SHAMANISM and ACTIVISM

I think the main contribution that Shamanism can offer to protest is awareness of the shadow. The gaze of many activists, in my experience, tends to be outwards at the expense of inwards. Hence the Extinction Rebellion placard below (which one friend put admiringly on FB) with its 'us and them' message. 

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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I mean, even simple logic shows him to be wrong: who uses the fossil fuels, the producers of which he is demonising? It is ourselves. Any collective movement has a shadow, it is to be expected. We project what we do not like about ourselves onto politicians, CEOs, bankers, men, you name it. Hence 'us and them' when it needs to be 'us and us'. It is because we have viewed the earth as a 'them' that we have felt able to exploit her. And in bringing an 'us and them' attitude to environmental protest, we are bringing the very mindset that caused the problem in the first place.

PRAYER

When we pray, we are aligning ourselves with what Spirit wants for us. Sometimes it takes a bit of talking round the subject to get there. And if it's just what your ego wants, it probably won't happen, because there isn't the power of Spirit behind it.

But that doesn't mean we can't pray for ordinary things. Spirit doesn't mean 'spiritual'. Spirit concerns the totality of life, the totality of this dream that we are, for now, part of. Spirit will respond to whatever we genuinely need for our life to flourish, or even for our life just to work. There is nothing superficial or disrespectful about praying for your car to work properly. Or that your ageing aunt will continue to be able to go to Bingo.

Shamanism is an earth path, that which really matters is not away in some higher world, but here and now and embodied. We have our upperworlds and lowerworlds, but they are places we visit for nourishment; sideshows, even, to the real thing. Really, this world and the otherworld are not different.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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So prayer is grounded and ordinary, and is about aligning ourselves with the greater dream of Spirit, which is easy to lose sight of amid what are often all-consuming practical concerns. Unless you are a child or an old person.

A PAEAN TO DEATH AND OLD AGE

Whose idea was it that Death is a something to be afraid of? I want to point a finger firstly at the Christian Church, which claimed knowledge of that great Unknowable as a means of controlling people, of getting them to behave in the way that it wanted them to. And then I want to point a finger at its banal offspring, materialist science, which replaced the prospect of hell with the prospect of extinction. (Science is the offspring of the church in that the church removed the sacred from everyday life into an abstract absolute called God, and from there it is only one step to getting rid of the sacred altogether.)

In a sense, Science is right - Death IS an extinction, but only of the self we know. What is left is that infinite ocean of Spirit which created this dream in the first place. And if we live close to that, then to that extent the prospect of death has a feeling of joy and fulfillment. The ego, of course, remains a bit wobbly at the prospect, and that is precisely what organised religion (in which I include Science as a belief system) is able to manipulate.

And then there is old age. As we age, the body and mind start to slow down, but not as fast as we might think, particularly if we take steps to remain healthy. That process of slowing down is maybe better seen as a slow movement from matter to spirit, which is of benefit to the whole community. This is a traditional viewpoint. But our society has done away with Spirit, so that old age merely becomes a reminder of death, that extinction event of which we are terrified, and therefore do not talk about.

So in this piece I want to reclaim old age as well as death. I am 61, and in another 15 years I may be an elder, I may have some serious wisdom to offer. I am currently experiencing a deep renewal, which I had been previously told about in dreams. I feel that I am at the start of the most fruitful period of my life. And I am physically fitter than I was 20 years ago. A friend who is 88 has a replacement hip and still beats most young people up the side of a mountain.  Don't underestimate what Spirit can do to keep us buzzing right into old age!

I think as we get older we can become more open to change, less rigid in our ideas and emotional patterns, and Spirit is able to take great advantage of that, and transform us in ways that would never have been possible when we were younger. In this sense, life grows rather than diminishes as we age. There is MORE life in us.

The leaves on an old tree are as green as those on a younger tree, and there are more of them.

Massage

Just been for a massage with Katerina Down in Yelverton on Dartmoor. It was much more than I expected - it turned into a full-on shamanic healing after an hour or so. She is gifted that way, though doesn't say so, but if you are open to it, that's what happens. This lovely energy as soon as she put her hands on my back, and by the end the spirits had taken over, all sorts coursing through me. Very happy with it!

The Great Unknowable

It doesn't take much to realise that all is not as it seems. There is this naive view of reality, that we are essentially a brain looking out on a real material world. But the brain structures our experience in a profound way. The givens we have of space and time and left and right and in here and out there, all those are created by the brain as a way of ordering and making sense of our experience. 

This isn't just an interesting philosophical idea: just read Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, a series of case studies of people in whom these basic brain structurings of experience have broken down, and it will shake you, as it shook me in my 20s. This life really is the Great Dreaming, and behind it all is the Great Unknowable.