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| Martin Heidegger |
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his 1927 book ‘Being and Time’, accused the Western tradition of having forgotten, since ancient Greek times, the main question of philosophy, which is what does it mean to BE? He reckoned that it had already gone wrong with Plato and Aristotle in their assertion that the cosmos pre-dates us, so that we come into the world as subjects merely seeking to know its objects. “From then on, according to Heidegger, Western thought was led down the false path of only attempting to know the truth about things in the world, rather than posing the more primordial question of how it is that we have a world in the first place.”*
Heidegger’s position, in my view, is in accord with a Shamanic view (note I don’t say THE Shamanic view, I don’t think like that.) For Shamanism, the world is continually dreamed into being. All we have is subjectivity, our own experience. There is no firm ‘objective’ reality (the basis of science) into which mere ‘subjectivity’ must be subsumed if we wish to have true knowledge.
No, if you are a Native American and from a distance you see an owl sitting in a fir tree, and as you get closer it becomes a fir cone, then it is a spirit that first presented itself to you as an owl, and then as a fir cone. How interesting, how wonderful, what is it trying to tell you? The modern view is that there is an ‘objective’ reality, and to start with you got it wrong and thought it was an owl.
This is so illogical. The slightest reflection on the brain tells us that our perception of an external world is a fabrication, a model that works, and that everyone else’s model is slightly different, or very different, to our own. All we can know is our subjective experience. And there is an important point here: we have been taught to downgrade that as ‘merely’ subjective. And when we do that we become lost and disempowered, for we attempt to anchor ourselves in something external and contingent. No, we need to reclaim the subjective, honour it, trust it in its depths, for it is all we have, it is who we are. Taking care of that is our primary calling in life: anything we do for others comes out of that primary care of that deep thing within us. Getting people to listen to that is, I think, our main job as healers.
So the world is being continually dreamed into existence by the primacy of Being. This dreaming is all there is, but we easily have the illusion of a solid world external to ourselves, and we forget about the dreaming. As Shamans, we know the dreaming. It gets called the Otherworld, and that is itself a concession to our corporeal forgetting. In reality, this world and the Otherworld are the same. I think this is something that many of us come to experience over time: the Otherworld, the Spirit world, is just there, we don’t need drums or rattles or whatever to ‘travel’ there. And that means we are always connected to the dreaming, at least when we’re not too busy or in the grip of our shadow stuff :).
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I
offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk
over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel,
Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres
around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis,
and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work.
Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk
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So when we do work for people, we are working on the level of where things really happen. WE ARE ALTERING THE DREAMING OF THE WORLD. What a wonderful and profound thing to be able to do. And of course, it is not ‘us’ that is doing it, because the self is also a concession to corporeal existence.
And when we die, the dreaming stops producing the experience of a world ‘external’ to ourselves, I think that is all that happens. ‘All’! That is hugely threatening if you haven’t practised loosening the sense of self and its anchoring in an apparently solid world, that in turn gives us an illusion of a substantial self. But the experienced Shaman is already dead, in the sense that it no longer makes a difference if he/she has a body, for it is experienced as contingent, illusory.
It is on this dreaming level that we can have the greatest effect, although we can never know exactly what that will be, for it is not a simple cause and effect relationship. Prayer - a conversation with the natural world – also brings us onto this level. Words can come from this level too, and they can really hit home for people: you may not be the sort of shaman that bungs bits of soul around, but you may work with words instead. And it is also a reason that activism may not be our thing. As a Native American friend said to me, all some elders do is pray.
*Angus Nichols - Times Literary Supplement 6/12/19
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