This is the 12th piece on Chaos Shamanism, and I'm coming down to a particular form in a way that I haven't so far. That's going to be interesting. It's easy to get the idea, particularly if you're a bit rebellious, that this is all about being above the forms, about the restrictive forms, and that we're beyond all that. But it's not like that at all, it's the opposite. It's about being able to go into the forms more deeply, because we're approaching them on a level of experience rather than on a level of ideas.
For an example of that, I’ll go over to astrology for a moment. The Sun and the Moon have particular meanings, and they're written down in the books according to the stars behind them, and various other factors. But I say if you're doing the astrology reading, just let the Sun be with you, you can feel the Sun because we know it, we experience it. So then it's as if it'll speak through you, and yes you have all your intellectual understandings and they contribute, but there's this other thing that speaks through you. So it's more that sort of level - it's in us and it's also a bit divinatory or intuitive. We may say things we have no reason for knowing, we just know that we need to say them, we know that there's some kind of truth in them that we would probably never insist on.
We're inspired by tradition but we're not beholden to it. That's how I began this exploration of Chaos Shamanism. We're maybe deeply in some tradition, we understand the Medicine Wheel, the Pipe Ceremony, the Sweatlodge, we appreciate them, we love them, we love to be part of the community that happens when we do them, or the Trance Dance, the Despacho Ceremony, whatever else it is. But while being fully in it, we also have that gap which enables us to be with the real meaning of it rather, than worrying too much about whether or not you're doing it in the right way or maybe what other people are thinking of you.
I was once around a traditionally trained guy from South America. We had built a sweat lodge, and we needed a few leaders of them, because we were going to have several sweats. I asked him if he’d lead one, and he thought about and he goes no I'm afraid I can't. my tradition won't allow me to, because it's not built in quite the right way. I still don't quite know what to make of that.
I'm not going to disrespect it, there is something in really holding to a tradition and doing it exactly as you're meant to. It has all sorts of layers of beauty and meaning in it, has all sorts of layers of honouring what's come before, honouring the ancestors who created it. It has all of that, and that's beautiful and you want to be able to do that. But you also want to be able to step outside and just go whatever, I know the essence of what this is about, and sometimes we need to leave the past behind because it becomes the past, it becomes a hindrance.
So in a way I do know what to make of it. When needs must, you drop all of that, you don't just not run a sweat lodge when you know you could do something that would help people. Because that is what we are here to do: help people. Are you here to help people, or to do things in the correct manner?
There's a saying by a Native American guy called Jim Tree, who wrote a book called The Way of the Sacred Pipe. It's all about pipes and ceremonies, and he's got this kind of combination of saying really do it with respect, really do it with tradition, but also I want everyone to be able to do it. How you achieve that I'm not exactly certain, but that's what he said, and I appreciate the spirit of that. He also came up with the saying that, “If it works it's real, and if it's real it works.” I think that's a really good principle. So this South American guy could have run a sweat lodge, he could have done a really good sweat lodge. It just wouldn't have been the way he was taught. But he knows perfectly well that you need to just get people in there in a kind of sacred way, and get them praying, getting connected to the stones, all of that, just do it. It's an interesting dance this one.
So Chaos Medicine Wheel. That's what I'm slowly circling around and coming to. It's an interesting exercise, and more than just an exercise, it’s about how we live our lives. So how do we use the Medicine Wheel coming at it from a Chaos point of view?
We need to start with, well what is it getting at? The Wheel, which at its simplest is just 4 stones, is about becoming a balanced human being, balanced within ourselves, and balanced in relation to the world around us. We do this by bringing the 4 stones, and what they stand for, into balance. That's its purpose, that's what the Native Americans say.
So providing we can hang on to that, the feeling of moving towards balance deep within us, as well the understanding of it, then we'll be able to do it, then we'll be able to approach it in a way that that works, and that isn't rigid and that keeps the original purpose of being in balance.
We talk in our modern world about becoming whole. That is because we emphasize the autonomy, the primacy of the individual: that is what we value. We maybe overemphasize it. In a way it came out of Protestant Christianity, which itself arose as a rebellion against Catholicism, where only the priests could have a hotline to God, so to speak. And that's a way of keeping people disempowered and under control. So Protestantism goes no, everyone has their relationship to God, we all have an individual relationship to God. I'm not a great believer in the Christian God, but you get the point. I'm more a Great Spirit sort of guy or Great Mystery, the great unknowable. But anyway, there is something of value in that. We all do need our individual connection. But it can go too far, and one way in which it's gone too far is that we forget to value community sufficiently and the natural world around us the. We don't value and respect that as we need to, we easily get out of balance with that.
If someone is ill in a community, then that affects the whole community. So that person needs to get well the sake of the community as well as for their own sake. In a traditional setting, you may get the whole community, or much of it, there at a healing ceremony, praying for the recovery of the ill person. The ill person may not even be there if he’s too ill. This kind of thing works. So indigenous people have an experience of the individual as relational as much as they do as autonomous. Just the fact that you can pray for someone and it helps them get well shows you on your pulses just how connected we all are. So that's worth thinking about, because we get so het up about our rights and our identity.
There's a book called Drawing Down Law by Professor John Borrows, who is a Native Canadian. In the book he is looking at the different ways the white people and the Indians look at law. He says let's take abortion as an example. We frame it in terms of women's rights over her body, and it's like okay, that works, he respects that and he’s not trying to argue the rights and wrongs of that. But he says the Indians don’t think like that. Let's shift it to their framework where you have a community, and the father is held to account, he is made to be responsible, while the mother gets a lot of support from women, because people are much more networked and connected and part of each other’s lives. What happens as a result is that you get a lot less abortion. So that’s what can happen when you shift from the individual as autonomous, to the individual is relational. Things happen in quite a different way, and it doesn't make one approach right or one of them wrong. Let's forget about all of that, let's just be pragmatic: if it works it's real, and if it’s real it works.
To come back to where I started, the Medicine Wheel has as its purpose the idea of living in balance with the world around us, as well as within ourselves. And that idea is perhaps easier to connect with if we can shift our thinking from our notion of the individual as autonomous, in the direction of the individual being relational. If you like, that wholeness that we value is about becoming the whole world, not just a whole person.
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