CHAOS SHAMANISM 4: PRAYER and the NATURAL WORLD
So here's the fourth part in this Chaos Shamanism series. God knows how long it's going to carry on for. Well that's the way of it, it's Chaos! Chaos really means staying close to your heart. It can sound a bit hard, a bit harsh saying Chaos. Yeah, it's like there's no feeling or it's an idea, and it's not like that. It's actually about being close to your heart, because your heart doesn't work in that rational human ordered kind of way, and Chaos just means not that.
We need that rationality, we need it in order to run our lives, but underneath it all that's not who we are. It's about remaining close to that. I read a book many years ago now called The Spears of Twilight by Philip d’Escola, he was a young French anthropologist who spent two years with the Achuar Indians in the Amazon jungle. He's now a sort of mandarin, a grand guy in French anthropology. But he was a young researcher then, and he lived with these people for two years. He said for some of them, everything they do is a prayer. I thought wow what a way to live.
What does that mean, that everything you do is a prayer? It means you're connected with your heart to everything that you do, and that you're wishing for a good outcome. You're asking with gratitude for a good outcome. Prayer is founded in gratitude. It means a conversation with the natural world, that's one way of putting it, that's a sort of Navajo way. It's not about asking a deity, it's about being with the natural world, because we're part of it. And so it's founded in gratitude, it's founded in this sense that we're taken care of, we're helped, and that we can maybe get further help from that benign power.
It's interesting what nature is. I'm going on a slight digression here, but I want to. This is Chaos so I can! We have two kind sof attitudes or archetypes in the west towards nature. We have nature as sort of pristine, as fragile, as Gaia, as the mother who takes care of us. And then there's nature red in tooth and claw, the sort of Hobbesian version. The first one is Rousseau, yeah man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Piece of nonsense, if you ask me. Although we do know how to play as children and we can forget how to play, but that's something else. And then the Hobbesian attitude, you know, life is nasty brutish and brutish and short. So we have these two archetypes of nature running alongside each other, they are contradictory, but that’s ok, we just need to hold those opposites, it’s only the rational mind that has to have everything neatly tied up.
I think the environmental movement tends to lean one-sidedly towards nature as sort of pristine, benign and fragile, and you know we must protect her from the nasty humans, that's the underlying feeling. And that gets mixed up with Shamanism, because of course we love the natural world, we remember we are part of it. But we also know it's tough, nature is red in tooth and claw. The Chippewa Cree used to send their teenage boys naked out into the wilds on their own for a month, with just a knife and a blanket. They would have to learn to survive. Of course, Health and Safety would get you for child abuse nowadays if you did that. But the Chippewa Cree understood and appreciated this other side of nature, how can you not when you are living close to the laws of survival? It is maybe a sign of our softness and decadence that we think of the earth as fragile and in need of our protection.
Nature doesn't guarantee your survival. This business of rights to happiness and life and liberty, that's a human invention, nature doesn't think like that. An antelope on the Serengeti doesn't think it has a right to life, it had better look out sharp or it won't have a life anymore!
So nature is both, and she can take care of herself, and yes of course we need to take care of her as well, be respectful and ask her for things, we need to take from her respectfully. She has riches that she gives freely to us, she gives us of her oil, she gives to us of her rare earth elements. We humans have this technological inventive genius, and it's part of our nature, in a way it's a unique part of nature, it's something unique we bring to the table.
I don’t want to over-egg that uniqueness, because if you read Frans de Waal’s books - he's a great primatologist who died this year – he showed there's nothing in humans that isn't also shared by animals, whether cognitively or emotionally. He's written two books on that: Mama's Last Hug, about animal emotions, mainly chimpanzee, and then another book called Are we intelligent enough to know how intelligent animals are? They sometimes even have certain types of cognition we don't have!
So there is a continuity between humans and animals, but at the same time we bring something to the table, this huge inventiveness, and we need to trust it because it's natural to us, and our job is not to oppose that with fear, but to support it and work to keep it in balance. Our shamanic job, if you like, is to keep humanity in balance with where it's going, rather than cling on to a pristine past, as if how we are now is somehow wrong and unnatural and killing the Earth, and all that sort of attitude. You can see this in environmentalism in its extreme form, the fundamentalist environmentalists who hate humanity and all its works, think of humanity as a cancer. That any changes in the earth due to humans are automatically bad, because humans caused them. Well, we're shamanic, we love humanity and we love all of nature: we love the nature of each creature and plant, and we love our own nature. So be discerning in your sympathies for the environmental movement. Not just the obvious nut-jobs who go around wearing death masks and glueing themselves to roads, but the more widespread and less obvious putting down of humanity. It is life-denying.
So back to prayer. This ongoing prayer, it would require a considerable depth and attention from you to be living from that place all the time and listening to that place, and not doing something if it feels wrong. There is a whole other area there, to do with feelings, and trusting feelings and not trusting feelings. It can be one of the shadows of the counter culture that I talked about last time, which is that we may mistrust reason and overvalue feeling: if I feel it, well then I'll do it and it's not like that. We need to consult feeling as part of the whole context in us, the complex in us of feeling, thought, instinct, body, imagination, inspiration and experience. We need to consult all of these things, and through that we gradually learn which feelings to trust and which feelings not to trust.
A good example is romantic feelings, they can blow us right off course, I’m sure we’ve all experienced this. And you know if you've woken up and you're in a mood, then you don't trust what it's telling you about the world, that the world's terrible and what's the point of being here, that's your mood and what you learn is that, well you can't just get rid of the feeling, you have to make friends with it and live with it. We learn to tolerate ourselves, as one therapist told me, what she sees herself doing is helping people tolerate themselves. So we're tolerating certain feelings, we're learning to live with them make friends with them, stop judging them, but don't act on them, we need to hold on to ourselves. On the one hand we're not putting ourselves down and judging ourselves, but on the other hand we're quite rigorous with ourselves, we need to be honest with ourselves. That's a whole other area.
I think I’ll just stick with prayer for this one, because that's essential and it's what Pipe Ceremony is about, and what the Sweat Lodge is about: prayer. It's about sitting with your life, and firstly giving thanks for what works in it. We forget to give thanks for things like food and shelter and friends and family, we we think oh you know the world's in a terrible state and this society's awful. Actually it really takes care of us, yes it's out of balance in many ways. But that's our nature as humans, we get out of balance regularly. Animals and plants, they know how to live according to their natures, while we're still working that one out, because we are the newborn ones, we only arrived recently. So this ongoing prayer, that is another way of saying what Chaos Shamanism is about. I'm not convinced I've got the right word yet with Chaos Shamanism maybe I'll end up calling it something else, but that's a whole other thing. Chaos has got a lot going for it. Anyway, we'll leave it for now.
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