CHAOS SHAMANISM Part 3
It's quite a deep thing this idea of Chaos. We think of it as a superficial thing, when things just aren't ordered, things haven't been paid attention to, yeah, it seems superficial. But that's using the word Chaos to mean untidy, teenage bedroom, disarray.
That's not the original meaning, as I said in the first part, it comes from the Greek and it refers to the vast Abyss that was there before anything arose out of Chaos. First arose darkness and night, the god Erebus and the goddess Nyx, the male and female dimensions of the dark, and out of them arose light. Also arose Gaia the Earth and Tartarus, the depths beneath the Earth. So everything arose out of Chaos, it's the source of everything. Chaos is that potent source of Life, of everything, of the universe, of the dreaming, of the creation.
This ongoing creation: that's what we're tuning into when we do Chaos Shamanism, we're tuning into the ongoing dreaming of who we are, and the collective dreaming of the universe that keeps it coming into being. But most importantly this ongoing dreaming of who we are, we're tuning into that, we're becoming aware that life isn't something that just happens to us, which is how it seems if you're just looking outwards. If you look inwards as well to the spirit you realize that actually it's been created mysteriously, it's not under our control. Like thoughts, where do they come from, they just seem to come in? Or feelings, how we're feeling today, it's not something we decide on. It's something that we feel the victim of sometimes! Our job is to come into relationship with it all, with this ongoing creation, which we experience through the continual bubbling up of thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations and dreams and hints from spirit too. And events on the outside too, we roll with them when they need rolling with, and we grapple with them when they need grappling with.
Shamanism without the Chaos is religion. In religion you get in the way of the Chaos, you get in the way of that access to Spirit, you put up boundaries of this is how it should be, yeah this is how you Journey and all that. I read this long description on Facebook yesterday. Someone had asked a question about journeying and this whole description came back of the three worlds and exactly what you need to do where and what soul retrievals are about, and it just sounded enormously complicated. But it's not, it's simple, everything is simple. That's what Chaos reminds us of: that everything is simple. It doesn't mean you can't have complexity – which I distinguish from complicated - but there's always simplicity behind it. So when you're doing anything - if you're in a sweat lodge, if you're on a journey to the lower world, if you're dancing around the medicine wheel, if you’re praying in a Pipe Ceremony, if you're doing an astrology reading, whatever it is you're doing, you need to be asking yourself why am I doing it? What's the purpose of it? That is what gives the depth.
There's always this very simple purpose behind everything, which is to be living from that deeper source within us, that thing that's calling us, that thing that is love, that loves life yeah, that wants to live, that has living to do. We're living from that place that has living to do, and maybe death is when you've done the living that was to be done this time, and it's time to go off on the next thing whatever that is.
So Chaos can sound like a superficial thing yeah, and you think you're the one with the real depth because you've done 20 years training with a you know, a Siberian Shaman or a Native American teacher yeah and that's got real depth. Well it probably has so I don't want to go the opposite here, it's a delicate dance of appreciating the depth of proper training that takes many years, and that being true to the Spirit within us at all points. A proper training should lead us to that point where you can just let go of it all.
Sometimes you just need to let go of all those practices you built up, however beautiful. Like the sweat lodge has got so much in it, so much symbolism, everything is symbolic and it's beautiful. And by the way, symbols are not an intellectual thing for indigenous peoples, they do not just stand for something, like let’s pretend. No, they ARE that thing, the sweatlodge IS the womb out of which you are reborn. It also IS the whole universe while you are in it. That’s what ceremony does, it shifts reality and makes it sacred.
So of course there's lots of different ways of doing sweat lodges, as many as there are peoples, and the traditional sweat lodges will have a lot more of that kind of symbolic content than anything we can run. We have to kind of just be true to the spirit, and keep it simple to keep it real, the complex symbolism is not ours, it is foreign, it is something we can probably never be truly part of.
Last time I led a sweat lodge was about five years ago, it was lovely, it flowed, it was like this feminine presence came in and took over and she just led it, and people had a really good time. People experienced it differently, for some people it can be really hot, some other people it's really gentle. The goddess took care of that, and I didn't have much in the way of tradition behind me, just a few basics, but that's all I needed, because I'd done the 20 or 30 years being with myself, which is the real training and which any traditional training will be moving you towards.
In a traditional training they may stick you out on Vision Quests, where it's just you and the natural world, so it's a deep thing and it's a demanding thing. It's very demanding to keep asking yourself what is the purpose of why I'm doing what I'm doing, it's much easier just to go to church on Sunday and do what the priest tells you, or go to the sweat lodge and do what you're told - of course we need to do that as well, because it's a collective thing and that has its own power and it brings Community together and it has its own beauty. We do what we're told, but within it we need to be aware of why we're doing it, we're not just doing it because when we've done it, it’s like good I've done that, I'm a bit sacred, now I'm spiritual. No, there's no point doing it unless you're with whatever it is in you that you're here to be with, we all have something to be here with, to take care of, deep within us.
Okay that was the first point. I've got several more. So we're always going back to the source with Chaos Shamanism. We're respecting tradition, yeah we really honour it, we really learn it when we're around it, but there's always that gap we need to live from, that space where we find our souls, independently of whatever practice or ceremony it is that we are doing. But at the same time we are fully immersed in, wholehearted about whatever it is we are doing.
There's a whole other area that I wanted to talk about, which is a bit separate and I probably won't have time for an awful lot of it. In the same way that there's a gap between us and tradition, there also needs to be a gap between us and the collective values around us. Tradition and the collective values will overlap if we belong to a traditional culture. But certainly there's collective values around us now, they're not all wrong, collective values are necessary, they hold the community together, they are not just the brainwashing that some people think. They orient us, even though we might eventually need to move beyond them. In the same way, religion holds the community together. But these values are necessarily limited, at least in the way they are applied, if not in themselves, and we need to be able to stand apart from that, and that can be quite tough.
If you do this shamanic thing, you're probably part of the counterculture that began in the 60s as a protest against the materialism of society and the lack of spirit, it was necessary. But it has its own shadow, because it was itself a rebellion. We need to be able to stand apart from that collective shadow of the counterculture, which is authority, money and a reflex opposition to the establishment. We end up thinking we're above the world, we're better than the world, we know better, that capitalism's evil and all that sort of thing. Well we couldn't run it any better. You encounter this very often in spiritual groups of whatever sorts, this kind of putting down of the world and it's like we know better. “The world's in a dreadful state.” Well, the world's just the world, it is what it is, it’s not good or bad. And remember news isn’t news unless it’s bad, so we’re skewed anyway by the media.
We need to be part of the world. What happens when you're part of a tradition or some modern spiritual group, is you can feel you're above the world subtly and it makes you feel good about yourself. Well there's no easy get out if you're into Chaos Shamanism: you're part of the world, you're equal with the world, you're in the world, which is what we're here to do, to incarnate, to undertake the difficult task of bringing spirit into matter, and that subtle hubris is not there.
And one final point. Remember that indigenous people are necessarily on the defensive, they have been overwhelmed by modern culture. So it is hard for them not to put our culture down to some extent, or even to a big extent, out of self-preservation. It is understandable and very common, but don’t buy into it. Otherwise you’re just buying into that same old thing and creating a false, superior identity for yourself. But it means taking indigenous people off that pedestal we put them on – can you do that?
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