LOCKDOWN SWEATLODGE, ANCESTORS & LEFT-BRAIN SHAMANISM

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 So what you do is to prepare your bathroom beforehand: light a candle, add essential oils to your bath, scatter some flower petals and call in the directions and the spirits. Focus particularly on Water and Fire. Make sure the water is sufficiently hot that you can only just get in. You will acclimatise. Lie in it and have a good time.

Having a good time when we are being 'spiritual' is an important ingredient. Otherwise a bit of us disappears into earnestness and 'respect' and what you have is religion. The difference between being serious and being earnest is that the former keeps its sense of humour.

Lean your head back and give it a good dunking under the water, though you don't need to dunk your face as well. Keep it there for a while. Repeat. Then just lie there again and let the heat do its work. Most of the stuff that had been swirling around in your head, all your everyday concerns, will gradually fall away. You will be melted out of your rational ego and into your heart and body and right-brain. What a relief!

At this point you can bring in any thanks and prayers that you have. Or maybe just sit with those deeper issues in your life. Now is not a time for working them out, but for letting your non-ordinary consciousness wash over them. This is transformative.

Health warning: if your health is OK for sweatlodges, then this should be OK too. Otherwise not. For myself, after I have been very hot for a while, my heart starts to race. That is the point at which I will leave the bath - slowly - or the sweatlodge, and only return when my heart has returned to normal.

Have you noticed that your fear of death disappears when you are in an SSC (Shamanic State of Consciousness, as Harner terms it)? Notice this in the bath. I noticed it recently after an LSD trip, confirming recent research findings that psilocybin administered to dying patients permanently reduces their anxiety about death.

And the reason for this is that it is only the ego, the left-brain (using these terms loosely) that is afraid of death. And this is because for the rational ego, physical death IS an extinction. It is for this same reason that we doubt the reality of our shamanic journeys: we are immersing ourselves in a non-rational world, and the ego maintains its sense of separate existence by doubting that world. It is therefore natural to doubt in this way (thanks to Jung for this insight.)

So in our Lockdown Sweatlodge, we are immersing ourselves in the right brain, connected, oceanic consciousness. The lack of fear of death in this consciousness suggests to me that death is simply a return to this consciousness, but with the ego absent. On my recent LSD session, I felt I was looking through the gates of death, and the same beauty and joy was there as is this world, they were the same place! 

In this SSC we can come closer to the ancestors, and particularly anyone who you were close to who has died. I think something of this experience is necessary to reclaim the ancestors and their ongoing help into our lives. Otherwise it is a belief, a 'practice', and you are heading towards religion. Even relatives who were very limited in this life will have been loosened by their experience of the death realm, and may have genuine support and guidance to offer you.

So I have talked about death and the ancestors in the context of this right-brain consciousness, but that is just because I am with those themes at present. It doesn't have to be those themes. It may not be any theme at all. You may just be digging your SSC!

Watch this TED talk (or read her book) by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist whose left-brain was disabled by a stroke.

In this context, in which we have begun with intention and calling in the spirits, we can generally trust the right-brain state that we enter. But the right-brain goes both ways: it is also at work when a mob goes crazy. Or when there is a crisis in the world, and you get an explosion of ungrounded, blaming theories for what has happened. Regardless of how much truth they contain - and I am not addressing that here - underlying them is a primal need for order and reassurance that recedes as the crisis in the world recedes.

So this is why we need a left-brain. Let us not undervalue the left-brain. Without it we could not live this life, walk our earthwalk, for we would be floating in the oceanic state that is there before and after life. And the left-brain is vital for discerning the kind of right-brain, non-rational state we are in: is it Spirit speaking through us, or is it our own prejudices, fears, aversions, anger? Or is it a mixture of both? That mixture is such a tricky one, and I think we are all prone to it. Someone with an intuitive gift will probably speak sufficient truth to be of help to others. And sometimes they will be wrong, sometimes what they say will be bollocks, not to put too fine a point on it. And this applies to everyone I know, including myself. WE ALL SOMETIMES TALK BOLLOCKS FROM THAT INTUITIVE PLACE. 

In a sense that is just as well. We take ourselves and others off their pedestals, at least to some degree, once we can discern the bits of nonsense that sometimes comes out. And that gives us actual, rather than false, power. The danger, of course, is when we believe either our own nonsense or that of others. And it's probably part of the journey for many of us. Spot yourself believing your own or others' (particularly teachers') nonsense.

In this way, using the left-brain, and developing its powers of discernment, we slowly learn to tell the difference between Spirit and Shadow. This is why the right brain needs the left brain, why oceanic consciousness needs rational consciousness.

The key quality of the rational ego is not so much logic (though most of us are less logical than we like to think, and we do need logic) as its ability to stand back disinterestedly. The characteristic of right-brain consciousness is immersion, we ARE that state, we can fully believe in it. Hence the ecstasy of Spirit, and the righteousness of rage.

What we are here to do is to learn to experience the right brain, but with awareness. We are not here to change and to purify ourselves, for that notion brings in judgment, even though that change and purification may well happen over time.  

In terms of the Medicine Wheel, we begin in the East with that initial experience of Fire/Spirit, the divine spark that begins life, and goes on its journey through the elements, round and round. Air is the final element in each cycle, and that is because it is the hardest. We move through and experience Water - Emotion - and Earth - the Body and then we reach Air, where we stand back and come to know Fire, Water and Earth. This is what it has all been leading up to. 

I think we often distrust the Air element because for us it is associated with the wounding of excessive rationality. But the true disinterestedness of the Air element is involved with, immersed in experience, rather than detached from, alienated from experience.