1. Shamanism as deepest connection to Earth
2. Enduring vs. archaic
3. Shaman as landscape vs. person
4. Spirit: numinous vs. literal [ultimately no separation between self and image]
5. Creatural vs. cultural
6. Cultural robbery: direct vs. no borrowing of technique/belief or “creation” of economic [eco-tourist] event
7. Core vs. derivative/degenerate cultural shamanism
8. Imaginal vs. imaginary experience
9. Self-criticism of all journey imagery / progression of imagery with experience
10. Shamanizing: seeing sound [or repetition] as a primary method
11. Method of access vs. belief system

Core Issue

Major religions and shamanism are mutually exclusive.  The difference has to do with their IDENTITY base:  Shamanism=humanness as creatural.  As a cultural product, human life is described as separate and above the landscape, and assumes that human beings come into the world and leave it, and/or that spiritual life has little to do with the “material world.”

Indigenous spiritual practices that are often described as “paganism” and even “animism” that seem to be Earth-based, tend to be ecologically sensitive but imagine a world of spirits that really describe power resources for health as well as for evil.  Further, paganism and animism tend to imagine individual human life as everlasting and having an afterlife be it in Earth or beyond. Even non-theocratic Buddhism retains many elements from Hinduism that imagine an after-life.  God or gods are the creator(s) of life and the creation of man/woman and the Earth are the work of these anthropomorphized spirits.  Spirits are separate entities that are arranged in hierarchy of intelligence, grace, and other noble and ignoble characteristics: gods, angels, saints, eagle and animal spirits, demons, humans, animals, plants, stones, wind and water and light.  Spirit in shamanism is ultimately quite different, although shamanism tends to degenerate into the above religious motifs.

Paradoxically, most practices that are termed shamanism are cultural: shared belief systems that are “derivative” from authentic shamanism and often “degenerative.”  They aspire to meet cultural and social and psychological needs rather than open to and serve the larger landscape.

BOTTOM LINE: We live inside an incredible landscape, inside such an incredible, unending miracle that is so eloquent, so intelligent in every speck and flash of it, and our beliefs, values, and morals are so facile, so small, so prejudiced, biased, and anthropocentric.   We imagine that we know what most events are, but in our heart of hearts, we really recognize that we do not understand what the most basic events are, such as atmosphere and water and energy.

Shamanism appears and endures because it finds the humanized moral base limited and damaging to the Earth that, in turn, damages human life/health, no matter how benign or other-serving/kind the religious expression appears to be.  After we strip away the moral self-serving biases that we have been applying culturally to everything, this is not what we intuitively experience in a fundamental shamanic experience. 

Shamanism is naturalist inquiry, not a religious pagan practice, and not a theology.  Religions offer belief systems.  Shamanism emerges as a method of access like science.  Many spiritual practices, as well as science, emerge from a sense of everyday experience being incomplete.  All of the spiritual practices that endure across time go through cycles of co-optation and reformation.  Even science becomes “scientistic/scientism” and must check itself, but religions assume a stolid base that is eternal.

Shamanism sees difference—sun, tree, water, wind, biota, stone—but doesn’t find hierarchy that then sees “apartness.”  There is more of a metaphorical interweaving of events [not really objects] and process.  You listen more than you know, because seeing a tree, you need to get past the image/object to have any hope of relating/understanding and the event “tree” or any other that does not cleanly come down to a separate object. 

You see tree as expressing a star in Earth and it goes on and on from there, And then your actions may become quite different toward this event.  And this same base begins to apply to other events, and it is quite different from the routine way that you have been approaching things.  There is no longer a set base.  And then you find yourself living in two simultaneous contexts: cultural and natural.  Shamanism doesn’t “believe in nature” more than in culture.  It just goes there.  And this nature is not apart, not anti-urban, as urbanization can have powerful ecologically adaptive features and be optimized an expression of the Earth that, in turn, is an expression of the outer atmosphere of the sun, that is, in turn, ….

Different from other practices that emerge out of a sense of ordinary life as incomplete and even inaccurate, shamanism directs attention to the creatural dimensions of human life.  When it becomes psychological, social, societal and cultural, shamanism tends to become a derivative practice in which it reinforces a belief system rather than remains a method of access.  It becomes a motif and is really not shamanism any more, but rather becomes degraded and deteriorates. Blends/amalgams of shamanic method and other spiritual practices are cultural motifs.  Most practices that are termed shamanism either in contemporary indigenous or modern societies are really derivative and degenerative forms.   Why? Because spiritual practices are often more psychological balms and when supported culturally aspire to support and stabilize the culture rather than to challenge it, and were never really methods of access in the first place.  They arise out of neediness.  And none of these practices image themselves as coming from the landscape.  They are all anthropomorphic, human-centered.  They may pay homage to honoring the creation, but they ultimately look elsewhere.

Shamanism attends to the creatural because of a sense of human development coming out of the landscape and going back into the landscape.  Landscape designs and expresses human life, not anthropomorphic god/goddess-images.  Spirit comes from the landscape, period, no exception.  The landscape is not a playground of good and evil or demonic forces.  Spirit is present in an inherent harmonious intelligence that is in atoms, cells, slime molds, ad infinitum and that is demonstrable.  Shamanism aspires to attend to such phenomena.

Most aspects of everyday life that seem so real and concrete are primarily constructions: Time artificially divides the day, the sun moving across the sky is really the Earth’s rotation, actions are shaped by priorities and folkways and mores that may not be in harmony with landscape [which then feeds back on us in terms of physical and mental disorder and violence.  And our cultural sacred and profane practices and beliefs tend to encourage this disorder.  The worst-case scenarios of atrocities that have resulted in the murder of millions over and over again have what we consider to be benevolent religions as their root source.  The same has been the case toward the landscape.  It is not within our identity despite the contributions of our most rational scientific measures that find human life both intimately landscape [DNA and ecological literacy] and deeply lost in an Oceanus of Earth, galaxies and Cosmos rather than separate and above or some Casper-like soul.

The role of culture in creating exclusiveness and separation is reinforced because of core moral beliefs that place us either separate from the landscape or place us within it as if it were a stage set.  And this morality has fostered destruction of the landscape and underpins the manipulation/destruction of other human beings.  There is no unbreakable common ground once beliefs collide. 

Attention to the creatural dimensions of human life finds a complexity and subtlety that is intelligent and wise, not primitive.  Not separate, it designs us rather that we have to activate it, and we optimize human life by attending especially to that which we overlook and come into increasing harmony with it.  Shamanism is a method of access, with which we attend to the landscape, but very self-critically because of the cultural biases that we apply to it.  Attending to the creatural offers a check on our activities, folkways, mores and overriding beliefs that damage more than optimize. 

If this process is not there in what we call shamanism, then the practice is little more than a diversion or a delusion or entertaining, curious escape.

For a Koryak shaman the landscape of tundra and forest is heartfelt and the source, authentic, not primitive/archaic.  For moderns, core beliefs allow for the industrialization of landscape with landscape as a separate resource to be used to be of value or to be activated, preference/inequality in relationships both human and with other species, both human and ecological poverty, and violence.  Modern and primitive values encourage us to step out of the world as if it is not us.  It is simply crazy and yet it is what our systems teach us and these beliefs are expressed in our religions and philosophies and psychologies and sociologies and go unchallenged.

Homo sapiens/Earth taster

Lance Kinseth, Shaman’s Prayer For The Earth, 36”x36

Conversations With Oak

In totemic work

In conversation with oak today

About their caring for offspring

And such exquisite sensitivity

Especially their quibble with stars

Perhaps next time

How and why they came to this ground

And how wonderful their optimism

And more about the gratitude of the one with blessed wounds

In marriage with lightning

And perhaps how oak is rain

And more of what wind had to say

And what sense of obligation and to whom?

Such overlooked intelligence and so wide open

And why so few of us listening?

The Unspoken Language

Cy Twombly

Yet one more abandoned the heavy city's
ring of greedy stones.  And the water, salt and 
crystal closes over the heads of all who 
truly seek refuge.
Tomas Transtromer, from "Five Stanzas to Thoreau,"
The Great Enigma

WE BECOME OUR WORDS.

We are born from the Earth carrying a unimaginably deep wisdom in our bones—an immeasurable oceanus of eco-literacy. We come out of the Earth itself like a small wave crest of its ongoing creation.  While we are remarkable for our capacity for self-design, the Earth expresses us and designs us.  And while speech-into-languages and language into written literacy seem to separate human life from landscape, Emerson accurately states in his essay Nature that our words come from nature.  And yet, our words become abstractions, and island us in specific cultures.   We tend to see our words and concepts more than the events that they represent.   And we ignore and down-prize a language that is deep and enduring and yet intimately known to us and that actually runs us and saves us.

There is a common unspoken language that is present in each of us and in each event in the universe.  It is neither inactive nor untranslatable. We read it more than we allow ourselves to imagine.  We can see it expressed directly in the forms and forces in the world around us.  It speaks directly in the shape of a tree limb or a grass stem or the billions of orbs of dew in grass.  It is also within us, in the eloquence of our billions-years old tested body design.  And when all is said and done, it is the language that keeps us alive across the long run of things.

Anyone of us can look about and see and taste and touch and even hear this language and easily sense that it is full of power: The light of the sun and the wind and movement of water in streams and in rainfall.  It is more than enough information and it comes directly into awareness from within and without.

And yet, we favor dwelling in a dream of beautiful abstractions.  In this dream, the sun appears to move across the sky when it is really the rotating Earth.   In this dream we find a world of parts—flowers and leaves that appear to be separate objects on a stage set. To live, to become ourselves, we imagine that we must take power from separate events and bring them inside to activate them.

In every era and in every culture, there are at least moments when we sense that we are living in a dream and not really listening to life as it is.   And in some moments we recognize these elements to be more eloquent than culture or society or psychology or biology.  And we “get it,” that our daily actions that carry us into the future are creatural and that our eco-literacy is vary facile.   “Shamanism” emerges as a response in direct practices and as powerful motifs in medicine and art.  It aspires to attune us to the unspoken language that keeps us alert to the changing conditions of existence.  But without strong cautions, shamanism almost immediate degenerates and degrades because it goes through a cultural filter that quickly co-opts it to serve the society.  Degraded, we might seek “power animals” from our dream of parts as well as psychic capacities that would make us special.

Yet, when authentic, when truly humane, we awaken on the inside of nature, buoyed up by it, made by it.  And then, rather than take from the Earth, we aspire to come into harmony with the power contained in the direct Earth, and to live it.

Everything we touch in the built environment required millions of human encounters to product the event in the present moment. And this is very beautiful.  And yet, it is a dream of the Earth rather than the Earth itself. and wears an abstract coat of language and can miss the very heart of language.  It is not the language of the sparrows and grasses and stars and wind and water.

And so, this experience of life as a dream or as a set of half-truths sometimes leads to an effort to step out of the dream.  Shamanism is not a belief system but rather a method of entry.  As a method, it is nothing special.  It is a ritual—as lean as we can possibly make it—that both aspires to desensitize us from the domination of our thinking and beliefs and to deeply relax our physiology, to allow us to become a creature. 

In our dream life, when we look at a tree or the moon, we tend to see what we have learned about a tree or the moon rather than the event before our senses.  We dream “tree” and “moon.”  In shamanic method, we aspire to listen deep enough so that our culturally colored imagination can drop away.  Having fallen away, the imaginary can become the imaginal.  The very real imaginal is often veiled at first, yet often refreshing and restorative.  Rarely instantaneous, but rather by returns, we train in this method of entry.

The imaginal is the unspoken language.  And we try to come into harmony with the unspoken “words” that appear.  We do this, not as an esoteric, spiritual act, but rather as a practical, profane way to optimize our life and our health.   

Dogma Free

NOT DERIVATIVE  /  DEGENERATIVE (ELIADE) SHAMANISM, of which MOST "shamanism" is, even the most traditional--more of a religious shamanic motif.

Not a post-modern blend of wondrous Sufi or Zen or complex sounding, more something free of convention, free of culture, society, psychology--creatural.

GETTING BACK TO THE HEART PRACTICE.  When you think that you have got it, perhaps, you think, again.  You make a stab at turning off your thinking.  Take a serious look at the cultural constructs that you are applying.    It is not unrelated to to the same problem in resolving Zen questions--koans/kong-ans.

Instead of something easy, try to imagine taking up something so limited, so impossible that perhaps one in 100.000 thousands of Koryaks living so intimately with the landscape find impossible to do.

And yet, still, it appears in human life in any age.  Eternal, enduring.

Drum Sings Sky Down

Lance Kinseth, Calling Down Moon, 48x48”

DRUM SINGS SKY DOWN. 

Drum’s vibrations obviously pulse through us, but they are far more than drum’s.  In that way in which a wave is the ocean, these vibrations are Sky-sized.

Endless Sky, containing Earth and galaxies and Cosmos, comes down.

Sky is already here, inside mass, inside us and the surrounding space, and unbound in the holy river and sea.  The trees and mountains are Sky.

Drum forms a pathway for the essentials of Sky to come down or for you and I to go up.

Raven and Crow are two of the essentials—faces of Sky.   Raven and Crow are present, even already inside us, and yet—like Sky—are touchless.

Perhaps one time Moon or Raven comes down and perhaps in another time we go up to Crow, and still more magic: we do not move.

If we are lucky we sense them and we interact with them.

If we are even more lucky, a time will come when they are known to be us.

The atmosphere is the essence of their bodies and of your body as well.

And yet, we spend most of our time in a world that does not exist, that we contrive, and call this very real reality of Sky a “dream.”

Sky is our very existence in each moment and, in its vast, unending formless form, that which designs us and expresses us.  Our most real scientific measures are saying this to us.

Our hands are Sky’s hands. 

Sky is the body of spirit that extends out beyond galaxies and cosmos. 

We exist deep inside spirit as a congealed form of energy to fit the local conditions of existence. 

We are not little pieces of spirit. 

There is no end or beginning to us, no separation, no previous life, no coming and going, no ending and beginning. 

The differences that we feel—such as what I choose to eat or how you dress—are real, but small and narrow expressions of our identity and of our limits. 

A fish is river-shaped; a blossom is the tilt of the Earth toward the sun.

And were we to get hold of it, opening a pathway into Sky can optimize us, attune us to the longer reaches of ourselves, bring us into harmony, and heal and sustain us. 

 **********

DRUM PULSE IS SKY SONG.

WHEN SKY SWEEPS DOWN in drum sound, all is transformed.  Be it far northern Eskimo kilaut or Koryak boubin.  Drum’s vibration sweeps sky into the present moment.

Do you seek it’s wisdom?

Sky is more than space above landscape.  Sky is the farther reach of landscape.  Earth is in it, as well as star—Sun—and Milky Way Galaxy that contains Sun as a small obscure star, and all galaxies and the farthest reach of cosmos, that unknown terrain of universe or universes and/or more.

And Sky is the immanent form of Raven and Crow that can seem ghost-like to us, appearing to wear the appearance of thin air.   Spirit-Beings are not really spirit-beings in the catholic sense, not real this thing or that thing, not really something either exclusively outside or inside, but rather, are manifestations of inseparable, interpenetrating Sky.

When Sky sweeps down, as Sky endlessly does, but typically so far outside our consciousness, Raven/Crow/Moon sweeps down.  In drum sounds, Sky sings and comes down or we fly out to meet Raven/Crow.  When we leave the world that we have contrived, we find ourselves inseparable an in a world where self and landscape are no more or no less than facets of a whole.  We look at our experience contriving parts and miss the elephant.  It is like trying to cut the river into parts to see the river.  Sky is the horizontal and vertical terrain in front of our senses as well as the literal atmosphere above us that presses into us as our very breath and our very sensing as well.

And perhaps if we are lucky—if we are “called” into such consciousness—Raven/Crow/Moon open this inseparability.

Spiritually, we are likely to imagine the landscape as separable from ourselves, either as a stage-set in which we act out a rather brief temporal life before entering a more spiritual, transcendent “heaven” or as a landscape of “come-arounds” in which our soul moves across life spans though a variety of forms. 

Shamanically, however, landscape—that is far more sky than solid mass as its physical and spiritual essence—is god-like, and we—deep within it, ensouled rather than a separate soul—are expressions of this godliness.

Not just for aesthetic pleasure, awareness that everything that is landscape is in us brings us inside is this very deep reality to optimize each moment.