BELIEFS (Part II)

Maybe the subject of beliefs doesn't appear to have a lot to do with Shamanism, but for me and my temperament, it is quite central. As I said in my last piece, if you want to be a hollow bone for Spirit, you need a pliable ego that can get out of the way when necessary.

Beliefs about ourselves and about the world are a large part of what gives us our identity/ego, and if they are rigid - which they usually are, to a considerable extent - then they stand in the way of Spirit. The Medicine person understands that everything is the Great Mystery, that really we know nothing, and that all beliefs are just stories we use to orient and reassure ourselves in the face of the potentially terrifying uncertainty of the universe.

My experience of people is that for the most part they will hang on hard to their beliefs about just about everything in the face of evidence to the contrary. Human beings rational and reasonable? You must be joking 🤣

I was lying in bed this morning, thinking about the deliberate way I have changed some of my beliefs in recent years. Usually I see the glass-half-empty side of that, in that it puts me at odds with many people I know, who share certain basic beliefs: this collective aspect adds to the existential security the beliefs give. But then I thought I should give myself serious credit for what I have done. I have been diligent in putting credible evidence over what I might prefer to believe, and it has changed me profoundly.

Here are the 5 main beliefs/attitudes I identified that I have deliberately changed:

(1) 10 years ago, after some intuitive guidance from a friend, I decided to stop being automatically cynical about the motives of people in authority or who had achieved success/prominence. It had been self-serving of me, and I immediately felt more at ease with who I was, and able to give credit where credit was due.

This more human view of those with power makes it harder to believe theories that suggest they are acting in secretive, organised and deliberately malign ways against us. These type of theories are, unfortunately, very important to quite a large proportion of people in the shamanic world, as the pandemic showed very clearly.

And then in the last few years:

(2) I extended that generosity to Tory politicians. I was part of a collective default assumption that they are all heartless and purely self-interested. It was a matter of integrity that I should stop doing this to people I had not met and did not know. I am now able to appreciate their values in a more balanced way.

(3) Pessimism and judgement about humanity and its future. This was another collective belief that I had become trapped in. Books by Michael Schellenberger, Marion Tupy, Bjorn Lomborg and Alex Epstein, all based in publicly available research findings, helped me find my way out, by pointing out the good things that are also going on, such as the unprecedented numbers of people coming out of poverty as capitalism and industrialisation spread; and the greening of the earth as CO2 levels rise. There are of course many problems to address, and always will be, but I am now basically optimistic about the future of humanity.

(4) Apocalyptic environmentalism and its threat of human extinction. The main issue here is rising CO2, and there are many scientific models as to what could happen, not just the one that politicians have seized on. I am now very relaxed about climate change, I think it might even turn out to be an overall good as nature flourishes.

(5) After reading The Nurture Assumption, by Judith Rich Harris, I was persuaded by her viewpoint that we are far less shaped by our parents than we are usually led to believe. Again, her findings are all based on publicly available research papers. I have had to sit with this idea to truly believe it, because the conventional view went to the root of how I understood myself. Now, instead, I am more agnostic about who I am. Like everyone, I have certain troublesome aspects to live with, and beyond that I do not know. There is a freedom in that, an owning of myself. And it also brings me closer to the indigenous attitude that these troublesome aspects are not essential to us, but visiting spirits that we need to get to know.

I have become very aware of some of the default, collective beliefs within the counter-culture, and that I have stepped outside of a number of them. So I guess I find myself in a bit of a strange position, having a shamanic blog where my basic beliefs perhaps run contrary to many of its readers. On the other hand, having shared unexamined collective beliefs is a hallmark of religion, which is inevitably the norm in group situations: I am aware that I am largely from outside that paradigm, and hopefully an irritant to it :)