CHAOS SHAMANISM - the Written Version!

OK, so I know a load of you aren't so keen on the short videos I've been making. You'd rather scan a written piece and move on. Fair enough. That's how social media works. With that in mind I have lightly edited the transcript (provided by youtube) of my 1st talk on Chaos Shamanism. It took a while, but I'll do Part 2 as well if you like this one 😎 Below is a painting by Jackson Pollock. Maybe he can be a patron saint of Chaos Shamanism?

I'm going to talk around an idea I've had for what I call Chaos Shamanism. I've looked it up on the net, there don't seem to be many references to it, so I can probably pinch it for my own!

I came up with it about a week ago because I almost had like this visionary moment in some Fairy Woods in a Doncaster. I started talking about teaching Shamanism - like offline, in person - I don't know what the term is for it these days. I don't currently do that, but I know I'd be good at it. I just don't quite know where to start. But I just started talking, and it just all came out, and I was just feeling so deeply about it, I was weeping as I talked.

It's like there's something bubbling up within me, something strong to say and I'd love to do it. but I'm not in a hurry. I'm hungry, yes, but I don't think I have much to prove: I'm old enough to have had most of that knocked out of me! Besides which I wrote a few books a few years ago and I found a publisher and so that's sort of taken care of: “Okay, you've done something now!”

So, Chaos Shamanism. I came up with the idea because I thought what would I teach, what type of shamanism would it be? Well, it wouldn't be any particular kind of school or tradition, and the reason for that is you see in spiritual traditions the sort of breakaway attempt to return to the source when it becomes religion. Because that's what people do: they turn it into religion, they turn it into a set of forms which they bow down and worship, a teacher that they bow down and worship. And they think that's the thing, and aligning themselves with that is what will make them holy or whatever it is they are trying to become – enlightened, spiritual, maybe just better than other people! All of those things.

But it's not about aligning yourself with a tradition, it's about aligning yourself with your own guidance, that which comes from within you. That is what people find very difficult, but that is what a good teacher does. A good teacher doesn't go, “Follow what I say, understand what I say, because I have thought it through much more deeply than you ever could.” Well, he may have done but that's not the point, which is don't align yourself with a tradition, but benefit from a tradition, be inspired by it, appreciate its depths.

Of course, all teachers will SAY don’t follow me, follow your own wisdom. And you have to work out how much they mean that by what the people around them are like, and by what you are like around the teacher. Do you lose something?

Traditions may be thousands of years old and they carry egregore with them, the energy that builds up over time around ceremonies etc, and that is powerful. That egregore is a gift from the ancestors! So we need to respect traditions, but not be beholden to them. At the end of the day you always have to step back: it's about you and your own soul, and if you are shamanic your soul is the natural world, you and the natural world are the same, we belong to the natural world.

The natural world is alive, it's inspirited, and that is the foundation of shamanism, because that is the foundation of how indigenous people are in the world. It's not even an idea for them; for us that has to be an idea, but for them it's like it's the air they breathe. “Well of course it's alive, of course we're part of the natural world, what crazy person are you that you could think otherwise?”

Well we are those crazy people, we have this dead universe. Christianity fell apart and gave rise to a dead universe. Why did that happen? Well maybe because it had an image of torture at the middle of it: the crucifix. However profound its teachings might be in certain ways, it is also an image of torture bang at the centre of people's mythology of how they see the universe, with this threat of eternal hellfire too. So now we have a dead universe. It's almost like we're in cultural trauma from what the crucifix did to us, it created despair and a dead universe yeah and we haven't woken up yet, we are still numb.

Of course the universe is alive, we're alive, everything's alive, rocks are alive, you can feel their presence: these big rocks you want to talk to them you want to love them. I live on Dartmoor, I see that a lot.

So this is what Shamanism has to offer the modern world: a remedy for this great forgetting that the world is alive and it's inspirited and it takes care of us and it's beautiful, and we don't put the spirit somewhere else up there in heaven: it is here.

Nature worship, that's what it's about. I don't know if you watch Jordan Peterson on youtube, I’d recommend him, but I have an issue with him, he tries to put down how we feel about the natural world as Baal, worshipped with a Golden Calf in the Old Testament, and condemned by God. Mere nature worship, he thinks of it. Well no you're wrong Mr Peterson, nature contains everything, we contain everything we contain the whole universe.

So Chaos Shamanism. Chaos, that's an interesting word because we think of it as mere disorder. Well yes, it it's not order, but neither is it disorder or disarray, which is what it came to mean. It's the ancient Greek word, it refers to the vast abyss of Unknowing, the Great Mystery out of which everything arose, yeah what came before the Big Bang is the Great Mystery, Chaos is about that. So it's great Mystery Shamanism.

We think because we can't order things in human terms then that is a negative, it's disorder, it's disarray. Well that's just the limited rational mind. Chaos Shamanism is Great Mystery Shamanism, and it's out of the Great Mystery flowing through us, because we are it, that we have our own inner guidance.

You see this kind of return to that kind of source in other religions. You see it in Buddhism, they have sunyata, which is emptiness, which is a bit like chaos. It's the great void, the Great Mystery. So then people turn sunyata into a thing, so you have to go no no, emptiness is itself empty. All right, so you then have a two types of sunyata, and they have to keep doing that because people turn it into a thing. So it's a continual process of rebelling against people's tendency to turn ideas or practices into absolutes, taking them literally, writing them in stone. And then they tell other people they're not being respectful because they didn't hold the pipe in the right way, or they didn't give thanks in the right way, that's disrespectful to the pipe. Well I'm not saying no to that, I do respect tradition, but actually it's the spirit that matters.

There’s a good story from Tibetan Buddhism about someone who was reciting the mantra of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and he recited it Om Mani Padme Ox for years, and it worked, it changed him. But he’d got it wrong, it should have been Om Mani Padme Hum. But it still worked because he was doing it with the right intention. So you see the point.

In medieval Christianity they had dancing in the churches, and they stopped that, because when you dance you make your own connection with the spirit, and you can’t have that if you’re trying to run a religion. So with that in mind, maybe that is what the Sufi dancing is about, a return to a direct connection with the spirit within a formalised religion.

So that's what we need to do with Shamanism continually, because you see it happening you see it turning into religion left right and centre all over the place, not because anything's going wrong, but because that's what people do. They think there really is a lower world and a middle world and an upper world and that power animals live in the lower world and spirit guides live in the upper world and the middle world's where you go to find your lost keys. OK, there's a certain amount of truth in that, but really it's just Spirit working through you, it has no name or form. So if you just feel that working through you, it's not that you haven't got there yet because you don't know what your power animal is yeah and that you're backward, actually it's probably that you're forward, you don't need those intermediaries. I mean I love my animals, don't get me wrong, I love all of that, but they are intermediaries, it's the warmth of the Great Spirit comes through them, their physical presence, the physical presence of power animals, of animal helpers reminds us of the physicality of Spirit yeah.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” that's what Mary Oliver the poet said. You don’t have to be good, you don't have to repent, she said, you only need to do that and then you have your source of guidance and joy.

Moment by moment. Chaos Shamanism is about listening to the spirit and listening to that inner guidance or outer guidance, it's kind of both yeah, but listening to that guidance moment by moment and living from that, putting that first, putting your guidance before tradition, respecting tradition, but that inner guidance needs to feel comfortable around the tradition, and there may be bits that don't feel comfortable, so don't think there's something wrong with you yeah, trust that inner guidance, trust the bits that feel right and discard the bits that don't and a good teacher will always guide you towards that.

Chaos Shamanism: inspired by tradition but not beholden to it, and listening to Spirit at all times.