SHAMANISM VS THE DOOMSTERS AND GLOOMSTERS

I was watching with grim fascination the head of a Buddhist Order that I used to be part of. He was emphasising what a terrible state the world is in. He said the world has always been in a terrible state, but that it is particularly terrible right now.

My view is that the world just is what it is, it is humans doing what humans do and always have done, and there are good things and problematic things within that. We kind of need the challenges of the problematic things. As Dostoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, if humanity ever did create a utopia, it would destroy it, if only to assert its own free will.

So what is it about religions damning the world? We see it in Christianity, where the world is the creation of the Devil, and humans are tarred with Original Sin. And we see it in Shamanism also: it is almost axiomatic that benighted, greedy humanity is destroying the natural world and that we know better.

There is an unconscious dishonesty here that goes deep: the worse the world is, the more spiritual we are with our 'enlightened' attitudes; the more virtuous we become when we go about saving the world from itself. Another term for it is 'spiritual bypass': when we imagine a good, identify with it, and see 'bad' as out there instead of where it truly lies, in our own hearts. This is what all these Buddhists, Christians and Shamans are avoiding in their condemnation of the world. Muslims too, no doubt.

The western world is having a particularly bad dose of 'everything is terrible' at the moment. I doubt people in China, one generation out of rural poverty, see it that way!

I think it is our responsibility as shamans to oppose this pessimism, to repeatedly point out that which is good in the world, and for that basic optimism to shine through in the way we are. Because if we feel close to Spirit - and that, after all, is the point - then we feel joy, and we want to embrace this brief period called life while we can.

So enough of this climate apocalypse stuff, enough of this condemning humans as thoughtless and greedy (most people are just trying to get by!) Instead, rejoice in human brilliance and ingenuity and adaptability: it is what we bring to the table of life, and Spirit is cheering us on as our technological inventiveness increasingly races forward. Of course it brings imbalance, but that can and is being addressed.

To condemn humanity as a cancer, as many do, is itself a disease. Love humanity.

Things are at a stage where to you are liable to be attacked if you point out the good trends in the world, as though that is a denial of the bad things which, we are told, constitute an existential crisis.

Here are some of the good things: Hundreds of millions are coming out of poverty as the East industrialises; vast areas are greening over due to higher CO2; agricultural yields are at an all time high, and we are starting to give land back to nature; the world is net being reforested; as the world warms, so do far fewer people die from cold, well outweighing the extra heat deaths; fewer people are dying from climate incidents because we adapt; we live amidst unprecedented peace and prosperity. (Look up Bjorn Lomborg for a fuller, referenced account of these trends.)

Will that do? It is our responsibility to be informed of these positive trends as a counter-balance to the problems of the world. It is our job to help people out of the slough of pessimism into which they have sunk. As healers, where else do you begin?

Of course, people are attached to their slough of pessimism: it gives them a group identity, it makes them feels like they are on the side of good, and it protects them from their own misery. So it's not easy, and you won't always get thanked for it. You will lose a few friends. Some people will think you are unhinged and in denial. But that is always part of the shamanic territory, for we can only help and heal to the extent that we have stepped out of herd-think. That is an ongoing task, for the collective pressures to think in particular ways are powerful and alluring, however wrong-headed.

OPEN TO INVITES...

I'm not a great advertiser of myself. But I reckon I'm good at running workshops of many varieties. It's something I love to do. I've been at it for nearly 40 years in one way or another. In my youth it was Buddhism. After a major revamp that turned into Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Pipe Ceremonies, Sweatlodges, Trance Dances and just general chewing stuff over: maybe my favourite 😎 I do astrology and tarot too. I prefer not to plan too much, and let things unfold in their own way.

The point of a teacher is to edge you in the direction of your own inner guidance. That is why I say cherish the things you don't agree with me about. If you've been reading this blog for a while, I will almost certainly have said some things you don't agree with 🤣

I have 2 books as a sort of CV (pictured), published by Moon Books in 2022. I'm not that inclined to set up workshops myself, but if you would like me to come and do something for an evening or a day or even a week, I will probably say yes, enthusiastically. Anywhere in the world! As long as I don't lose money on it. Happy to sleep in a tent. Or my van  😊

OF COLONISED INDIANS

A traditionally-trained Chippewa Cree guy who used to stay with me said that 'Native Americans' refer to themselves as 'Indians'. It was just the white people who call them Native Americans. So now I refer to them when I can as Indians. And sometimes you will get taken to task for that by whites who think you are being disrespectful. It happened to me recently, from someone has a bit of Indian blood in them, but is very identified with that, even though they had never met an Indian until recently. No discussion was possible, she was fierce about it: saying 'Indian' was like using the 'n' word about black people.

Personally I'd rather call people by the name they call themselves, rather than one invented by guilty whites, and then adhered to dogmatically by an imaginary Indian.

Another word I'm wondering about is 'colonised'. In this case it refers to the dominant, conquering culture taking away the identity and culture of the conquered people and telling them who they should be in terms of the values of the dominant culture. Any process of telling people who they should be at a formative age is 'colonisation': an Indian teacher told me I had been colonised by my early boarding school experience.

Indians often need to go through a process of 'decolonisation' to reclaim their original culture. The word brings in the connotation of 'colonialism' as an unmitigated evil. There was nothing good, for example, about the British Empire in modern discourse, and academics who look for the good as well as the bad get shunned. As did Nigel Biggar for writing the book pictured below.

This may sound harsh, but 'colonisation' is where Indian-as-victim meets modern woke culture, which turns any number of people into victims, and demands that we as privileged oppressors bow down before them. Some Indians are in victim mode, some are not. The Dalai Lama could easily be in victim mode, but he never has been. He gets on with life, and does not attack the Chinese. It is not some form of 'denial'. He just refuses to bear a grudge and complain about what was a huge injustice, when to do so would be futile.

My Chippewa Cree friend told me it is often the warrior cultures amongst the Indians who go on and on about what happened to them, for it is a matter of wounded pride that they have been conquered.

But isn't colonisation what has happened throughout history, when one people conquered another? You'd better adapt to their culture - allow your mind to be colonised - or you will not flourish, you will be squeezed out. If Indians want to flourish, they had better adopt the white man's ways. It doesn't mean they can't also hold on to, and reclaim, their traditional ways: the conquering culture of the US is unusually liberal in that respect, by historical standards. It is great they can do so, for there is much in the traditional indigenous ways that we have forgotten, to our detriment in the modern world.

Even if you are not part of a conquered culture, you will be colonised: your culture will tell you, as a child, who you are. It may do that with greater or lesser degrees of liberalism, but tell you it will. It is not a victim thing, but a necessary thing that suits most people. Some of us may eventually find it to be a cage that we have to struggle our way out of, because we have something deeper of our own to find. But that is a minority thing, and that struggle for our own values, with opposition from the mainstream, can be exactly what we need to find them.

So yes, all of us may need to 'decolonise' our minds in some respects. The reclaiming of a sense of the sacred, for example, denied as it is by materialist atheism. But don't get into blame mode about it, or you will perpetuate the colonisation: victimhood easily becomes a religion in itself. That is why I think the current narrative about slavery is as much about stirring up ancestral grievances - from something that ended generations ago - as it is about justice. Think Dalai Lama.

SOUL RETRIEVAL and the DAIMON: REMEMBERING WHO WE ALWAYS WERE

I'm trying to get my head around the idea of soul retrieval, as it is taught in so-called 'core' shamanism. It is a concept that is fundamental to becoming a 'shamanic practitioner', which is what many people call themselves these days. I've never been able to bring myself to use that epithet, and I trust my reluctance. After much thought, I decided a while back that if anything I would call myself the ‘flatpak helpline’. That is, I will do my best to help you decipher and live whatever vision it is you have for your life - what it is that you love, I will align myself with that.

As for your traumas, I really don't feel it is my job to sort them by bringing back the soul parts that allegedly went missing as a result. That is just a modern western psychotherapising of the human as victim of their childhood, and the healer as the person who will sort that for you - with the help, of course, of their spirit guides.

No. We need to heal ourselves. And your traumas, your demons, however awful, have their part to play in your destiny. You have my full sympathy in your tribulations, but I'm not going to take them away from you, even if I could. You may think they came about because your father was like this, or your mother was like that. We never know, and in a way it doesn't matter. All we can ever do is come into good relationship with our demons. That is something we have to do to become a full human being, and it's like everything else will take care of itself if we do that. And it is a lifelong process.

I don't think psychotherapists do anyone a service when they encourage people in the invention of creation myths of their own demons, based on their childhoods, however plausible. It is an easy, facile thing to do. We don't know where these demons come from, and there's a good chance our parents were just familiar mirrors for the challenges we came in with anyway. So don't blame them, which is all we are doing when we invent stories that seem to explain who we are in terms of how they were.

I am banging on about this because the soul retrieval paradigm I was taught back in the 90s, that goes back to Michael Harner, had clearly been crafted to fit the modern childhood victim paradigm. We were taught that soul pieces often went missing as the result of trauma in childhood, and our job as whatever strange thing we were being taught to be - certainly not a traditional shaman - was to bring those pieces back, along with a story about what had gone wrong.

Now I'm not saying there isn't some kind of truth in all this, but I am also saying to hell with it. I am not sure why I am putting it so vehemently, but I trust it.

There's a whole modern way of looking at the world behind my reservations. There is human as victim and human as autonomous. Those are the two underlying ideas that I am protesting against. Indigenous peoples did not see themselves as victims - as results, if you like, of genes, environment, of childhood. No, they were born unique, with a destiny, which if they were lucky would result in a vision of what their life would be. And humans were relational: you did not separate yourself from your people, you were not the lone hero, carving a place in an unforgiving world. As an adult, you had responsibilities more than you had 'rights'.

So where does that leave the work I sometimes do for people that shifts things along, or the work I have had done for me? Being able to do work for others that moves things along is a gift, it is beautiful, it is special, and I am grateful that I am able to facilitate that through whatever it is that works through me. I will always say yes if I am asked to do something, it is what I am here for. Why I end up doing what I do when I do it is a mystery, necessarily. It is always about a much bigger picture than the presenting problem. Maybe that is all I can say.

It is not something I advertise. I have never been able to bring myself to do that. I can just about bring myself to advertise my astrology readings, but even then I do my best to keep them informal and to let them run on as long as they need to so that the spirit can do what it needs to. Healing isn't just about me shapeshifting and letting the animals take over. It is also about me feeling aligned with myself, and the other person as a result being drawn into a deeper alignment with themselves, maybe just through conversation.

For myself, feeling out of sorts for years at a time, feeling disempowered and lacking has pushed me to struggle and to find gold in myself. What we call ‘soul loss’ can be a necessary thing. I spent many years with childhood explanations. I refuse to use those facile explanations, which are so easy to invent, any more. I prefer the old idea of Plato that

“the soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

 

"As explained by the greatest of the later Platonists, Plotinus, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice – and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.” (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p8)

In this sense, ‘Soul Retrieval’ could be seen as helping people to remember the presiding image of who they always were. That, in Norse mythology, was woven by the Norns. It is about this bigger picture, rather than a remedying of pathologies.

THE BAD TEACHER

 I think we all have a bad teacher somewhere in us. By which I mean we all have a self-serving shadow-side that we're not always in good relationship with. It loves praise, it does not like being contradicted, it wants to have its way with some of the women who come along. It's a rat's nest of trouble. 

 

There's only one thing worse than having a shadow, and that is not having one. By which I mean denying it. If you feel you have a position as teacher to maintain, if you feel you have to give an appearance of knowing something, then the shadow is ready and waiting to seize on that. So being any kind of teacher requires an ongoing struggle, not to control the shadow - that just makes things worse - but to be honest about it, firstly with yourself, and then, to the extent it is appropriate, with others. Then you are a good teacher. For you are showing others how to be in good relationship with themselves.

The shadow will always be there, and I think it has mysterious purposes of its own, like Gollum, without whom the Ring would not have been destroyed in Mount Doom.

I think we can learn as much from the bad teacher as we can from the good teacher. Every teacher has a bad teacher within them, and if you keep your eyes peeled you will see it, for no-one is perfect. Heaven help us from anyone who is perfect.

What do you do with what you have seen? Many people reject the teacher outright once they have seen his/her faults. That is because they feel betrayed. They were expecting perfection. Don't get me wrong, you may need to just walk away. They may be seriously bad news. But teachers usually also have some genuine gift that also needs appreciating: they'd maybe rushed in to teaching early, before they were ready. Or maybe that was always going to happen.

I've yet to see anyone teaching who is young (and that means from B4 middle age) and plenty older than that, where the shadow side isn't playing a significant, and unconscious, part. I've previously been unfriended by teachers for making this sort of general statement, which I think proves the point. My first port of call with teachers is can I level with them, will they talk to me man to man, so to speak, or are they always having to be teacher, always having to know better? And on a feeling level, are they allowing me close to them, or is there a protective wall there? And maybe I do feel close to them, but is that just their charisma?

 

It's easier to be a good teacher when it is one-to-one. A group situation has its own dynamic in which the teacher becomes the 'special' one who everyone treats differently, and there's not much to be done about that. Except keep giving people their power back by being honest and natural and not trying to sound too authoritative.

 

Not only does the group give power to the teacher - and this is something that can be difficult for the individual to resist, for we are relational creatures - but the bad teacher will want it, need it. You will find yourself becoming diminished, a different and less free person than when you are around friends and family. It can be subtle, and it can take a while.

 

I think this is one of the greatest lessons we can have. You may be able to look back and see that losing some of your power, your autonomy to that teacher was exactly what was needed in order for you to properly claim it. Because if it can be given away, you never truly had it in the first place. The bad teacher doesn't truly have their own power either: they need your praise to feel sure of themselves.

 

'Power' is an overused word in this context. What I mean at bottom is our own ability to guide ourself, that lies deep within. It usually takes unearthing, because it is not something humans naturally have, though we find that hard to see and admit to. Everyone thinks they are their own person. This is why we have religion: we usually need to start with considerable guidance from without. Or from your spirit guides, though that is more complex, because in a sense they also are that deeper self.

I covered some of this in my last piece, 'The Good Teacher', who is always guiding us to find our own answers. A bad teacher will always claim to be doing that too, and think they are doing that. Which they may be to some extent: it is complicated. But their own personal needs will also draw you into a place of submission to their authority, along with the rest of the group.

Just as Gollum had his part to play, so too do the bad teachers, for they expose the ways in which we are not sure of ourselves. Breaking away from them can be a drawn-out crisis. There is a voice in us we need to listen to, but we are uncertain of it. Things do not seem right when we do not listen to it. But the price of listening to it can mean leaving the metaphysical and social security of the teacher and group we are around. And there are good things about the group, so we try to put the doubts aside. But they keep coming back. It is a warrior thing. It requires daring, courage, self-confidence and ruthless honesty. There is a new centre waiting to emerge, around which your whole being will re-arrange itself.