AI MEDICINE WHEEL SONNET and a WOLF VISITATION

My nephew, who has read my Medicine Wheel book, went to chatgpt yesterday and instructed it to write a sonnet about the medicine wheel. This was what came back:

In the Medicine Wheel, the

sacred circle stands

A symbol of balance, harmony,

and growth

Four quarters represent the four

sacred lands

Where all life's aspects find their

perfect home

The east is where the dawn

breaks, fresh and new

The south is where the sun is at

its peak

The west is where the day begins

to cool

The north is where the wisdom

lies, unique

But the centre is the heart of all

that's known

A place of unity, a sacred space

where all the elements and

forces are shown

To bring about a sense of love

and grace

The Medicine Wheel teaches us

to see

the balance that exists within all

beings

Meanwhile my niece used my FB profile pic to generate a picture of me in wolf form. This was because she has never forgotten the time, maybe 20 years ago, when we visited Longleat Safari Park. We were in 2 cars, and the wolves gathered around the car I was in and stared in at me. She didn't know that it was a wolf who turned up 18 months ago and suggested I write a fantasy novel about shapeshifters, something I thought was beyond me. And still do sometimes, 140k words later😊

SHAMANISM AND THE WORLD 100 YEARS FROM NOW

One day I think we will look back at our age and scratch our heads. We had never had it so good, and yet so many of us were filled with gloom that humanity was driving itself to extinction, along with most of the rest of the life on the planet. The shrill cheerleader of this collective fear – the pony-girl of the apocalypse - being a naïve teenage girl, honoured by many world leaders. We were fuelled by news reports that proclaimed the most alarmist speculations of ‘experts’ as gospel truth. News was never reported, as ever, unless it was bad news. What had the western world come to?

This apocalyptic thinking was nothing new. There had previously been fears of extinction from over-population, and then from nuclear war: the only discernible outcome of the nuclear threat was the end to all major wars. Perhaps the root of it all was an existential insecurity arising from the loss of our old moorings in Christianity, so starkly proclaimed by Nietzsche when he wrote that “God is Dead.” And the fact that humanity was going through a huge transition: people do not feel comfortable with change.

Meanwhile, the actual course of humanity was to continue to raise unprecedented numbers of people out of poverty, driven by a combination of the capitalist economic system, technological inventiveness and the consumption of fossil fuels, followed by the eventual shift to nuclear power. Alongside came an unprecedented flourishing of the natural world, due to the higher CO2 levels. Vast areas were allowed to become wild again, as humanity became more efficient at producing food for itself. The world population eventually levelled off as middle-class living standards became the norm. Many species did indeed become extinct along the way, but eventually a new balance was found as humanity completed its transition to a largely urban dwelling, technologically-based, culturally ever-renewing species. New certainties arose, limited as any certainty necessarily is, but enough to allay the existential fears of much of collective humanity.

Meanwhile the individual was left, as they always had been, with their own solitary self to deal with, and the option to project their own darkness onto the world, with which they would find a ready demographic of concurrence in the social media.

 

This is where our Shamanism will find itself. You can forget about a return to the old utopia, the ‘participation mystique’, that we project onto indigenous peoples. Our job is to keep clawing back that sense of belonging to the natural world which, if there is an absolute truth, is that. And the sense of it in an urban environment, which is where most of us in the West now live. And maybe the breaking down of the distinction between human-made and ‘natural’, as if the human ability to invent were somehow not natural. Don’t perpetuate the split that Christianity gave us into godly and worldly, that we may carry forward into ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. The urban environment as inspirited. Maybe that is our job. But we need to feel it first. And that comes through treating it as alive. Give thanks to your car, your frying pan, your phone. Trust that Mother Earth knows what she is doing.

SHAMANISM, CAPITALISM and IMAGINARY SPIRIT WORK

Even though this blog is 'Shamanic', I have an ongoing thing about whether I even want to use the word 'Shamanism'. Maybe that is as it should be. Maybe it means I am thoughtful 😂

But seriously, most Shamanism is religion, just like any other path is mostly religion: ie there is a hierarchy, and people take their guidance primarily from that, although that is hard for individuals to admit to. It is the human condition, it is not a complaint, and it is where many of us need to start. I will complain, however, about Shamanism being effectively reduced to a method, which is what 'core' Shamanism does. I don't know why, but it makes me see plastic, masquerading as the real thing.

But this isn't my main point. What I am wanting to bang on about is the indigenous people = good, modern humans = bad attitude, which is just one of the prejudices we may bring to Shamanism. Along with the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, anti-technology, apocalyptic environmentalist attitude, with ourselves as the good guys. We can in this context claim to be virtuous, not because of anything we do - apart from maybe the odd soul retrieval, imaginary or otherwise - but because of our identification with who we imagine to be the good guys.

Let me digress and say something I have never seen said before: I think a lot of our spirit work is imaginary. There, I have said it. Of course 'clients' (ghastly word) feel good afterwards, that is not hard to achieve. But has anything real shifted? Hard to say. Sometimes. Often not. Your pedestal often gives the illusion of it. There is real power in this work if we have the gifts for it, and the training too. It is a long, slow path, and we need to keep the faith in it, and it is our own Spirits that fundamentally keep the whole thing rolling along. Indigenous people understand the slow and deep nature of this path, our culture does not.

So the idea that indigenous = good, modern = bad. Not so. Humanity is on a hell of a technological roller-coaster ride, which I find myself marvelling at, in the context of vast collectives, and early peoples simply did not have any of this. Their example can help us remember that we belong to the natural world, and to continually give thanks for what we have. Modern westerners would do well to remember what our system gives us, instead of damning it, which is the tendency of the counter-culture. Dostoevsky identified lack of gratitude as the root of evil. I think he was right. Our counter-culture, which Shamanism tends to nest itself in, easily damns and feels superior to this culture, this system, that has given us so much.

There is no point fighting against where humanity is going. It is high tech, it is vast collectives, it is fossil fuels for now. Fossil fuels, that continue to help raise so many millions of people out of poverty. Why are these things often not seen as part of the natural world? What are they, if not that? Is not an iphone or an electric car also part of the natural world, something we can wonder at and feel grateful for and treat as having its own spirit, which I am sure they do?

So yes, Shamanism reminds us of certain basic attitudes that we need, and that we can easily forget. That humans have always easily forgotten. Hence ceremonies in which people give thanks and make prayers: because we forget to do so in the busyness of everyday life. That alienation is nothing new. And the cure is, in a way, simple.

So this, I think, is what our Shamanism, which is an ongoing re-invention, needs to be: an embracing of where humanity is going, working with our collectives rather than in opposition to them (and traditional shamans would have worked with, not against, their political leaders), while remembering our belonging to an inspirited natural world.

And one last thing: capitalism is just what humans do. We have always traded and attempted to build prosperity. It is stupid, it is anti-human nature to oppose it, and to use 'capitalist' as a term to damn people. Capitalism needs managing, definitely, for it tends towards amorality. But we are Shamanic, are we not, we are attempting to align ourselves with what is natural to humans, that which makes humans flourish and prosper? Should we not, therefore, align ourselves with the spirit of prosperity which is at the root of capitalism? Should we not align ourselves with the establishment, with our political leaders, whoever they might be, and bring our values to that table, instead of placing ourselves apart and above, which I do not think is an honest or effective place to be? I think that oppositional, superior attitude, which is so common, which becomes an accepted reality in many shamanic groups, is a kind of spiritual bypass.

 

The image is of the Shaman as Magician, who re-creates the world not through opposition, but by bringing the elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air together. Just as the Medicine Wheel also does.

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So why would you read my book? First of all, it is very readable. I had previously spent 15 years writing astrology blogs. That was my apprenticeship. I learnt to write in a way that is concrete, to the point and original. I know from experience what I am talking about. I do not write systematically, there is no attempt to put astrology into neat boxes. I keep it interesting, and I look at the subject in ways that I have not seen elsewhere. I have lots of opinions!

This book is aimed at anyone who has a little bit of knowledge of astrology upwards. Astrology is one of those subjects that enters your bones, and if it is there, then it is there, however much or however little you know. It is a primordial connection to the sky that many of us feel.

If I had to draw out some central themes of the book, they would be these: the power of astrology to take our breath away, to enchant us, through the eerie synchronicities it reveals between sky events and earthly events; its ability, particularly using the outer planets, to guide us through the deep initiatory and transformative experiences that life, if we are willing, offers us; and an affirmation of the intuitive, non-rational means of knowing, that is so central to who we are as humans, but which is undervalued and even denied in our modern age.

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SCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

This is worth watching. Two points that were not made:

Can consciousness be investigated as an object of scientific inquiry, or is it by definition subject, and therefore not amenable to that particular way of knowing? I see matter and consciousness as the outer and inner, objective and subjective, poles of the one reality.

Then there is the question of whether matter is conscious. I like to argue that the onus is on science to prove that matter is not conscious. Why would matter not have an inward dimension, just as we do?

BALANCING HEAVEN AND EARTH

I am reading these memoirs of a singular Jungian analyst. There is much food for thought. Johnson is by temperament introverted and solitary, and it draws me into that emphasis in myself. The Hermit archetype, which is full of the inner joy to be found when we let the world recede and honour the abundance within. Out of that I do my best work, which mainly takes the form of astrology readings by zoom, but which is a vehicle for whatever is needed.

For me, the overlap between Jung and Shamanism is seamless. I don't feel any limits or dogmas around Jung's spirit, and Shamanism at its best also has that quality: it is simply the human living in alignment with the spirit of the natural world, which is infinite. Jung knew one or two indigenous elders, and there was an easy understanding between them.

As a young man, Johnson was fortunate enough to meet Jung. He'd had a dream, which he related to Mrs Jung, and she passed it on to Carl. It was a huge lengthy dream involving Buddhas and snakes. Jung laid out Johnson's life before him. Do not join anything. Never marry. Your life is an inner life, and the world may never acknowledge you. That does not matter. What matters is that you commit yourself to that inner life and work.

As it happens, the world did acknowledge him. His books such as He, and Lying with the Heavenly Woman, became bestsellers (I recommend them.) And Jung was spot on. It reminds me of the traditional idea where a young man goes out on a vision quest, has a vision which reveals the course of his life, and an elder interprets it for him.

Never join anything was one of the injunctions. Out of his longing for community, Johnson tried a number of times to join institutions. He even became a monk at one point. It never worked out, and he knew beforehand that it was wrong for him. But still he went ahead. How many times has each of us done just that, one way or another?

Jolande Jacobi founded the CG Jung Institute in Zurich. Jung was resigned to its inevitability, but refused to set foot in it. Groups of people always mess up and dogmatise and literalise the teachings, and put the teacher on a pedestal. Not to speak of the interpersonal politics that arise.

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This has been a theme for me for years. I feel that the universe keeps shoving me away from groups, but still I footle around the edges. I may even try to change them. It always ends in tears. There is usually some kind of falling out because I feel constrained by the unspoken rules and hierarchy, and I say something. That need for community has also driven me to allow people to become close to me who are inauthentic in some way, have an agenda. And I can be naïve enough to try to address it with them.

I am trying now to quietly leave religious groupings – and indeed, the world itself - to their own devices. There is an inevitability to the way they are, and they serve a function. Where does that leave me? I have published a book, The Medicine Wheel. It is full of ideas that are worth chewing on, though I say so myself. But to set up a group based around the things I have to say? I recoil at that.

Many of those who wanted to stay in such a group would be doing so on the basis of aligning themselves with my ideas, with various degrees of dogmatism, depending on their (unacknowledged) need for authority. Now there’s nothing wrong with my ideas, I think many of them are pretty good. But my job is to help people align with their own inner guidance, not mine. That is all that real teaching ever is. But the difference is not clear to most members of spiritual groupings. Of course they think their understanding is their own. But it’s not, it’s the teacher’s. If you are outside the group, you can see that.

It's like received opinion everywhere. It’s what makes the world go round. You hear one opinion from someone, and you can usually guess the next dozen. And there’s usually very little point arguing with it, even though I do, because people get their identity from belonging to some sort of ‘right-thinking’ demographic. Here’s a thing, based on my observation: nearly everyone believes what they want to believe about just about everything, and evidence to the contrary makes very little difference. It is almost the human condition itself. As Blake said, “A man convinced against his will, retains the same opinion still.” This is the North of the Medicine Wheel, the Mind, and it comes last because it is so difficult for people. The ‘wanting’ to believe comes from the opposite point, the South, Emotion, and the North can help bring awareness to that.

So I am much more inclined to go for individual interactions. With the best will in the world, a grouping develops a collective mind of its own, with its own unspoken rules of engagement. We all get drawn into that to some extent when we join or when we lead. I am not saying useful stuff does not happen in that context. It is often the first stage for people, and it may go on for years. It certainly did for myself, even though I was always a bit uncomfortable, always aware that the leader needed me to surrender some of my autonomy, though they would never have acknowledged that. Group leaders are usually very unaware of the real nature of their relationship with their students. That is quite a thing to say, but I think it is nevertheless true.

That is not what I am about. The people running such groupings usually have some kind of ambition for themselves (NOT always!) They don’t seem to see anything wrong with that. I have been unfriended and blocked by teachers over this issue. One guy even claimed that personal ambition was validated by the indigenous Mexicans he hangs out with. It that is truly the case, then that indigenous tradition has become degenerate. It is a fundamental issue, and a good teacher will hold you back and help you unravel those different motivations, which I think we all have. I have had the personal ambition painfully pummelled out of me, incrementally, over the last 30 years. The more I move away from the ego paradigm, the more Spirit has the opportunity to send my way the people I can be of use to, which is by no means everyone.

I am moving to this deep place where I sit quietly and let Spirit call the shots. I love it. It is such a relief. You have probably seen this process in me, as I have been writing on this theme, on and off, for years now. Yes, I will talk about my book with people if they want to, I am very happy to. But purely from the angle of how it helps them align with who they are. That mysterious journey, that just gets more mysterious as we get older. This is Robert Johnson’s approach, coming out of his commitment to his inner life. It has been a welcome reminder.

SHAMANISM SAVES THE WORLD!

I've spent the last 18 months writing a fantasy trilogy. A wolf in Victorian dress turned up and suggested it. I'd just finished writing my 1st 2 books, one on the Medicine Wheel and one on astrology. In a sense, these were straightforward, as they involved setting out stuff I'd been thinking and writing about for years. But a novel? I hadn't done that sort of writing before, and surely I didn't have the ability? It has been stop-start, as I have shifted in and out of self-belief. 

One major theme has been a kind of how-to guide to embodied journeying - Shapeshifting - which isn't normally what gets taught, even though as far as I can see it is the most traditional way. Iconoclasm, which is my nature, my edge, always seems to bring me back to tradition in the best sense. Beyond that, I am addressing our great historical divide between Spirit and Reason, God and Lucifer. I want them to shake hands, and it is the Shapeshifters and those who love the Earth who will bring about that reconciliation - which Philip Pullman so noticeably failed to do. Shamanism saves the world!

 

I've just had a 2 and 1/2 month stoppage, at the start of the 3rd volume of the trilogy. I have to be inside one of the central characters to keep the bigger plot going, and I was failing to do that. And what happens then is that I don't have enough meaning in my life, and I start drinking a bottle of wine every other night. Alcohol gets a grip on me nowadays, in a way that it never used to, if I am not creating a story. It is not enough to write shamanic and astrology blogs, which is an important part of what I do. That creative story-telling side of me, which is new, has to be up and running or I drink instead. Alcohol is a powerful and addictive class A drug. I love it, I even have some of my best writing ideas under its influence.

I am still circling around this central character, who is about to go wandering on a Vision Quest in Iceland. This volume is called The Second Coming, and in it the young Messiah lectures people about the horrors of hell, but he gets a hard-on when he does so, and it is visible and embarassing for him, so he has some special underpants made that hide the problem. I am having fun. But it is still a kind of avoidance of the central character, who has much of myself and my own current conflicts and contradictions. Him going on a vision quest will be me going on a vision quest too. This sort of writing is transformative, sometimes it has me weeping.

I didn't do any writing today, because I haven't worked out the next step, and this evening the walls started to crash around me, though I remain off the wine. I have a lot going on inside me, I feel like a pressure cooker sometimes, and I just need someone around to speak it all out too. Which is difficult in my writerly solitude. I am very social as well as requiring solitude, and sometimes it all gets a bit much. I would love to have someone around me enough to talk it all out for at least an hour every day. Which is partly why I am writing this piece late at night. I just want to get it out there, I want to tell you all, I want you to know me, then I hope to have a good night's sleep. Though generally I am happily awake till 3am, and that's another thing 🤣

'ILLIBERAL' SHAMANISM

I have my boys' evening once a week, where we play bridge. I've been doing that for 12 years now. And we sometimes tease each other, and I like that. And we don't talk personally, but the personal is there, you just have to read it. Most of my friends are women, and it's a different dynamic, and I like that too. But anyway, one of the guys was saying last week that he didn't believe in commenting on other religions, for they were none of his business. Very liberal, and I can feel the moralising around that kind of positioning. It's very common, and I do my best not to take up arms against it. I don't think it is honest. We judge, and judging is part of being human. We can pretend we have gone beyond judging, but it is only a pretence. We do judge, and best be honest about it. There is nothing wrong with judging, in fact it is very necessary. It protects us and defines us. Just don't put others down in the process, don't use it as a way of feeling better than them, that is the difficult bit.

So are you going to stand back and not judge a religion that puts a person being tortured to death - the crucifix - at the centre of its cosmology, that is moreover the British state religion? What does that cosmology do to people? What about another religion, Islam, that is now also part of our culture, that puts its women under pressure to mask themselves in public? I have had two quite heated conversations with liberal friends who overlook the religious pressure and insist I am 'telling women what to wear'. They try to put me in the wrong for defending women. In the liberal PC world, what can appear as religious intolerance, with its racist overtones, over-rides gender discrimination.

Anyway, this is a shamanic blog, so what am I talking about this here for? I try not to put my head in my hands about shamanism, because it has become a religion like any other, and why would it not? It is what human collectives do. And they also buy into the collective values of the day.

Shamanism is part of the wider counter-culture that has been around since the 60s. It tends to buy into the shadow side of that culture, demonising money, authority, the political right-wing, science and rationality. I don't think that traditional shamanism would have demonised any of those things. It was an integral part of its societies, it was not in opposition. And nor would it have had a problem with being critical of philosophies and ways of life which were out of balance. I read an account of some Siberian shamans who were fiercely critical of aspects of 'core' shamanism. No liberal 'non-judgmentalism' for them.

I think we have a duty to critique that which we see to be out of balance. I regularly encounter people who are old enough to know better, who oppose me not for the criticisms I make, but for the fact that I am criticising at all, as though this makes me somehow illiberal and intolerant. If people feel offended by criticism of their religion, that is personal to them, and an interesting problem for them to deal with. If I feel offended, I consider it a gift. Life cannot be spent walking on eggshells, or nothing of import will ever get discussed.

Shamanism is not the same as the big organised monotheisms that have arisen in our recent history. There is much to be critical of in these large collective phenomena, not least the tendencies towards dogmatism and exclusive possession of the truth. It is not illiberal to be critical of such tendencies: in fact, it is our duty to be so. As well as any underlying doctrines that set people apart from the natural world.

Shamanism is different to this; we have something of immense value to offer, that served humanity for tens of millennia before the recent large scale religions arrived, and whose truths persist outside of holy books and teachers with allegedly unique divine missions. We feel our belonging to the natural world, that is maybe the main thing that has been lost, for everything comes out of that. We need to differentiate ourselves - as well as acknowledge common ground - or what we have that is of value will not be heard.

DISCERNING MESSAGES FROM SPIRIT

 I had someone tell me last week that a 'shaman' told him as part of a healing session that she'd had a strong message that he should go to Mongolia and be dismembered by a shaman. This guy has no connection to Mongolia. I could spend the next few paragraphs saying why I think this is bullshit.

A few months ago I had another 'shaman' (who trains people in this work) insisting I should de-possess someone, and was I able to see what was going on in this person? More bullshit, this time mixed in with paranoia and self-importance and power-games. I had to tell them to back off and let my spirits decide what they were going to do. And it wasn't de-possession.

Charlatanry like this aside - and these 'shamans' have all the certificates to enable them to practise - I've thought for many years that we need to train ourselves more in bringing discernment to 'messages from Spirit'. I don't expect too much from a lot of our shamanism. It is often low-level stuff, glammed up. You get good stuff going on too, but the group trainings to be ‘practitioners’ also give rise to a lot of nonsense. I think it begins with the teachers. It would not occur to me that I could train a bunch of people to be healers. I just don’t think like that, it seems false to me. I spend time in a natural way with whoever turns up, I love to say yes to that, and if they feel a pull to man the flatpack helpline (as I call it), I’m happy to chew it over with them. But it is for their Spirits to tell them how and when to start doing healing work, not mine. It is a very individual, subtle kind of thing.

 

I also work as an astrologer, and in my writings I sometimes make predictions about the world. It is the same territory. Sometimes I am right, and sometimes I am wrong. Sometimes I get over-excited and get very definite about my predictions. And I can still be wrong. But then I go away and think about it. I'm usually seeing something, but I've got the words wrong. When it's a personal prediction, I will talk in terms of probabilities, and I am always cautious. Such predictions can help point people in a useful direction.

I think it's the same with the direct intuitive stuff we may get when working shamanically. It may not be intuition, it may be your own stuff. Or it may be a mixture of the two. So we need to be cautious and suggestive rather than emphasising that we 'know', as if to affirm our spirit authority. It is easy to confuse feeling with intuition. People want certainty, they want to hear flattering things, and they will pay good money for that. And we want to have something to tell them.

This is a big subject. I often find people do not want to question their 'messages from spirit', and they will try to make them 'right' even when they are not. And I think the trainings can place too much emphasis on trusting what you get from Spirit, at the expense of being discerning. Here are a few things:

(1) Be provisional in what you say, and ask for feedback both at the time and later, and reflect on it. It is not a threat to your authority to qualify what you have said. Rather, the willingness to do so adds to that authority. Personally, I can usually feel it when someone is speaking from intuition. It has a particular power and impersonal quality to it, and I accept that words can't always get it exactly right. And it is usually brief, to the point and practical. I am wary of anything that can't be verified, like past life explanations.

(2) Don’t be in a hurry. I think it’s no bloody good having someone you don’t know in for an hour and expect to be able to ‘heal’ them and give them spirit guidance. Well, needs must, but it is far from ideal. After the initial session, you need to give your spirits time to hang out with that person’s spirits; or, to use another language, you need to let your impressions of that person sink in and alchemise in your unconscious. The better you know someone, the more things will fall into place, and the more useful the guidance you will be able to offer. Shamanism was traditionally a community thing, there would already have been deep connections one way or another with whoever came your way. This semi-anonymous professional thing we often do is alien to Shamanism.

 (3) What you say will probably be a mix of intuition – direct spirit message – and your own perceptions. Where one ends and the other begins isn’t so obvious, and it probably doesn’t matter, because these things aren’t separate anyway. Jung talked about intuition as a knowing for which we have no evidence, it comes in from somewhere else. The main thing here is to prepare and purify yourself, and that takes years. (I also ensure I don’t drink alcohol the night before.) We need to be a ‘hollow bone’ so that Spirit can speak in an unalloyed way through us. Sometimes people will do good work even if they are not truly ready, but it will be hit or miss, for they will fuck up also at other times, and probably won’t admit it. We’ve probably all met healers like that. There is no hurry to be doing this work.

 It is a deep thing and a subtle thing to speak from Spirit, hit or miss isn’t good enough. We generally need to sit quietly for quite some time for the Spirit to speak, and that is after the years of personal preparation. Intuition is a mysterious thing, a sacred thing, it is given to us, it is the East of the Medicine Wheel, and it is rarely what we think. One of its hallmarks can be that jolt of realisation that it is not something you would have thought of. And sometimes we will get nothing. Trust that too.

I think a good parallel is the writing of poetry. A poet will often spend a long time working on a poem. They have seen something, and they come to know what they have seen though sitting with it and getting the words exactly right. We may not have the time for that, or the gift with words. But there is something important in it nonetheless about honing our experience, separating all the bits out, and being true to its complexity and subtlety. If you are more visual, you could also think of it as an artist working on a painting, and the training they give themselves in simply looking. 

JORDAN PETERSON and THE SPIRITS

I spend several hours a week watching Jordan Peterson. This week, it's an interview with a repentant ex-Mafia boss from New York. There's so much I get from watching the way Peterson thinks, and the open and accepting, yet sharply discerning way, he relates to his interviewees. And the sheer amount of evidence he has to back up what he says. 

 

And yet there's something in me left unsatisfied. I try to rule envy out, because I'll never have the intellectual fireworks that he has to hand. Envy, as Peterson points out, is the first sin in the Bible (Cain and Abel), and it's often what I think of when I see people criticising eminent people, when their criticisms seem to me superficial. It's like, get down to it, do your work, don't just take down others who have done their own work over decades. Don't fault-find just to make yourself feel OK about yourself and your anti-establishment stance . Appreciate these guys, make a practice of it. 

 

I haven't quite nailed it yet with Peterson. Maybe I approached it today when he was talking about getting every area of your house sorted in the way you want it, or it won't feel like home. I appreciate the sensibility behind that. And yet... you have to leave some room for chaos (which he makes a thing of)... you have to leave a place for the spirits to make their own, outside of your intervention. That just seems like respectfulness to me. I couldn't live in a house where everything had been deliberated on. I would feel trapped. 

 

There is something about surrendering to the universe, to the cosmos, to the mysterious Great Spirit, which I don't feel that Jordan can quite do. I feel that he wants to, but his way is to rehabilitate Christianity and the Bible. Don't get me wrong, he pulls up some profound stuff when he does that. But it's like, as a rational academic, he is reaching after faith while trying to keep it respectable. He wants to have his cake and eat it, and you can't do that. There is a point at which you have to chuck Science overboard and just surrender to the mystery that is the universe. 

 

I think it is telling that he won't criticise Christianity - a religion that puts the figure of a tortured human being at the centre of its story. That is not OK, it is really not OK, and sure you can draw stuff about suffering and the shadow from it, as Peterson does, but really it's not a good starting point in the quest for a meaningful life. 

 

This is why I am Shamanic, in the sense of attempting to recapture the attitude of early peoples towards life, which is pretty universal, and which therefore gives me grounds to trust it. The starting point of indigeneity, as far as I can ascertain, is that we are a part of the natural world, that the natural world is alive at all points, that she takes care of us, and that our purpose is to live in balance with her. That just seems really right to me, it is where I can breathe. 

 

Something else I appreciate about Jordan is his acceptance of humanity as it is, it's like we are technological and urban and use lots of energy, so how do we live within that, and what are the pragmatic solutions to our problems? Too often, it seems, shamanic people take up an oppositional attitude, like there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we live, and we need to get back to something more like our fantasy of the Garden of Eden. Well that just isn't going to happen, and there is no point speculating about what might be, because humanity is going to do what it is going to do, and that is almost certainly high tech, in fact that is where part of our genius lies, so let us work within that. That is very much Jordan Peterson's attitude. 

 

Something else I like about Peterson is his political conservatism. Before I lose you, let me just remind you about the Shamanic quest for tradition, that gets taken to ridiculous lengths sometimes, with people scrabbling around in the scraps of the past, looking for a 'Celtic' tradition that they can identify with; or putting jobbing healers from South America on a pedestal because they come from a long tradition. We long for tradition, and we venerate people who appear to carry it. Just look what happens when an 'indigenous' person walks into the room, it's like the Pope has turned up. 

 

Politically, most Shamanic people belong to the liberal consensus. But in our heart of hearts, we long for tradition. That seems so obvious to me that I don't mind being called out for speaking for others. And of course most people will say they appreciate tradition, but stand apart too and have their own take. That is largely bollocks. It's like the Americans who are proudly Republican, yet go into full-on celebrity mode as soon as a member of the British Royal family turns up. Think Diana. 

 

I have stepped outside most of this. That is quite a claim to make. But I have spent over 40 years engaging with traditions - Buddhist, astrological, shamanic - and that engagement has kept forcing me towards the guidance from within, that is outside of any tradition. As I say, nearly everyone will claim that is what they are doing too, but I look slightly askance at that, for it is generally something that has to be earned, incrementally, over a lifetime, and not many people get there. But it is the best of aspirations, and I appreciate that in people. 

 

But precisely because I have earned my way out of traditions, I appreciate them too. There are depths of meaning woven into them than I can never have, coming from a culture that, uniquely, has no extant spiritual traditions. We need traditions and even rules. Without them, we would come apart psychologically. We need shared beliefs. We saw under Covid the way people get scared and will follow rules - or mindlessly rebel against them. I had my own mindless rebellion against masks to get through, this is all work in progress for me. 

 

So, back to Jordan, it seems to me that he is reaching after tradition; for all his brilliance, he yearns for a sense of something ancient and outside of himself to tell him who he is. That is why he puts such effort into trying to rehabilitate Christianity, and why he refuses to criticise it. And why he sets such a premium on orderliness in his own life. He can't fully let go. And that is a big ask. It is the 'hollow bone' thing. We need to keep aspiring to it. 

 

Abandon all personal plans and ambitions, and allow Spirit to put life your way. Trust what is happening, and trust what isn't happening. Jordan is furiously sharp and intellectual, and I love that. But he also needs to drop it, and just be a mess too. I think that is what I would like to see in him. Maybe the serious illnesses he and most of his family went through in recent years points to that also. But look up the Peterson podcast on youtube. There is a lot to be gained from it. He will show you the way out of much of modern groupthink, including wokeness (rooted in what he calls 'narcissistic compassion') and apocalyptic environmentalism. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzKM-VwriK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzKM-VwriK0

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION?

I recently wrote a slightly polemical piece titled 'Reinventing the Wheel' for the current issue of Indie Shaman Magazine (see pic below) launching my book The Medicine Wheel. Here it is :)

A book by a European on the Native American Medicine Wheel? Is that not cultural appropriation: an act of theft from a colonised people, by a member of the dominant culture? It would probably depend on which Native American you asked. I have been in Sweatlodges run by Native Americans which, rightly, you wouldn’t dream of trying replicate yourself. And one by a woman from a Lakota reservation who wanted us all to head out and lead lodges ourselves. She even suggested that it was a male thing to be hidebound and exclusive about tradition. She claimed to have brought a spirit for the lodge over from America in her handbag. What shone through was her compassion and generosity of spirit.

There is no final answer to this question. There are good points on both sides. It is certainly appropriation, or worse, to claim to represent a tradition of which you are not part. On the other hand, people have always borrowed and re-invented. Our creativity in this respect is fundamental to who we are, and it is not something you can put a stop to without truncating human nature.

I found myself in a limbo for some years on this matter. I could see the depth that comes from an old tradition, that has woven in layers of symbolism and meaning over the centuries, or even millennia. I knew I could never be part of those traditions. So where did that leave me, a member of probably the first society in history not to have extant traditions?

 

It left me free, I ultimately concluded. Free in a way that many indigenous people are probably not, with their commitment to doing things in the ways they have always been done.

In the Buddhist tradition, one of the fetters to insight is reliance on teachings and ceremonies as ends in themselves. It is a natural human tendency to mistake words for realities. It is much harder work to hold them lightly and see what it is they are pointing to. It requires courage, too, for there will always be people who see thoughtfulness about tradition as a betrayal, as showing a lack of respect.

Teachings such as the Medicine Wheel, and ceremonies such as the Sweatlodge, can be helpful to us in our non-traditional societies. That is all that matters. Jim Tree, a Cherokee who wrote The Way of the Sacred Pipe, says (p15): “If it’s real, it works; if it works, it’s real.”

So, grasping the freedom I had claimed for myself, I wrote a book on the Medicine Wheel. I made it clear from the outset that I was in no way claiming to represent any Native American tradition.

There is no single Medicine Wheel. There are dozens of them, each with their own traditional teachings. I used the one that just happened to have come my way. I learnt about it from a non-traditional teacher. But most of what I have to say comes from my own reflections. I made my own connections with the Directions and Elements of the Wheel, coming from my personal experience.

This is what we need to do with any teaching in order to fully understand it. Having reflected on and practised it on its own terms – and that may take some years – we can increasingly make our own connections and contributions. For the spirit to unfold deeply, we need to find our own unique bearings in relation to the teachings and ceremonies, and be willing to re-invent: advisedly, for it is a right that needs to be earned.

This is where religion ends and what you might call spirituality begins. Religion is for the majority, and always will be. It serves a purpose, providing authority (that is often what ‘elders’ and ‘lineage’ really mean), and a fairly simple set of beliefs and practices that come to be seen as sacred.

Our modern shamanic world functions for the most part as religion. I think it is best to accept that as inevitable and probably necessary, rather than railing against it, while at the same time not neglecting to keep up our prodding of its sacred cows. Like the way people act differently when an indigenous person enters the room, as though the Pope has walked in. No disrespect intended, but humour is probably the best approach.

The Medicine Wheel provides a way of understanding ourselves and the universe, using the four Directions, and the four Elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air. This is straightaway empowering, because it is within our immediate experience. We have been taught to believe that an understanding of the universe is in the hands of scientists, using equations that most of us do not have a hope of grasping. It is not that the scientists are wrong, but there is more than one way of seeing and comprehending anything. Sun, Soil, Rain and Wind: what could be more immediate than that?

In my book, I place most emphasis on the four Elements, because we have a similar understanding of them in the western esoteric tradition, which goes back a long way. They are something we understand already, whether or not we are conscious of that. They align well too with Carl Jung’s personality traits of Intuition, Feeling, Sensation and Thinking: Fire, Water, Earth and Air, respectively. The Elements are used in a similar way in astrology, the stories from the sky spirits.

For us moderns, the individual tends to be seen as autonomous, and our path is towards wholeness. For an indigenous person, the individual is seen as relational, and there is no path, rather an ongoing requirement to live in balance with the world. The Medicine Wheel shows us how to live in balance, though it can also be used within our paradigm of wholeness.

Our modern world is linear. We are always going somewhere, we have plans and things to achieve, which we formulate with reason. The world of the Medicine Wheel is very different. It is the spirit that speaks to us and guides us, there is nowhere to go, for it is how we live that matters. There is serious effort to be made, but it is more to do with integrity in the moment, than in trying to re-shape the world.

With its emphasis on the Elements, the Medicine Wheel reminds us that we are part of the natural world, for we are nothing but those elements – elements that are alive and inspirited. It is a corrective to the Great Forgetting: the 3000 year period, from the ancient Greeks onwards, in which we in the West have gradually come to feel ourselves as separate to the natural world.

There are many ways in which the Wheel can be used: psychologically, philosophically, ceremonially, divinatorily. I will conclude with a brief description of how the Four Elements relate to personal psychological experience. Each Direction has many correspondences, the Elements being just one of them, for between them they describe the whole of life. This includes the journey from birth (East) round to old age (North).

East/Fire – Initiation

Life is continually renewing and unfolding. If we block that process, we may get ill. At what points in your life did a new element enter your consciousness, that eventually changed everything? What were the natures of those elements? Were they also times of difficulty and crisis?

South/Water – The Close-to Place

This is where we pay attention to ourselves, to our hearts, to what we are feeling in the moment. This can in some ways be the hardest, yet most transformative place on the Wheel. The dis-identified attention itself is enough. Living at the coal-face of who we are. The inspirational energies of the East provide the vision for the transformation.

West/Earth – Incarnation

We are here to bring spirit into matter, to embody. Life needs to be fully engaged with, to be lived. The worldly is the spiritual, they are not separate. This is the place where we dream, and where we engage in Ceremony, whose purpose is to remind us, in our busy everyday lives, of the primacy of the spirit.

North/Air – Two-Eyed Seeing

Two-Eyed seeing is a modern Native American concept that refers to the ability, in the first instance, to appreciate the value of both traditional and modern forms of healing, without one criticising the other. This quality of disinterest – which doesn’t mean lack of engagement – is the essential quality of the North/Air. It is what our minds are really for. Though a simple idea, most people find it very difficult: we generally only know how to believe what we want to believe. That is why the North is also the place of the Elder.

Directions provide orientation when we are lost. If your life isn’t working, check-in that the Directions are in balance. In the modern world, we have a psychotherapeutic paradigm that attributes dysfunctions to childhood conditions. An indigenous perspective is that the spirit of eg anxiety has come to visit us, it is not part of us, but we need to get to know it and form a relationship. And use the Medicine Wheel to ask in what way this spirit is an expression of imbalance, and what Directions/Elements need to be cultivated? Maybe more trust in life, a quality of the South, is needed. In this way our sufferings bring us to a deeper point of balance, both within ourselves and in relation to the world.