THE BEGINNINGS OF WISDOM

The real qualification in this Shamanic business is not the certificated courses we have been on, or even the profound initiations that Spirit has given us - invaluable as the latter are - but the degree to which we have a straightforward relationship with our 'shadow' side. It only gets called shadow 'cos usually we don't want to know about it. But if we start to make friends with those bits that torment us or that we even feel ashamed about, then they are very happy to make friends with us, it's what they want.

It's all actually a very straightforward business, but that doesn't mean it's easy. It's about catching yourself at all those times when you feel anxious or overwhelmed or self-doubting or raging or envious (go on admit it 🤣) and just saying it to yourself WITHOUT JUDGING and just being with it, and even better being able to say it straightforwardly to other people. And hauling the feeling off the object/person/circumstance to which it has attached itself.

 

It's not about trying to change those 'demons' either. They almost certainly will change, as it happens, if you stay with them and don't judge them. And why would they want to stay around if you are judging them? I wouldn't want to stay around in such company! But it's not for us to 'change' them, they may even be serving certain purposes beyond our ken (like Gollum in Lord of the Rings). Spirit is such an unfathomable thing, how do we know what-is-what with our merely human judgement?

 

So here is one with me. I haven't written a book. I do not currently have a genuine urge to do so, but I know at some point I probably could and would love to. Meanwhile, if someone else has written a 'shamanic' book, and particularly if they are my age or younger - and that is without even looking to see if the book is any good - I feel threatened, I feel envious. And if I'm not careful, I could start to fault-find with that person. That is envy, and it was the first sin in the Bible, it was why Cain killed his brother Abel, because God had praised Abel and not him. So I'm like that with anything I'm good at or want to be good at, and I'm like that with astrology too: if someone appears like they might be better than me, I feel threatened. I start to lose myself.

 

Now I think this is a universal tendency, and it can be very hard to admit to. A lot of criticism of wealth and privilege comes down to this: envy. But actually, it's not hard once you start admitting to it. Why not admit to it? Why feel ashamed and hide it, especially from oneself, if not from others? But people do it all the time. And that means, in my book, that they haven't reached the beginnings of wisdom.

 

Wisdom requires 'humility'. But humility is not about 'lowering' oneself. It is about being level headed and straightforward about who we are. And it is such a fucking relief, I tell you. And in the case of envy, it is based on comparison, and the first thing we lose when we start doing that is to lose sight of our own unique gifts, or what it is in our life that works well.

 

And let us call these things by their old-fashioned names: let’s not talk about someone making us feel insecure, but about envy; not ‘anxiety’ but ‘fear’; maybe sometimes instead of ‘self-esteem’ we might say ‘pride’, the flip-side of envy. And on the subject of ‘self-esteem’, as the great Bill Gates said, it is not a given, you have to earn it: take that thing you can be good at and keep doing it. Then you will feel good about yourself, and rightly so.

 

I used to live with someone who could not for a moment admit her own insecurities, and if I wanted to talk about mine she would use it against me, as a way of propping herself up. And for years I longed to be able to talk about all that stuff in myself. And what a relief it has been, the last 3 years living on my own and at least being able to be honest with myself and not having someone else around needing to stand in the way of that. Now I don't want to judge that other person, because Wisdom begins by not judging others as well as oneself, and forgiving ourselves each time we catch ourselves judging, because it is something we will keep doing, we can't help it. But at least we can forgive ourselves, and why not?

 

And here is a good one (with a Toltec origin): keep, in your mind at least, asking those who you feel have wronged you for forgiveness for judging them, because that is something we do to those who have wronged us, and it is not helpful to judge anyone.

 

So I think this is when we are really on ‘the path’ in a grounded way and have something solid to offer others: when we can be honest about who we are to ourselves and to others. We don’t need to be an ‘advanced’ being to be a teacher, we just need to be an honest being.

 

And I think this is a common misconception. I regularly encounter people who have put themselves in a teaching position on the strength of their ‘spiritual’ experiences and trainings, but they are not the sort of people you can get near to in a personal sense. I feel they are not fully present, and sure enough sooner or later they will do something, usually to do with power, that gives the game away. But they are usually quite unconscious of this, they just think they are ‘light-workers’ or something, they are identified with that. They may even make a noise about how they acknowledge their ‘shadow side’, but without being specific, and that is a giveaway.

 

But that is where they are. I feel tempted to judge them for their false pride and the harm they do. But it is just one of those things, there is no law saying that anyone has to come into relationship with their shadow, and it something we can learn from if we come out the other side of those kinds of teachers. We learn to trust our own discernment more deeply, in the face of someone, and probably the people around them too, who want us to put their opinions above our own.

 

And when there is this non-acknowledgement of the shadow, then there is usually projection of it. I listened to a ‘lightworker’ the other day giving a long spiel about how evil the world is; it is standard for I would say most people to project their shadow onto the political party they don’t vote for (in our context, that usually means Republican/Tory); and in a spiritual group - or a family - anyone who is critical of the unspoken rules is usually seen by everyone else as having a problem.

 

Whole religions are founded on what is now called ‘spiritual bypass’: I was part of a Buddhist set-up like that for many years, and it made me ill. There are plenty of shamanists like this too. Religion tends to be like this across the board, because it is based on a division into good and evil, which is an all too human thing to do. Not many people can do shadow work. It requires standing outside what society regards as ‘bad’ and finding the ‘evil’ inside ourselves and welcoming it. Finding, as Jordan Peterson puts it, the concentration camp guard within ourselves. Then we start to become a whole and balanced human being, and have something of real value to offer others.