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