(Continuing the series on Chaos Shamanism)
The irruption of the Sun in a big way into our lives can cause a crisis. We maybe have one big one in our lives, a turning point, or maybe we have more than one. The shamanic illness is such a crisis. It's a crisis of something new trying to come in. We can go through this whole thing and we may not know what it is for much of the time. Sometimes we do know, it's like it's this thing to be claimed, though we may not be ready for it. Sometimes we know where we're going, we know there are these qualities, these gifts in us but we're not ready, the old has to be demolished first. We might think we're ready, but we're not, and it's like the spirit knows, and will hold us back. A bit of help from someone who’s been through this kind of thing – who maybe has a sense of the Spirits knocking at your door – can make a big difference. Help you start to anchor you to the new reality that is coming upon you.
So sometimes these times of change, of crisis, of illness even, of unknowing, can go on and on for years. I spent about three years in the early 90s where anything I tried to do outwardly just seemed to go wrong: it just didn't work, it always just went to pot. But if I listened to the inner voice that was emerging, that was drawn to Shamanism, then I felt fine. But even that was a slow and gradual thing. It took its time, it had its own course. We're not in charge: that's what it showed me. This is one of the great learnings that we get from the Sun, because this is where Spirit comes in, it feeds into the rest of the Wheel. It comes in the East, the Sun, and it then informs the other directions.
Or you could say it goes straight from the East across to the West, you could look at it like that as well, because opposite the East is Earth, Soil, which is body, which is Incarnation. So it's Spirit coming into matter, and it's outside of our control. Spirit events are outside of our control, and Earth events are outside of our control. Take the body: we have two arms, two legs, we're human, and we didn't choose that. We didn't choose to be born and we won't choose our moment of death, probably. We don't choose when we get ill. So similarly with these Spirit events. The Sun is inspiration, and it is well-known that we don’t choose that, inspiration comes calling at a time of its choosing. This insight is a great antidote to the western myth of the lone hero carving his place against a hostile nature. That heroic myth is vital – it gives courage and a sense of adventure – but it needs to be in the service of nature, or the feminine, if you like. It tends to think it is top dog, and that is where it gets out of balance.
The axis across the middle of the Wheel is called the Blue Road. It's the axis of Fate, you could say. And running from North to South is the Red Road, the Good Red Road as it gets called. You could call it the axis of Free Will. We have choice here, because it is Water and Air, Emotion and Mind, and that’s where we can manoeuvre, that’s where we have choice about what thoughts and feelings we’re going to give free rein to, and what we are going to keep at bay and not act on, or not let take over our minds. And that then provides fertile soil for when the Blue Road activates, when Spirit comes in. It has more of a place to land. This is for later, but I just thought I’d bring in this bigger picture briefly.
I just wanted to say a bit about a bit more about the nature of these crises. You get them delineated in Psychosynthesis, which is a sort of slightly Jungian Psychotherapy School. A guy called Assagioli started it, he was around at the time of Jung. He has this thing called the Self (a bit like Jung.) It's kind of transpersonal, and at certain times in life it's time for a new element of Self to be born, but the old has to readjust itself, because when a new element of Self is born, it's not an add-on. It's a new centre, like when I wrote at the start of the Shamanic Illness chapter about a shift in authority. There's a new centre to us, and everything has to be re-arranged, our whole life has to be re-arranged around that. Of course, that is often a crisis, and then eventually we know what it is we have to do, what it is we have to accept, what it is we have to live from. It can be like, “I can't carry on living like this,” we can get driven to that point. This is how Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, sometimes works for an astrologer. And once you’ve given in, so to speak, something new can happen. When you stop doing that, it can be tremendous relief, like letting go of what had become a great burden.
You can see these periods of change starting sometimes when the energy starts to go out of something that you've been strongly engaged in, and it's time for it to die, so that a bigger self can be emerge. It’s like you fall out of love, but you don’t notice it at first. The enthusiasm, the passion you had: you suddenly notice, oh it's been leeching out, it's not there anymore. It's dying, and you maybe find that hard to recognise or accept, so you struggle to get it back again.
But that's not the way to go. The way to go is to trust it. We'll get to trust when we do the South. But it's a big trust process. There is something new to be found, and you have to trust in that, even though you may not know what it is. But of course, the human tendency is to scrabble for a handhold in what has the become the loose and sliding shingle of our old life.
The East, the Sun, is the Timeless. The South is the Past, the West is the Present and the North is the Future. You can get the sense of a design, a pattern to your life at these times, when you're strongly in the East, it's like suddenly there's illumination, and it's outside of time. I was watching a Siberian woman called Snow Raven, you can look her up on YouTube. She gave a long interview, and she says that her people, whose culture is strongly shamanic, believe that everything is always happening at once, there is no past, present and future. And they're quite right. She puts it in terms of belief, but really it needs to be an experience. It's hard for us to experience that as human beings much of the time, it’s not really a place to live from. We need ordinary reality most of the time, or we’ll get out of balance. But it's good as a belief that you maybe have a sense of on a day-to-day basis, but which opens out into mystical experience at special times. When the Shaman is doing his journeying, for example, and is with the Spirits. Beliefs are OK, they are very useful pointers, providing you have some kind of feeling for their veracity, and not just something you want to be true, which is the norm for human beings. Everything at all times happening at once: it's not something we can put into words or understand in any kind of normal way. But that is the light of the Sun for you. Take a light particle: Einstein told us they don’t experience time, they arrive as soon as they leave. So there’s a connection!
I also want to say something about teachers, who we also find in the East. They are the bringers of light, of inspiration, they show it to us, they remind us of it in ourselves. Teachers perform such a great service, and they've also got a bit of a bad name! They've always been up to their tricks, one way or another, because they are human, but they also bring gifts. A good teacher needs to be personally ready to teach, in other words in good relationship with his own shadow. He will have a shadow, he will have all those usual things that we have - self-doubt, anxiety, insecurity, anger, cruelty, a pretty bunch. We'll come to the shadow later, but we do have all those potentials within us as part of being human. We don't like to admit it, we like to think we're a good person who doesn't have things like that.
Sometimes you can learn as much from the teacher's faults as you can from what he has to offer. A teacher usually does have some gifts to offer, they have something to say and you can learn from that. But usually, well invariably in my experience, there's something out of balance also going on around them, and it becomes a matter of can you live with that? Can you even see it? That's the first thing you learn, is to be able to even see their Shadow. Can you see the way that they need everyone to love them? Or how they need everyone to believe what they believe? Or the way they demonize and cast out anyone who doesn't fit in, anyone who criticizes them, reduces it to their problem? Or the way, maybe, they are fuelled by ambition and the desire to make a name for themselves – which is legit and even necessary in a worldly context, but not OK in this context, at least not too much of it.
All these sorts of currents tend to swirl around them, to a greater or lesser degree, and you can really learn from that. And actually, that can also be what saves you. Because sometimes we go in there with a teacher, and yes it helps, and our own kind of metaphysical connection strengthens, we learn to take it more seriously. But we also lose something, we get drawn into their orbit. We get drawn into that energy field around them, which has its own kind of rules and hierarchy, that people will create, with the best will in the world on the part of the teacher. Unless the teacher is really sure of himself, it is then hard for him not to feed off that adulation to some degree and so become complicit. But of course, he may well have catalysed it in the first place.
One of my litmus tests with a teacher is, can I hang out with them in an ordinary kind of way? Can I feel them, or do they have a shell around them? Can they listen to what I say, or do they always have to have the upper hand, to be in the teacher role?
So we give our power away, if only because everyone else is doing so. It is very hard to resists these collective dynamics. A good teacher will know how and when to hand it back. He won’t provide you with answers, he won’t tell you how to live, he’ll always be nudging you in the direction of trusting your own inner guidance. That is the only job of a teacher! Not to teach you stuff, not to tell you how things are, but to get you to trust your own nascent wisdom. ‘Educate’ comes from the Latin ‘educare’, to lead out what is already there.
Realistically, we are rarely ready to fully trust our own inner guidance, though not many people will admit to that. So the teacher accepts that people need a person and a teaching to look to, to rely upon, to some degree, and that may go on for years. People can easily spend their whole lives making just a small shift in this respect. And that is fine. They are doing what they need to do.
There are plenty of teachers who won’t throw you back on yourself, because they need you as a disciple. Of course, they will claim to be promoting your metaphysical independence, and that they don’t want followers. Of course they will say that, they all do. And you need to be able to stand back – with the gap of Chaos Shamanism, that ability to stay close to your own experience and not be thrown off it – and see the actual situation.
It won’t win you any friends if you talk too readily about what you see, because people need to be in that vortex around the teacher, and who knows what it is they have to learn? But it will save you, if you act on it, if you trust it. Because it means you are trusting your own voice, your own inner guidance, in the face of a collective who do not want you to, who will do their best to make you doubt what you see if you speak it. Speak it if you can, there is a test of courage! I have been in that situation, and it is painful, but it can really forge you. It is, however, temperamental. Some people will just slip away quietly, and good on them.
So in this sense, we can be grateful to the teacher, maybe through gritted teeth, for his or her egotism. When we see it and go our own way, maybe after some struggle – because the teacher has, after all, helped us, and that can make it hard also to doubt him – then we trust our own inner guidance as never before, we can really start to own ourselves in a deep way. We come to the centre of who we are.
No comments:
Post a Comment