sound/movement

All Is New: Or What Is Enduringly Wrong With Shamanism, Or Science, Or Psychic Energy

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THERE IS A PREDOMINANT belief that shamanism is an old way, and “ancient way” that may or may not have value for modern life, depending on one’s point of view.   There is a sense that a “return” to Old Ways is either of value—more authentic “original thought”—or a misguided fantasy.

Such a belief is just that—a belief—when in reality there really neither old nor new when it comes to human development.  Human life is still very young in the evolution of the Earth, having appeared only in the last flashes of the history of the Earth.

“Old ways” are replete with superstition, prejudice, and even a sanctioned presence for  murder [e.g., an especially high murder rate among young men as a response to injustice].  Illness and death might be skewed toward perceptions of having offended the spirits or hexing by enemies.  And “new post-modern, cybernetic ways” may not really be an improvement and continue this prejudice in different clothing.  Still, old ways can offer some rich emotional technologies that are expressed in activities such as listening to stone, presence/identity in stars, and taking/desiring less in material things.  And the material technology of “new ways” can offer deeper subtlety, such as micro- and macro- and astro perspectives that are still only just beginning to open.

In such a context, living shamanism has always been and continues to remain “no-thought,” a process of “seeking more than knowing and interpreting,” connecting, and entering.  This is essentially a wordless strategy that aspires to be non-conceptual and be a method of access rather than an answer—a method of remaining in contact.

The deepest poetry is beyond words.  “Plants speaking” is conceptual, and across the long run perhaps appealing in the sense of hearing answers or information, yet facile at best.  But the drum sound or grinding a small stone in a circle on a larger tundra boulder or looking into a stone or into burnt wood can open.  It opens, not by getting an answer as much as challenging conceptualization.  Shamanism that becomes culturally shared is likely no longer shamanism, but rather has become a motif in a cultural religious or medicinal practice—an element of a belief system.  The snake means this… and the plant says this and does that…

Shamanism knows nothing.  It is perhaps a pulse or a repetitive act or a calming and stilling, turning these sensations into gateways.   We want answers, but the authentic “warrior” practice involves existence in an unanswerable context. 

“Plant says this to me.”  Good luck with that.  Shamanism says human life in any era is wild, and the essence of wildness is the capacity to remain alert.  No more than this.  And this capacity to remain alert (which implies a movement toward coming into balance or “fitted-ness” is a wondrous dance that is more than enough to ask.

Alertness is an experience of which all living events have some degree of consciousness.  It is present at the bird feeder and in the growth of a plant and even in the seasonal rock of the Earth in its star-dance.  Cultural life can be convinced that it has answers, but all of the clear views of reality proposed by a thousand human cultures are soon overturned.  Stars that are gods dissolve to galaxies to a universe in perhaps multiverses and what is that.  If anything is known, it is perhaps that you and I are really not you and I but rather an expression of all, and all itself—more the dazzling, miraculous appearance of all in this place in this moment.

Shamanism does say in a strong way that we need the Earth.  We need modernist Henry Beston’s “fire before the hands” [The Outermost House], and we need an indigenous sense of mitakuye oyasin—“all my relations” that is heartfelt, and perhaps not unlike Siddhartha’s experience of dropping off self and the discovery of E=mc2 or DNA.

A feral return to a pastoral is a concept, and a link of sound with charkas to heal is the same.  It is an attempt to break the barrier, but a facile waste of life.  But sitting down with a steady pulse or stillness and a heartbeat can be revelatory. 

So, teaching shamanism might begin with a drum pulse and largely stay there, and when words are introduce, they are used to tell us what not to do rather than what to do, (1) in order to reduce the repetition of same-old romantic pitfalls, (2) to criticize what we have come to sense that shamanism is or science or the high life of poetry or cyber-technology is.

There is an enduring dimension of human experience that is, essentially, the enduring experience of human wildness—something that seems impossible, something that we have left behind in modernity.

Old is not, in itself, better, but there was this beautiful view of the wide-open star-full sky then.  And new is not, in itself, the clarified, finally anti-superstitious way forward.

So sit down, perhaps with sound in an urban basement, or after two days of solo camping under the stars, and listen.

It is Drawn Down & Heart-Sings