Transformation Myths

Just been up in North Wales where Angharad Wynne used the great idea of telling the story of the rebirth of Taliesin as a paradigm for the process of transformation; then asking us to connect the shamanic journeying - or dreaming - we had just done to that story. And it drove home to me how personal transformation is central to this shamanic thing for me. I have for many years been using the Greek myth of Pluto's abduction of Persephone to describe it; and also the idea of the shamanic illness, where you have to answer the call from the Otherworld if you want to get well again.

And in one of the dreamings we did I was shown a fireplace in a cave where I needed to build and light a fire and people would gather round. And I'm thinking yes, I need to get on with this thing. And I know what's at the centre of it, it is this idea and myth of transformation. And when I think like that, I get glimpses of a high voltage cable within me, that has been gradually growing for decades, a kind of magic thread around which all else gathers.

SCIENCE and RELIGION: BELIEF vs EXPERIENCE

Atoms, Dark Energy, the Big Bang, Evolution - these are some of the multitude of beliefs about the nature of the world that Science presents us with. I say beliefs because they are not objects or processes we see with our own two eyes. They are not unreasonable beliefs, but they are beliefs nonetheless. On a popular level, which means most of the time, these beliefs are, however, blind because they are hearsay. Our certainty in them lies in our acceptance of the authority that generates these beliefs.

Miracles, to be taken seriously by the Church as evidence for Sainthood, need to have witnesses. They therefore concern experience rather than belief. Many aspects of religion involve the experience of something Other, something Numinous that uplifts and connects and gives meaning. Don't get me wrong, there is no shortage of blind belief to be found in religion, but it is far from the one-way street that Scientism would have it.

Shamanism at its best concerns experience rather than belief, whether it is through the mysterious way in which heartfelt prayers are answered; or the realisation that the world around us is alive and conscious; or the tangibility of energy in healing work, and the visibility of the results.

Shamanism is a way that keeps us close to experience and to direct knowledge. Our distancing from that by the greater authority of Science is the great modern disempowerment. We cannot easily see it because we are in it, spellbound by the idea that these modern priests know how the world 'really' works, and intimidated by their seemingly irrefutable equations and evidence. But it is just another set of beliefs. If it wasn't Science, it would be something else, because large societies seem to need collective beliefs for their own stability. It is not a conspiracy, rather it reflects a collective desire.

Far better to prioritise our own experience over belief. It keeps us close to who we are, and what else is life about? Without this closeness we are lost. It is not for everyone. I don't think it matters too much how we conceptualise our experience, it is the rigidity with which we hold those ideas that is the issue. I think the health of a large society is inversely related to the rigidity of its collective beliefs. 

Our job is to sit at the edge and to soften those rigidities, and to open up for people, to remind people of the delicious path of direct experience, and the re-empowerment that accompanies that. The true human being who is not reliant on others for knowledge, but trusts that source from within.

RAM MASK

I've been making a ram mask for this Snowdonia Spirit School thing (Dadeni.org) that I'm part of. And I was round at Berto's, the local Italian restaurant I visit quite religiously once a week, and the waitress asked me how the mask was going. She does my cleaning sometimes, so she knows a bit about my strange goings on. And I said I've nearly finished applying the papier mache, prior to painting it. 

But I added, before I began that, I put the basic template over my head and looked at myself in the mirror, and I found myself pawing the ground. Ooh, she said, when you said that goosebumps went right up my arm. Well I won't tell the vicar I replied. But it's like that, these things touch something quite visceral and inspirational that we have forgotten for a long time and which I'm sure the church would not approve of.

ON PROPHECIES

I think it is best not to take prophecies literally. As an astrologer, I know that it is possible to predict the shape of events, their spirit-nature if you like, but how that actually unfolds in this reality is much harder to get right. For example, it was clear that the UK would be going through a meltdown and a rebirth around this time. It therefore made Brexit the most likely outcome (IMO) but you can never be certain. In fact, attempting to predict teaches us just how unpredictable the world is.

How we engage with prophecies I think depends on the literalness of the way we think. Our culture is literal, for science teaches us to be so. Things are either facts in the material world, or they do not exist. But this is just simple minds seeking simple certainties. There have always been many people, including indigenous people (who we easily idealise) who think like this, and always will be. But working with Spirit, we come to see that it is the dream and the dreaming that are real, and they are fluid things. And prophecy comes from the dream level.

So there was the 2012 Mayan prophecy that many people took literally as a sort of end of the world. It is first of all an expression of our alienation from our own imaginative roots, and from our own power, that we should get so engaged with the prophecy of another culture, and treat it as authoritative. But all the Mayan calendar was saying was that the world was coming to the end of a major cycle. What comes next is, as always, for us to dream into being. But the Mayan calendar is not our dreaming.

And it is the same with the union of the Eagle and the Condor. It is a beautiful prophecy, with two powerful symbols at its core, which are kind of masculine and feminine, north and south. The prophecy states that at this time, these 2 principles can come together again. Maybe they can, I don't know. One of the elders in this youtube video, Phil Lane, seems to take it quite literally and that will no doubt gain him followers, because many people want certainty. That apart, is this prophecy part of our dreaming?

SPIRIT and BREXIT UNCERTAINTY

These points of national political meltdown are very rare. They create a lot of anxiety and uncertainty and it easy to respond to that by catastrophising and blaming. But they also represent a personal opportunity. There is little any of us can do to change the situation, and anyway how would we know what would help? But what we can do is stay with the feeling of uncertainty, uncomfortable as it is, without reacting to it. Because uncertainty, in this world, is the nature of things. 

We lay down tramlines of belief and codes of behaviour that provide an orientation for life, and we need these. But they are provisional. The shaman has the psychological strength to live outside these tramlines, and that gives him/her the alignment with Spirit necessary to counsel and to heal. 

So that is the opportunity of this time: to live in the uncertainty that is the true nature of things, and to draw strength from that, even to relish it. Above is the painting 'Autumn Rhythm' by Jackson Pollock, that shows the creatively chaotic nature of the inner world, where nothing is predictable, nothing repeats itself.

THE NEED FOR COLLECTIVE ECSTASY

We have become suspicious of collective consciousness - think football crowds and the Nazis and the Church. There can be an ecstatic quality to being in these situations - we put down the burden of self and lose ourselves in something larger. In the case of political collective consciousness, the loss of self involves affirming the authority of the leader. 

But what about situations where we are not elevating an authority, but where we are doing the opposite? I'm thinking specifically of dance as an aspect of tribal cultures, where people would allow Spirit to come through, and which 'fosters love, trust and equality' (1) It is not something we do very much in our shamanism - our trance dance is often blindfold, which maybe reflects the atomised nature of our culture. I do experience a measure of collective consciousness wherever Spirit is invoked in a group in eg the sweatlodge, or in say a journeying group, but maybe our wariness and our rationalism holds us back? People do not seem to hold back in this way, however, at a Rolling Stones concert That is why they were the bad boys.

From the 15th century onwards, "European travellers to every continent witnessed people coming together to dance with wild abandon around a fire, synchronised to the beat of drums, often to the point of exhaustion. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how European explorers reacted to these dances: with disgust. The masks, body paints, and guttural shrieks made the dancers seem like animals. The rhythmically undulating bodies and occasional sexual pantomimes were, to most Europeans, degrading, grotesque and thoroughly "savage". (1)

So we have a lot of cultural baggage. What drew me and still draws me to Shamanism is the reality of this abandonment to Spirit. I had just never thought of it as a collective phenomenon until I read the above passage. And I am thinking yes, we need this.

(1) The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt p199

Animal Spirits

I've long been a fan of trance dance, something I usually do blindfolded. And what can feel like an animal spirit moves through me, and I can do healing work in this way too, but without the blindfold or the music/drums, and it is just as powerful. 

But I also like the idea of painting myself up, or dressing up, as the animal spirit and dancing,  which I've never done. It would fill out that connection with the natural world, which is what we easily forget - for us trance dance can be something techno in which our consciousness alters, and that is something, but no natural world.