sound/movement

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

latest NASA Earth photo

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

Duir

DUIR: Celtic reference for Oak that means :"doorway."

Just outside the south-facing back window, a white oak doorway into "world," and what is that?  And why this separation of self and world?

A cluster of white oaks, once part of a savannah ecosystem, but with young oaks beginning to rise, in close communication and nurturance from the larger "mother" oaks--already here long before me. [The first house here, next door to the West, where the inhabitant at that time found North American Indian artifacts overflowing in the creek below. And the backyard of this house being largely a sandbar for the gushing waters of the melting glacial ice of the Des Moines Lobe, some 10,000 years past.]

6/23/2015:  The Oak King has ruled the "waxing of the year with strength, courage, and endurance."  Now, in this Celtic Old Way, we enter into the waning part of the year.

For all of its age-old similar conceptualization with our post-modern, post-industrial, cybernetic intelligence, we still clings to this here and that there--so very narrow a view.

We still argue over whether or not there is a climate change that we have caused.  But there is no question that we could erase the battle and look at how we are destroying the Earth, period.

Shamanism, at its heart, is not conceptual, not a feel-good, not a healing--more of a responsiveness, more of an opening.

Why something framed as ancestral, primitive when we are inside a mass extinction of eco-diversity?

Non-Conceptual Experience

from Shaman Tube

A WAY FORWARD IN SHAMANISM: naturalist, direct, non-conceptual experience

Not listening to, as we tend to hear/see our expectations, but rather, opening, following

Even in primal cultures, tight conceptual experience is the norm, because culture tends to be conceptual (-e.g., the forest pygmy, having lived in deep forest his entire life under canopy, travels with author on the culture to the edge of the forest and "sees" a puddle [common in forest] that is, in reality, a lake).

But if we FOLLOW, and open rather than discriminate, perhaps something is offered.

Mongolian shamans now incorporated, dancing around like idiots at their convention, practicing psycho-relief, of course, cultural now--derivative rather than original, and likely degenerate, which is to say, superficial, but well-costumed, and facile at best.

Mongolia is such a deep core place for shamanism, but, really, next-to-nothing but B.S. now, like almost anywhere on Earth where "shamanism" persists.  In Mongolia, medical, religious, and nature cult phenomena: Tengerism (highest god, Tenger, god of heaven with the nasty killer Genghis Khan as the highest embodiment) or yellow shamanism, an "expressive Buddhism."  Interestingly, the shaman's drum there, often a horse skin, becomes the "saddle" that the shaman rides.

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