Shamanism is a dimension of human experience that can be found in every culture in any age. It can be observed in a variety of forms, ranging from a fundamental spontaneous experience, derivative culturally shared practices, or as veiled motifs of spiritual, medical, artistic, scientific, and psychotherapeutic interventions.

Paradoxically, as shamanism becomes more culturally shared, it may become less authentic—less culturally challenging—and degenerative. Provoked by an experience of everyday life as a sort of “half-truth,” shamanism is a method that focuses on the erroneous belief in a separation of human life from nature. Shamanism focuses specifically on remaining alert to the creatural dimensions of human life that can be overridden by cultural, socio-psychological dimensions of everyday life.

Shamanism is an expression of an enduring wild state to remain alert to the changing conditions of existence and integrate into the natural world that continues to design and express human life across the long run.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Refuge / Disappearance

Evenk Headdress [search images]

A WAY OF SEEING in the dark, a way of knowing, retrieval or restoration?

Such a way may deteriorate into a pathway to discouragement or self-delusion, as if the landscape could be oversimplified—a “sham” that misleads oneself or others.

At its core, accessing the natural may be more a process of taking refuge, and, if realized, …the water, salt and crystal closes over the heads of all who truly seek refuge [from “Five Stanzas to Thoreau,” in Tomas Transtromer, The Great Enigma, p.6].

With such a turn in life, taking refuge, being truly absorbed, disappearing, a need for power or control or vision or knowing is realized to be unimportant, as well as impossible.

A powerful unseeing, with perhaps bright glints here and there that seem to make another world in this world, aliveness may turn into that which it is, wholly natural and eased, deep in…inner greenness / artful and hopeful [Transtromer, p.6].



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