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.
The term ‘shamanism,’ primarily references ‘cultural’ shamanism that shares general characteristics across various cultures as well as practices unique to each culture. The term is often used quite loosely to refer to practices beyond shamanism such as ‘folk healing.’ 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-cultural. 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 the dominance 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. This non-cultural experience is an original, personal experience. The first or original shaman was/is avant-guarde and more personal and transcendent, stepping outside of culture. This experience then gets adapted and applied—appropriated—by the culture.
Cultural shamanism emerges as an application with an intent to serve culture [e.g., science vs. applied science]. In cultural shamanism, the cultural overlay becomes shared and complex and shifts further from being an experience of events in a physical landscape to become interaction with spiritual entities and the voices of natural events, as well as interpretations of natural events taking on specific qualities—such as the “meaning of the appearance of a snake” or a coyote as “trickster’ or raven as ‘creator being”—that are exclusive interpretations in each society, and, overall, conceptual and cultural [giving the culture a shared creation myth],rather than creating a methodology for persons to increase direct experience of presence in a vast landscape.
Cultural shamanism retains the profound experience of the natural world that is often reduced to being background to culture or to being a material resource. Natural events are assigned ‘cultural’ traits, such as, for example bears or raccoons, being Humana variations. 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).
As modern culture uses landscape as utilitarian—as separable physical resource— cultural shamanism’s ‘inseparability’ ‘uses’ 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.
Comparing cultural and non-cultural focuses, traditional cultural work is individuated soul work. A ‘soul’ is individuated and continues infinitely. In non-cultural experience, a person is not in a relationship with other events, but rather is an inseparable facet of landscape—ensoulment where an individual object or plant or animal is an expression of overall oneness that continues infinitely. The ‘soul’ of ensoulment is the animating spirit or universal life force akin more to 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 or receive something—either physical or psycho-spiritual. 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.’ Paradoxically, in non-cultural experience, the ‘dark’ is not ‘out in the landscape’ but rather the domination of culture. We can have ‘objective truths’ or ’working truths’ that we operate with, be they practical and scientific or more aesthetic, and yet the understanding that they offer is subject to change as evidenced continually in scientific inquiry.
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. From an Eastern tradition it is said that Those who know do not know; those who do not know, know.” This reflects that sense of ‘knowing’ is partial rather than absolute. Explicit descriptions of reality are facile —too easy—at best. Einstein, who clarified aspects of light, stated that anyone who thinks that they understand light are wrong. We look at the moon and see two moons—the direct experience-moon and our cultural descriptive-moon that is detailed in physical or esoteric/mythic terms. Ensoulment is primarily a technique to ‘open,’ to receive, to non-resist, to blend, to not make ‘I.’
Ensoulment attends to the experience of ‘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 objectification—a landscape of objects and events. The fundamental, core process might be said to be spirit—vast and ultimately ineffable, not spirits that vary widely by culture.
‘Spirit’ references the connectivity of all events without final definition. “Spirits” vary by culture and fit with cultural needs. The snake means this here and something else there—fabrication that appeal to established cultural values. When they cross cultures and are shared is a way that suggests similarity, this is often because a shared values such as, for example, the ‘importance of family’ in both cultures. Sometimes a specific culture is an aspect of a very broad cultural complex that shares values that have developed across generations through trade.
The fundamental non-cultural priority action across all fauna to sustain across the long run is to stay ‘wild’—open and receptive. It is evident that landscapes themselves change across time. A process of first asking questions more than reaching answers can have survival/adaptation value.
In a non-cultural approach, the values of both landscape is identity rather than being individual and an effort to be ‘humane’ as a process more than being ‘human-centered’ is adaptive. With a more out-reaching identity, being Earth-centric rather than anthropocentric, the term, ’homo-sapiens’ might better reference ‘Earth-taster’ more than ‘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 web of relationship).
This deep original approach is a method of experience and not a shared belief system or a dream of return to an idealized eco-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 or past
- 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 immersion and inseparability only. Opening and alertness, with no clear purpose: Humans may be either a global ecologically constructive or disruptive force.
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. The non-cultural aspects of shamanism have their value in the context of human-driven global ecocide.
“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 culturally secondary and still a meager dimension of human life as a way to simply go deep into ‘see in the dark’ to, as Barry Lopez admonishes us, to “Embrace Fearlessly The Burning World.”
Non-cultural ‘shamanism is worth giving a strong look in challenging cultural resistance and cultural ambiguity [where (A) traditional shamans can be the most conservative elements of a society’s religious traditions [after Mircea Eliade] and (B) contemporary societies identifying as separate from and ‘above’ landscape].
