We come on to Water in this exploration of the Medicine Wheel, with Chaos as our foundation. And so it's also an exploration as we go along of what Chaos might mean. The term is there because we're in a unique position. We don't have tradition, and that is a loss but it's also a gain. It means we're free to delve into the essence of all these different Shamanic ways you find around the world. There's something universal about them. What is it that is universal? What is at the heart of them, what are they all getting at? Chaos Shamanism is about remaining close to the heart of Shamanism, and asking these kinds of questions.
It's the connection to Nature, to the Natural World that is fundamental. The softness and the care the natural world gives us, which brings us straight into Water, the South of the Wheel, or rather Rain. Water is in a way an abstraction, though it's not really, it’s alive to our imaginations, but it kind of is abstract because it's a generality, whereas Rain is more specific. You can see it running down the window pane like tears: tears of sorrow, tears of joy. That's the place we’ve arrived, we're in something very personal now.
We began with this bigger thing, the Sun, the element of Fire: warmth, initiation, inspiration, new life bubbling in, and where does it go to? Well it can go straight across the Wheel into the body as a sort of fated event. A new phase of life, arising naturally and inevitably. And it also goes around the Wheel as well, into the emotions, and that's where we learn how to live with it. It's Fire that keeps our emotions bubbling up, we don't have control over what we feel, our feelings are a mystery. In fact we don't even know what we're feeling half the time, let alone where the feelings come from. Well, particularly and maybe schematically if you're a bloke, and particularly if you haven't got much water in your chart astrologically. We still have strong feelings, it just takes longer to know they are there.
So that's the first task of this place of Rain: to pay attention to what you're feeling, all the time. That happens in your body - in the trunk of your body, in your heart, in your stomach, right through you. In your vitals. This is the big learning of the Water place. Paying attention to feeling, and living from that. It’s what we forget to do. Maybe we are even deluded enough to think we are rational creatures who operate from reason! Research has shown, as if it is needed, that we make decisions emotionally, and we espouse beliefs emotionally. Reason is applied post hoc as justification, that is all it is. We live from emotions anyway, so we may as well be aware of them, be honest about them. Otherwise we are just an unconscious human being, and who wants to be that?
Why is Water the element of feeling? Because it moves a bit, and yet is contained. It's not like Air or Wind, which moves all over the place unrestrictedly, which is more like the Mind. It's not like Earth, which is fixed like the body. And it's not like Fire either, which moves pretty fast also, it roars upwards, soaring inspiration. But feeling nevertheless moves – we talk about being moved by something. And yet it's also contained. So Water describes well these currents that go through us. Water IS that. These indigenous correspondences aren’t just symbols standing for something, they ARE that thing, because they partake of its nature, as we have just seen in the case of Water.
So we pay attention to what we feel, and we try and live from that place.
The emotion of trust belongs here in the South. I've learned to come from trust in the way that I do the videos on which these written pieces are based. In the way I teach, I haven't even got a notepad with headings written on it. I start with a few ideas to talk from and I just let it unfold, and that means I often surprise myself, there is room for the Spirit to come in with its halfpenny worth, that wouldn’t be possible if I had it all planned out. That approachwould kill it for me, I wouldn’t take the joy that I do.
There is something very traditional about this approach, which with a live audience could be called responsive. You are trusting in the process, that is where we begin. I mean, you need to know what you are talking about, you need a proper background and training. But then you throw that up in the air and let Spirit have its way, according to who you are talking to. Spontaneity.
Trust in life is the foundation when we are newly born. We trust in our mother, our existence is founded on implicitly trusting that we will be taken care of. That's where our psychological security comes from. So in a way you could argue the basic emotion is trust. And we're not just cared for by our physical mother. When we get older our physical mother has done her job, and so we can release her from that, thank her for that, and we discover the Earth is our real mother. The Earth takes care of us. The Earth is also red in tooth and claw, she is challenging, and we cannot ignore that. But for now, we're just concentrating on this benign caring aspect, which we learn to trust in as adults, ideally as a natural development from the trust we had in our parents.
I used to have a traditionally trained Native Canadian guy come and stay with me. You know how nowadays if someone's telling a story, they have it all prepared beforehand, and then they tell it, and that's great. I love going to storytellings myself, and telling them myself sometimes. They belong to the North, to Air and Wind, so we'll come to that. It is stories, scientific or otherwise, that tell us our place in the cosmos and show us how to orient.
Anyway,back to the South and trust. So this Native friend, he didn't work in our way. First of all, he didn't need to prepare his stories, because he'd been traditionally trained in dozens and dozens of them. He’d been sort of singled out as a youth, all right here's a sort of wise man or healer or whatever, and he was trained in the tradition and he knew all the stories, it was an oral tradition. He knew the meanings and how to expound them. So at a storytelling he would ask people to ask him questions about something that was relevant to their life at the moment. One person would ask a question, then another, and then another, and at a certain point a story would present itself to him to tell in response to the audience, and that's what he would do. He wouldn't necessarily give a neat explanation for why that particular story, but that's what he would do, and that's a certain kind of trust. You just trust in what's happening, and that enables you to be responsive.
You can easily tell the difference can't you, between someone who is reading out a script, and someone who is talking off the cuff? Watch my short videos on youtube at Chaos Shamanism to see what I mean. This piece is an edited transcript of a spontaneous talk. If I had been reading out a pre-prepared script, it would no doubt be better English and tighter, but it would also lose some flow. Sometimes of course it's necessary to read out a paper or whatever, but it's not half as alive, because what matters is that kind of spontaneity and play, and the opportunity for the speaker to be fully and easily him or her self.
This brings out another aspect of the Rain element, which is also the child as a stage of life: namely, spontaneity and play. That is how the child lives, and it is what we often need to re-learn as adults, instead of thinking we need to be dutiful and serious all the time. Children know what they want in a straightforward way. We adults don't always know what we want. We can end up confused. But kids know what they want. We need to go back to that, we need to keep it in the first place, not even go back to it. We need to always keep that playful element. I like to sometimes read children's books - Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, stuff like that. It brings you back into that. And it is vital for creativity. This Water place is also a place of creativity, because if your creativity isn't play, it's not really the full shebang, it's got a big bit missing. This is a point Jung made, just to quote an authority! So the videos behind these pieces I'm doing are play for me. I've got to enjoy them or I won't really communicate my being, because it's communicating my being as much as the words I use that matters. And hopefully in reading this you will be able to hear me talking and partying!
Play becomes joy, the rain on the window pane as tears of joy running down. Joy is different to ordinary happiness and contentment, which occurs when there's something you wanted and you've got it. It's dependent on the external: you've got a happy family, you've got a good job, you've got all those things, and you're content and you're happy, and that's great and that's good when that happens. But then there's something else, there's an inner joy when the spirit flies, when we're answering a call deep within us and living from that it. If we are expressing and creating from that place, then there's joy, and it can happen amidst worldly misery. It has the spontaneity that the child has in his or her play, so in a way the child experiences joy too, and as adults we experience joy when we remember to go back to that child place and trust, whatever our circumstances.
The child in a way has a naïve trust, and we have a different type of trust to find. It's not just a naive trust, although it contains that child-like attribute. It is a trust that comes from the fact that in many ways the world cannot be trusted, but still we trust in the benignity of the universe. Actually I think faith is a better word than trust here. I’ve been using trust because that is what came down to me, but it’s too psychological. Faith has a bad name, because it has connotations of blindness. But that isn’t what I mean. Faith connects us more explicitly to the Great Spirit, the Great Mystery, to something Other that we cannot know, but which we trust implicitly and which is the foundation of our life. How irrational is that? Faith is the confidence we have in life in a general way. Confidence itself comes from fides faith, and con with. Confidence is irrational, because it assumes a good outcome with knowing it.
It is faith that gives the emotional strength that is the potential of the South. Without faith, we cannot be both resilient and sensitive. Some people are very tough because they have thick skins, and that is all. But be like Armadillo, I say: develop a tough skin, put yourself in the fray; but keep a soft heart.
The story of Job in the Old Testament is illustrative of the type of faith that I mean, though I don’t necessarily appreciate what God did to the poor man. Job was a righteous and prosperous man, and Satan said to God that Job had faith in God only because he protected him. So God set out to prove Satan wrong, and utterly destroyed his life. Job considered the destruction to be God’s will, but nevertheless maintained his faith in God. So Satan was proved wrong.
This is the type of faith that I mean. That however bad things get, we do not shake our fist at the Great Spirit, we do not go into blame mode. We find ourselves able to keep our faith in life. This is a very deep and rare thing. But the testing we have as adults, the suffering and disappointments we inevitably experience, give us the opportunity to look deeper, beyond outward circumstance. Life in this sense forges us.
Chaos Shamanism is not a fluffy path. It looks at the darker, painful side of life full in the face, it demands fortitude of us – what we have come to call trauma can be this kind of character-forming vicissitude. And within that, we find faith and joy. A deep light shines from our eyes.
And here is the 10 min video on which this piece is based: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_aAhlel3w
No comments:
Post a Comment