THE NATURAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

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In her book The Hunter-Gatherers Way, Ffyona Campbell talks of a tribe of pygmies who gather honey from high up in the trees. Being a difficult climb, the men undertake the task. The women remain at the bottom, reminding the men not to take all of the honey, but to leave some for the bees so that they can continue to live. Our whole ecological crisis is probably in that story.

In her walks in which she teaches groups of people how to gather wild foods, Ffyona Campbell has noticed that it is the men she has to restrain most from taking too much from nature, and she has despaired when she has overheard them conspiring to come back later to pick whatever hasn't been picked.

The Iroquois Confederacy was established between 5 different peoples in what is now NE USA, long before the white settlers arrived, to stop war between them. They have a council, and any disputes are brought there. It works. A man is selected from each nation as a representative, but he is initially put forward by the women, who reserve the right to remove him if he is not doing his job properly (see articles 17 & 18 in link above).

In our modern shamanic world, I have noticed that a disproportionate number of men are teachers, while women generally seem to find shamanic journeying comes to them more easily than it does to men.

There seems to be a principle here, going right back over time to different parts of the world, and pursuing us into the modern age (with its politicised ideology that men and women should be the same): namely, that men like to get things done, and the job of women is to ensure that it is done in the right way. Somewhere that relationship broke down for us - and let us not start attaching blame, that does not help, and we do not know how it happened - and we now have a very one-sided world in which women's function as guardians of the vision, of a balanced way of doing things, is not recognised.

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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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Obviously I am dealing in generalities here, and they are not true for everyone. Human nature cannot be broken down into simple categories: some men are more feminine and vice-versa. And some men have the gift of feeling like they are a woman but are in a man's body, and vice-versa. People nowadays get terribly confused by this, and literalise it and think it needs a surgical solution, and often make what is joyful miserable. But it is the gift of being a Two-Spirit, and I think spirit needs to be trusted in what we have been given, instead of seeing it as a mistake.

In her essay Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche, Jung's collaborator and lover Toni Wolff outlines 4 modes of the feminine psyche: Amazon, Medial, Hetaira and Maternal. One doesn't want to get too hung up on categories, but they can be useful pointers. The Medial is the woman who can be a guide to the Unconscious; the Hetaira specialises in love and guidance of the other's unfoldment; and the other two speak for themselves. 

TONI WOLFF: MEDIAL and HETAIRA

The Amazon is paired with the Medial - so that one who is gifted at one will generally find the other more difficult. And the same for Maternal and Hetaira.

BOADICEA: AMAZON and MATERNAL

And nowadays of course there is much societal pressure for every woman to be an Amazon like so many men are, and they can feel ashamed, or inferior, if they are not. And this is all wrong-headed. There is a much broader range of possibilities for women, according to their natures. And this scheme is dynamic, it is about bringing balance over the course of a lifetime. Yes, some will be Amazons. But most will not be.

And in my view the fundamental task of feminism is not about bringing sameness between the sexes, for we are not the same; nor should it be about a power struggle with men and blaming men and demonising their divine masculinity as 'toxic' - that simply perpetuates the conflicted nature of our times.

Yes we all need to press for equal opportunity in the workplace. But I think the fundamental, and urgent, task of feminism (and of men too), for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the planet, lies in restoring that right relationship between men and women, in which men will carry on doing the main leading in certain kinds of ways and probably doing the dangerous physical jobs, and in which women lead as vision-holders, in ensuring that things are done in the right way. 

For the sake of completion, one could refer to King, Warrior, Magician and Lover as the archeytal masculine forms, but I will leave the unfoldment of that to another time. But it is fun correlating them with Toni Wolff's archetypes, although putting different systems together doesn't always work very well.

CONSPIRACY THEORY and THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

When events occur that disrupt our settled sense of the world, that is difficult for many people. For some, it is an opportunity. The curtains are, briefly, open, because the world was of course never settled, it was always fluid. But that is also why conspiracy theories intensify and proliferate in times of crisis.

 

The word 'conspiracy' comes from the Latin meaning 'to plot': ie someone has done something to you, whether it was 9/11, the death of Diana, or Covid 19. In this way the anxiety of living in an uncertain world is relieved by blaming it on someone else. So strong is this need, that facts are overlooked. This is shown by the constant refrain of the conspiracist for others to 'look at the evidence', which is exactly what they are not doing. To be concrete, some of the theories proliferating at present include linking Covid 19 with 5G, Bill Gates and deliberate engineering by the Chinese in order to gain economic advantage over the US. Or that the whole thing is a hoax.

 

There is a theory that Coronavirus escaped from a lab in China. That seems like a possibility from what I have read, but probably not the case. However - and here is the key - if I was a conspiracist I would be insisting that the lab escape was the case, and that it was deliberate. There is little room for doubt in conspiracy theory.

 

Another avenue to look at is 'agency'. I think that conspiracists feel they are acted upon, rather than acting, in their lives. At least, to an extent. I know conspiracists - and I won't mince my words when I say that what they talk in this respect is nonsense, disturbed, bonkers - who are clearly agents in their own lives at quite a deep level, they may be quite long in the tooth, yet when it comes to how they think of the collective, and governments and big business especially, they feel they are acted upon to a degree that is irrational: they are convinced they are being manipulated by powerful people and forces that I can never quite pin down, and usually they have an evangelical desire to 'wake others up', which is in itself revealing. They feel certain they have the hidden truth that the 'sheep' do not see (for myself I find it hard to be certain about anything!) And these people and forces acting on them are BAD GUYS, they make these big simplistic judgements on them that they would never make about people they actually know (and most of us do that with politicians, don't we?) More than that, there may be forces that are alien in origin that are manipulating us.

 

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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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I don't know what to do when people start to come out with this stuff, because there may well be other ways in which I respect them. The one thing I know I can't do is discuss it with them, because I am up against a need to believe. But for me it is a big limitation in my relationship with them, because I like to think about the world and what is happening in it without someone insisting that Bill Gates - who has given away $30 billion - means harm. Gates may be misguided, but that is a different matter, and I have my own reservations about him in this respect.

 

The collective noun for lemurs is a conspiracy. (And therein lies a nickname for conspiracists). And 'lemur' is from the Latin meaning 'Spirits of the Dead'. Wow! I think etymological and mythological connections need to be taken seriously. So conspiracy theory is the Spirits of the Dead speaking. Have you seen the Judgement Card in the Mythic Tarot? 

 

It shows the dead arising, and means old gifts emerging. It points to what I was saying about agency. Whenever our power, our gifts, are suppressed, they come out in wonky ways, often projected in negative form on the world outside. So this is my case. The conspiracists' urging of others to 'wake up' is really a message to themselves to wake up. To claim whatever it is in themselves that they are not claiming.

THE HUNTER-GATHERER WAY

Just read this extraordinary short book. Having walked around the world as a young woman, Ffyona Campbell decided to try to find out what it would mean to live as a hunter gatherer in England. She found it took her about 30 mins a day to gather from the wild the food she needed for her family. 

 

A host of original reflections and observations on how humans are designed to function and flourish in the natural world. And how we no longer have the confidence that that is possible, which undermines our relationship with the natural world and with ourselves. This book will change the way you think. It's required reading for Shamans!

CORONAVIRUS: WHAT WOULD A TRADITIONAL HEALER MAKE OF IT?

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 I was wondering what traditional or 'alternative' medicine would make of this pandemic we are experiencing. For a start, there are thousands of such ways, in which treatment tends to be approached individually rather than collectively. That is why, IMO, methods like homeopathy fail in lab tests: it is administered individually, and the faith of both the patient and the homeopath plays an important part. (The placebo effect, by the way, is a dynamic thing, it shows that real healing is at work, that is not dependent on just chemical cause-and-effect.) 

Astrology fails under scientific testing also, and a good thing too. As Jung pointed out, it is like a trickster comes in when we ignore the sacred and subject our healing or divinatory arts to the profane methods of science. That is why a good healer will keep his/her medicine objects well wrapped up from prying eyes.

What is most important to remember, and what is often very difficult to see, is that science is a story about how things are. It is not 'the truth'. Even in its own terms, it knows that it models reality rather than describes reality itself. Reality is not knowable because it is not literal. Whereas we tend to be literal, we want to know exactly how things are.

There is always this divide between simple-minded people who take their culture's stories literally - whether those stories are about heaven and hell or about coronaviruses - and people who understand that they are just stories, albeit sometimes useful and descriptive, and indeed often sacred. All we can ever have is a shifting set of stories about the world, that reflect the underlying dreaming of a people.

So coronavirus is a story. A traditional healer would describe this sickness quite differently. It would begin with the Spirit. What is it in the Spirit of this people that so many of them are falling prey to this illness? And this in the context of understanding that every person will also get this sickness for a different reason, that is unique to them.

Why did Boris Johnson, a guy with a history of robust health, get this sickness to such an extent that his life was endangered? There is a mythological dimension when the king is ill. 

In the Parsifal myth, the Fisher King recovers when the question 'Whom does the Grail serve?' is asked. And the answer is that the Grail serves the king. In other words, the king needs to be a conduit for Spirit, so that Spirit can serve the kingdom. Maybe he will emerge with a deeper understanding of his job and role. Johnson was also, in a sense, a sacrifice, and maybe the people will be less badly affected than they might have been because he gave his health. The leader is profoundly and archetypally connected to the collective he serves.

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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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The recovery from an illness begins with a re-alignment to Spirit. If we are deeply aligned to Spirit, we are more likely to be physically healthy. This is axiomatic for me. It's not always the case, and sometimes it may just be our time to go. And the nature of our collective disalignment can be read in the 'cure': the stopping of the world, and the effect that has had. Before the lockdown, the way the world was seemed inevitable, one possibility, one direction, a juggernaut. Now that we have stopped, new possibilities for a slower, more earth-friendly humanity seem to be emerging. And stopping means we are able to listen in ways we could not before. So this is one way of looking at this collective sickness: it arose because we were trapped in just one possibility, we were strangling ourselves, and we had forgotten how to listen.

So a traditional way of thinking might say we will get well collectively, not from social distancing and vaccines, which belong to another story, but by stopping and listening. "What is this world if full of care, we have not time to stand and stare."

Our modern solution to this illness is purely material. It will work, up to a point. But we are not being asked by the government or its medical advisers to reflect on who are we, that this Spirit of sickness has arisen among us? It is also asking us to reflect on our relationship with death. Death, for many of us, is an extinction, and to be avoided at all costs. This is also fuelling and exaggerating our response. Death is not truly a problem, it is a part of life, it is a homecoming, it is a return to that vastly bigger context about which we can know nothing while we are entranced by the apparent reality of this dream.

And social distancing, about which we have become so anxious and so moralising. Would a traditional healer recommend mass social distancing as part of his treatment? It seems hard to imagine. And maybe, in an opposites kind of way, and thinking 'story', it is our atomisation writ large. It is telling us that we need to find a new sense of community, along with the slowing and the listening and the reflection on death. 

And there is the name 'coronavirus' (Covid is just an abbreviation of this). Again, think 'story' and you will find a deeper truth. 'Corona' means garland, wreath, crown. And yes, we have allowed it to wear a crown, we have allowed it to rule us. It is the enemy to be defeated. When you turn someone or something into an enemy, you give it a lot of power. You allow it to define who you are by your opposition to it. As Nietzsche said, beware that in fighting monsters, you do not become one. We have set ourselves against nature, we fight her for her bounty, and insodoing we have become monstrous..

So we set ourselves against coronavirus, she is a form of life, yet we want to eradicate her, rather than find a partnership. The word 'virus' reflects this oppositional stance: it is from the Latin meaning slimy liquid or poison. So we really have created a monster out of this sickness: we call it 'the poison king' and do not even know that is what we are doing, because who investigates etymology, which is the story behind words? The collective unconscious knows these stories, however, and on that level we know exactly what we are doing.

So a traditional approach to a sickness such as we are experiencing might well involve this sort of investigation. As you can see, a lot can be unearthed that tells us so much about ourselves. This is how sickness can teach us. Sickness will keep teaching us so long as we are not aligned with Spirit. In the case of our culture, so long as we do not even believe that we have a Spirit. This is why there are so many hard-to-diagnose soul diseases like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and auto-immune diseases etc. The first question that may need to be asked in seeking a cure for the coronasickness is do we actually want to be well? And why?

IT'S ALL AN ILLUSION

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I have a notion that human beings from earlier times were more intelligent than we are. We have this idea of 'primitive' cultures, and that flatters us. We are more 'advanced' because of our technological superiority. But that technological superiority has been driven by say .1% of the population. The rest of us just have to sit back and enjoy it. And enjoy the reduction in effort - the reduction in day-to-day creativities - that the machines, which many of us now serve, give us. So many of us need not concern ourselves too much with enough food on the table and shelter and danger any more. That has been one of the main drivers of this technological civilisation - to take us away from that edge of existence that demands we are creative.

Perhaps the first defining step in this process was the invention of agriculture. At that point we began to move away from nature as a benign force that provided the conditions for life, and in which we were embedded, into an 'other' that had to be worked and manipulated to provide what we needed. So the alienation from ourselves as an integral part of the natural world began.

And it began metaphysically with the fierce God of the Middle East, who allowed no other gods, and who cast us out of Eden, that natural balance with nature. I don't mean to suggest it was a bed of roses - far from it, the human ego and suffering has always been there. But we knew how to restore the balance when it was lost.

And with farming came an abundance of food, and with that came large societies. These communities could no longer be governed by human relationships, but required impersonal laws and remote authoritarian figures. And we are still subject to that.

This slight ramble came out of the idea that we are no longer as intelligent as we were. Apart from the lack of day-to-day creativity, our memories are no longer what they were. An Irish bard would have to remember hundreds of stories. We know bits and pieces at best. And with that came a coherence and a culture within a person that now we find instead spread among books - another technological 'advance'.

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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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I'll try and come back to my original starting point, which is that I was reading a review of a book on neuroplasticity, which is roughly the idea that our brains are far more flexible and adaptable than we think. Read 'My Stroke of Insight' by Jille Bolte Taylor (or watch her TED talk). Brain scientist has her left brain taken out by a stroke, experiences oceanic right brain consciousness that fundamentally changes her, and a few years later, after a mighty sustained effort, has created new pathways in her brain that give her a new left brain.

And the big simple truth that can be so hard to get is that it is the brain that continually dreams this 'objective reality' into being, that gives form and space and time and left and right to experience and then we naively assume it's real and not just an interpretation. It is blindingly obvious that this world is a construction of the brain, and that what is really going on is the biggest and most shocking mystery that you could think of - think Matrix - but I still meet otherwise intelligent people who think that the physical world is the real reality. The metaphysical naivety of much of humanity has to be seen to be believed. 

And back to where I started, yet again :) Neuroplasticity shows to me that the world we experience can be continually re-dreamed, it is an enormous power once you grasp it. It is what prayer and ceremony are about: the attempt to re-dream the world. And the best sort of prayer and ceremony also involve an alignment with the bigger dream of the universe, which is an even greater and more awe-inspiring mystery. Neuroplasticity isn't just about getting back to where we were before an injury. It is about the powers the brain has to create an entirely different reality for ourselves, that is aligned with how things are, as conceived by the much greater reality that surrounds our tiny human consciousness. Ordinary, conventional reality is a profound illusion. If you can start to get that, you have a bit of wisdom. A bit.

PEYOTE HUNT

Just read this book. It is in the anthropologist-goes-native-scholarly-but-readable genre, which is something I like. Also in this category are The Beauty of the Primitive, Reindeer People (by Vitebsky) and The Spears of Twilight. Peyote Hunt shows us such a different and beautiful and profound and immediate way of experiencing the world.

 

The Huichol live incredibly simply in what is now Mexico, yet their way of relating to the world is very sophisticated and hard for us to grasp. I had the same experience with a Chippewa Cree friend from Canada who used to stay with me.

AUTHORITY

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I'd say it took me until my mid 50s before I began to have a balanced response to external authority. And that has been tied up with finding my authority within - the Emperor card in the Tarot. And I think that is a big quest. Of course we all think we are our own masters. And then we mind terribly what other people think of us! And we get offended, which I think is a useful experience.

I am talking about the centre of the Medicine Wheel. A deep sense of who we are cannot be separated from a deep connection to Spirit. It is open and flexible and hard-won and will always guide us.

So for myself, I would switch between being afraid of external authority (because I didn't properly have my own) and conforming for that reason, to being afraid of external authority and rebelling and attributing dark motives to those authorities. (I think a lot of conspiracy theory comes from this place.) At a certain point, I decided just to drop it all, and it made life a lot easier.

At present, external authority looms large in our lives. There are government lockdowns all over the world. It is a time when we can look at our relationship to external authority and to our own authority.

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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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We can on the one hand feel secretly reassured just by the fact of being told what to do. I am not opposing the rules by saying this, but I do observe a certain righteousness in some people around following the rules. Or we can rebel and feel there is some dark motive on the part of governments going on, we can't say exactly what, but somehow we just know it. Or we can stay with that piece of gold within us that is our inner guide, and let the governments, in all their limitedness and cack-handedness, get on with whatever it is they are getting on with. 

We can't change the world. But we can be in that still place within that sees clearly, and we can pray from that place and know it will do something, even though we can never know what that is. There is a much bigger picture, a Spirit picture, behind the world that we see, and there is so little we can know, but acknowledging that keys us into the sense of the Great Mystery within which we live our short lives.

THE SHAMANIC MEN'S CIRCLE

I am starting a Shamanic Circle for men. It will be online to start with. We will be meeting firstly on Zoom on Fri 1st May at 7.30pm BST (details are below, or in the Facebook group 'The Shamanic Men's Circle'). The Zoom Meeting is free, and all men are welcome. And you can post and discuss in the Facebook group.

 

It is a Circle for men who feel called to the Shamanic path, a way that reflects how early peoples were: the sense that the natural world is alive; that we are a part of her and are cared for by her; that aligning to the Spirit within is also an alignment to the Spirit of the universe; and this is what gives life a sense of meaning and fulfillment.

I have no agenda about how it is men are meant to be, but I do have a desire to experience more friendship and sense of community with men. I have a few observations, which may not be correct 😂: that men don't always find it so easy to talk personally with other men; that the Shamanic world has relatively few men in it (yet we are not shy of leading within that world); that we are often unsure of our masculinity in a wider culture that can be quick to label us 'toxic'; and that owning our sensitivity as a man can be something of a journey. 

 

So let us meet and talk and get to know each other. That is my only intention for now. And yeah doing sweats and stuff would be great, but let's take our time 😎

 

Barry Goddard is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: Shamanic Men's Circle
Time: May 1, 2020 06:30 PM Universal Time UTC (7.30pm BST)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87669781621…
Meeting ID: 876 6978 1621
Password: 216175

TELEPATHIC MEDICINE PEOPLE

You read about Medicine people who are able to communicate with each other at a distance. I don't see this as a 'psychic power' that is a sort of add-on to who we are. I see it more as being deeply attuned to ourselves and to others with whom we have strong spirit connections. It is a depth quality which maybe we are not used to but which I think is quite natural. And it is maybe something for us Shaman types to consider in these times of social distancing.

THE BOGEYMEN BEHIND COVID 19

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If we are any kind of healer or teacher, then fundamental to that is that we have some kind of relationship with our shadow, with all those things in us that we are maybe ashamed of, or that keep us awake at 4 am. Otherwise we cannot be a clear channel for Spirit in our work, nor will we have the psychological insight to be of real help to people. This is the real preparation to be a healer, and it may take decades.

At times of crisis like this, which inevitably provoke the collective shadow, it is more important than ever that we are able to stand apart from that: it is collective and psychic and we will get drawn in if we do not have our wits about us. 

Not many people have the psychological strength to remain with their own darkness and fragility. That is why collectives create bogeymen. It creates a kind of stability and reassurance. Hence the witch-burnings in early Europe, Nazi anti-Semitism, and McCarthyism in the US. You see it also with Donald Trump - a fragile individual if ever there was - attempting to create bogeymen out of the Mexicans, the Muslims and the Chinese.

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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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Whenever there is a major event that upsets our little world, you see the process at work, whether it was 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, or now with Covid 19. If Covid 19 was just a virus that had mutated, there would be nothing to carry the stress it has created. So, we are hearing, it was deliberately created by the Chinese, and somewhere Bill Gates and 5G were involved. Watch for Jeff Bezos to be dragged in too. It is pitiable and it is insane, but it is how collectives work, we should not be surprised.

What convinces people is not evidence, but other people's belief, because it is a herd thing. But from the point of view of the individual, it can seem like an epiphany, like they have had their eyes opened, balance has been restored, and it is everyone else who appears like a sheep. It has a lot in common with fundamentalist religion.