-sapiens’ referencing ‘Earth-taster’ more ‘wise being.’
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. Profound ‘hands off’ Respect—wonder, grace, eloquence
- 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 an Earth centric
- What are we not seeing/sensing that is optimal human life
- Identity open; humane as more than human to be optimally healthy; integration, co-creatural
- Harmony as an objective
- Beyond culture as timeless and essential vs archaic
- No fabrication as a result of this acultural process. Human life is not the focus of this work
- Simply, keep pointing at the landscape
- Ensoulment vs. soul work
- Totemism
‘Totemism’ references ‘a natural object or experience as an emblem.’
The ‘emblems’ are talismans to bring markers of natural process into direct contact: stones, bones feathers such as Georgia O’Keeffe bring bones and word and stones into her everyday life as dynamic rather than as decoration or relics.
Walking among a field of stones, ‘first bathing,’ observing glints in late summer sunset backlight— al meaningful rather than revealing 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 the essence of spiritual experience. Our most rational measure are eventually overturned. We fabricate purpose in a dynamic that does not reveal purpose.
Here lies the original ‘shaman’ [saman [Siberia]-tasting common ground, not a belief, not an entheogenic action, not even finally worded.
SUMMARY
Facing biases,
being self-critical of our thoughts and emotions,
Avoiding cultural-specific fabrication emerging out of our listening,
Stressing autonomic repetition,
considering talismans and deep presence in unbuilt landscapes:
Facing the thousands of times faster rate of natural background extinction rates, in the “Sixth Extinction” active in the present moment, there is the clear renaissant need in this Holocene/‘Anthropocene epoch’ [Paul Crutzen & Eugene Stoermer] “to integrate with the larger Earth community” [‘geologian,’ Thomas Berry, The Great Work].
“A deep dive into shamanism” is a brief sketch of a non-cultural experience in approaching reality that is inherent, yet secondary, in traditional shamanism that is worth giving a strong look.
