THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS

THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS

Part 1

A Shift in Authority

I want to say something about the shamanic illness, that phenomenon amongst the Shamans from the remote cultures of the Far East, and how that relates to us, what it’s really about. And this is in the spirit of Chaos Shamanism, where we are always asking that kind of question, instead of being overwhelmed by the exotic and foreign nature of these things and maybe bowing down before that. They are humans just like us, and we can always find a reference point in our own experience.

The way it's put, is that the young person who's supposed to become a shaman, he gets ill, because he's trying to be like an ordinary guy, and the spirits come knocking, like the dark stranger in the middle of the night come to tell you your Fate. And they go, “You got to be a Healer”, as well as everything else you do. Because in those cultures, it's not like you become the holy man and you get paid to do it. No, you still have your ordinary life to fulfil, and then you have these duties on top, and people don't necessarily want that.

But also I think it’s more than that. It can be deeply scary, and they're comfortable with who they are, they're comfortable with who they've been brought up to be, because they're being taken outside the sort of collective norms, the collective rules, the collective way of seeing things. That's how humanity works. It's important to recognize that we all think we're individuals with free minds and all the rest of it, but actually we're not. We go along with the collective norms and the collective way of seeing things, and we call that being reasonable. We think we have thought it all through, but we have all our beliefs for emotional, not rational, reasons, and they are given to us with a lot of authority.

And we believe that authority. It was interesting during lockdown, watching people's responses. Most people, they just buckled down immediately, and they believed that there was this really dangerous disease, they really did believe it. I'm not saying they're wrong, but they believed it purely because they'd been told it. I was more skeptical about it, I thought it was unnecessary. And then you saw people in in the opposite extreme, reacting against it, rebelling against it, and coming up with wild theories about secret agendas. That was no better, and was quite characteristic of the ‘alternative’ culture, with its frequent paranoia about authority.

I was a bit rebellious about masks myself, even at my advanced age, and I recognised that, and I just had to get over myself, though it took about 6 months! So there was a bit of self-knowledge for me.

So it was it was fascinating watching the collective at work, you can really learn something about collective humanity at such times.

We see it also with the whole net zero carbon thing. Without going into the rights and wrongs of that, you see how the collective has been persuaded into this kind of emergency apocalyptic thinking. People tend to bow down before politicians claiming the authority of science, and it is not hard for politicians to herd scientists along the lines they need them to go, they are not usually a very courageous bunch.

So it's not very difficult to whip the collective into a sense of crisis. Back in the day, it was the nuclear weapons crisis, then it became the environmental crisis. After that, Covid was the crisis for a bit, and now we’re back to the environment. But now there's the potential AI crisis that might end the world, or so we are told.

I suppose it gives a point of certainty or something, and a sense of right against wrong, something like that. As I said, it's not hard to create these crises in our huge collectives, it’s almost like a virus going round.

So that's the perennial collective mindset, and when you get onto this shamanic path you're stepping outside of it: the Spirits become your authority, your guidance, instead of the collective beliefs.

But it’s usually a process. and quite often what we do is we step outside of that collective mindset into another collective mindset, it’s kind of inevitable. You know, we loosen up a bit, there’s something new in us that we’re listening to, but we don’t fully trust our own guidance from within yet, we look to teachers and traditions, and we accept their authority, and that is natural. But it is limited.

What the Spirits want is for you to trust them fully and implicitly, because they ARE you in a broader sense. But that takes time, it is a lifetime’s work, probably! It is a huge shift, a deep shift. They want you to leave that group mindset behind, not by being anti-it, which often is also a temporary part of the path, a phase, but by living quietly alongside it, probably putting your head in your hands at the nonsense that goes on, but in a sympathetic way, and spreading a bit of that Spirit perspective where you can.

It was certainly gradual for me. And there were crises too, that only resolved by throwing off more of the collective mindset. These personal crises are common, and they bring us back to the Shamanic Illness, because a crisis is what it is.

We don't necessarily want to go there, we want the security, we want the certainty of that previous way of being. It can be a case of better the devil you know. We might be miserable, but at least it’s a familiar misery, we know what’s what. That in a in a way sums up why the shamanic illness occurs: better the devil you know!

So the young Shaman to be, they get ill and it may be an illness that is very hard to diagnose, a strange illness. Now we know that nowadays, don't we, all these all these strange illnesses?

But we'll come back to that. It's not until he accepts the Spirits into his life, that he becomes well again. I'm sure it doesn't happen for all of them like that, or necessarily even for most of them. Some of us are only too happy to accept the Spirits into our lives, because we can find the collective values stifling, we can't breathe. It's like oh I can breathe at last, yeah I bloody will do that, I'll accept this vocation, it gives life, it gives meaning, it gives it depth, it gives all of those things.

So your point of authority is shifting, you no longer look to the rules and norms of the society around you, you look to what Spirit's telling you. Now they're not necessarily contradictory, and in a reasonably healthy society they're not going to be too contradictory, we can do both.

In our counter-culture it can be almost a point of honour to be in an oppositional mode, to be anti-establishment, and certainly anti-Tory. But if you if you look at a traditional culture, a shamanic culture, you don't read stories of the shaman being in opposition to the political leaders, like he knows better. Well maybe he does know better in some ways, but he'd be diplomatic about it, the Spirits will tell him stuff, and there’s a good chance the political leaders will listen to that coming from him. They'd be working together, they wouldn't be in opposition like we so often put ourselves. It is so wrong-headed to be taking political sides, as we often do, and effectively setting ourselves against half the population. Our calling is to go beyond that polarised way of being in the world.

So the Shamans have their own otherworldly authority, Spirit speaking through them, and yet they're integrated with normal life. And that's what we need we need to do. As long as we feel ourselves to be in opposition to society and the way it works in that fundamental kind of way, I think we’re in a kind of spiritual bypass. I think it says something about ourselves, I don't think it says something about our insight: I think it says that we're not bringing Spirit into matter, we are floating above the fray.

Of course society will always need tweaking, but you need to go with it and tweak it, not just sit there in opposition and glue yourself to pavements or whatever, that doesn't achieve anything. You need to work with the culture you are part of, create something, build something. That's because Spirit isn't just about us, Spirit wants to be expressed and do good within society, so we need to be part of that Society.

OK, so I haven't got that far into the shamanic illness. I wanted firstly to make the important point about the locus of authority in one’s life changing, and the implications of that, because it has a lot of bearing on why the Shaman gets ill in the first place. So let’s head directly in again. We do get the equivalent in our society of this kind of calling with people getting ill with lots things like ME, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple allergies, fibromyalgia, all these sorts of gradual diseases that can be debilitating, that are quite hard to diagnose, quite hard to prove they're even there, medically.

This can be very distressing, because they just get called just psychological. And we go no no no it's not psychological, it's real. Well actually, it's both, but of course ‘it's psychological’ suggests you are malingering. Psyche means the soul, logos means the word, so psychology is the word of the soul, it's your soul speaking, saying I'm ill, I am out of balance. All diseases are psychological, but we have this connotation of it's just in your mind, you're malingering. This is because we see the mind and body as separate, in the same way that Christianity saw Spirit and the body as separate, and its offspring science translated that into mind and body are separate. So no, these illnesses are real, but like all illnesses, they're also the soul.