SPIRIT PLAY

Don't take your spirits too seriously. That is religion. You don't need to know what they look like, what they are. They show up in a light sort of way, sort of sideways on, not through any kind of demand. They are happy to dance around your life. But they are nevertheless powerful. They are involved in the main currents of your life, and they can be sensed.

Our modern wisdom is literal: we want to know who our spirit guides are, and almost what they have for breakfast. But it isn't like that. The spirits are very real, they can be experienced as more so than this everyday world. And that is because they are very real: this world is a pale reflection of how things are, as Plato's Cave illustrates. The spirits are real in the way that powerful dreams are real. And we always have a choice about how much attention we pay to them.

So there is a dance to be done. Don't get too religious about this thing. We will forget about the spirits, and we will forget about the natural world, because we are human. We need to forgive ourselves for being human.

There is always that wider pattern at work, for which the spirits are intermediary. Don't think that anything major happens in your life without that decisive influence. It is reassuring: we can trust there is something in it for us, that we are taken care of, even if it is bitter.

Trust what is not happening in your life, as well as what is happening. You may have notions about what you want to be happening, or that you think ought to be happening. But that is a merely human perspective, which is a tiny slice of how things are. Have patience, for there is often a deeper alchemy at work that takes time. Let Spirit hold your hand, and feel her presence as you make your choices. Choose gladly that which you have to do.

NOT A TALKING HEAD

I've recently created a video course for Watkins Books, as a companion to my book The Medicine Wheel. There are 11 sessions, and I had a fun time doing it: it brings something out in me that writing alone cannot. I think you'll find my style engaging: it's more enthusiastic fireside chat than polished talking head 🤣

 The intro is free and you can find it here

 The course itself can be found here.

 

While you are about it, I did a talk with Aquarius Severn Astrology group in early October, and you can find that here.

 

Happy Watching!

CRAZY SHAMANS and THE MADNESS OF CROWDS

Who am I to criticise anyone's crazy beliefs, when I talk to rocks, leave offerings for fairies and seek guidance from imaginary animal friends? But I think Shamanism does for that reason teach us to hang loose to all beliefs, especially those rigid ones that ironically stop our vast collectives from going completely insane. It used to be religious beliefs, nowadays scientific and political beliefs are used in the same rigid way.

 

We don't really know anything about the important stuff, like where the universe came from, who we are and why we're here, how life started..... we console ourselves with the idea that science will one day tell us, or maybe God is the one who has the answers.

 

Embracing the uncertainty is the way to go. But that isn't an intellectual position. It's about spending years doing the spade work so that you can tolerate yourself. Then there becomes no need to cling convulsively to those collective beliefs and the massive sense of authority behind them. It becomes natural to be open and fluid. And here's a thing: it means you can afford to think honestly and logically, because you no longer have anything to lose by doing so.

A SHAMANIC MANIFESTO

“God is Dead,” declared Nietzsche over 100 years ago. Who is this God who has died - or who, rather, according to Nietzsche - we killed? I think he was the corrupt invention of a desperate people.

 

It goes this way. The Great Spirit is everywhere in nature. All is sacred. This is the universal experience of early peoples. It is how things are, and far older than God, the new kid on the block. The Jews, a slave race, flee the Pharoah, and spend years wandering in the desert wilderness: this is the book of Exodus. They have fled a tyrant, but tyranny is what is familiar to them. And so, in the absence of a tyrannical worldly ruler, they create a tyrannical Otherworldly ruler. It is the psychology by which adults replicate painful family situations from childhood, because that is what they know.

 

This tyrannical God is abstracted from the natural world, he dominates it from above. The Jews were living in a harsh, unforgiving reality in which the people's survival was at stake if they did not follow strict codes of behaviour. So there was a practical as well as a psychological reason for an authoritarian God. He is for the same reason jealous of the pagan god Baal. What eventually arose were the monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which treat the Old Testament as a holy book.

There is, of course, the New Testament, which has a less authoritarian flavour. But even there, right at the start, you have Jesus saying you can only reach God through him. So it is there also. Christianity hit the big time when the Roman Empire, which needed an authoritarian religion to unite it, adopted it. And the rest is history: crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings and so on.

It has been said that monotheisms are desert religions, because their context is just one reality: the desert and the sky. In a jungle, by contrast, there are many realities, which therefore lends itself to polytheisms. Lots of spirit animals! It is why you got saints as Christianity spread beyond the desert.

So good riddance to God and his authoritarian ways. It has left the western world floundering in a sea of uncertainties. Politics has taken its place. Extreme right and left wing politics are a substitute for religion: they give the sense of certainty and belonging, and the prospect of redemption, that religion once provided. We see it too in the causes that young people take up - it is natural to them to do so - but with a religious dogmatism that brooks no disagreement. You are, for example, quickly labelled a 'climate denier' or a 'transphobe' if you question the mainstream narratives around climate and gender. People get 'cancelled'.

Into this brew walks Shamanism, which represents a return to that which was universally true before the corruption of the monotheisms. Shamanism is not true in a rigid sense: it has no holy books or founders. It is nevertheless perfectly possible to become authoritarian about it: you see that on the internet, where some people are quick to correct others about what shamanism is and isn’t. That is just a power thing, that is people wanting to stand above others, and there will always be people like that. You can learn a lot by watching them.

Shamanism, in a way, begins and ends with the experience of the natural world. In that is everything you will ever need to know, but you have to find it for yourself. We are a part of nature, neither above it (as God would have us believe) nor below it, a kind of plague (as many environmentalists would have us believe). The latter is an example of what Jung called enantiodroma, in which one switches to the psychological opposite: from above nature to below nature.

 

For the Chippewa Cree, we do indeed have a special place: the new-born ones, because we are the only animal that does not know who it is. And so we can learn to know who we are by observing nature – as part of it, not as separate to it – for animals and plants and rocks and streams all know who and what they are, and get on with it.

The loss of our traditional religion has been a mixed thing, and its influence persists: in, for example the scientific quest for truth, with its unspoken implication that the truth will redeem us. It is this passion that drives research scientists. It will indeed redeem us, but not very much if we are using the narrow scientific definition of truth alone. I think the hatred of humanity often found within environmentalism has reverberations of Original Sin, in this case our sin against the Mother, the Earth, for which we must pay by dismantling our whole way of life. I think it is important to look at the mythological roots of what drives us.

The collective needs a new mythology to live by, or it will continue to treat politics as religion, as a philosophy that can set us free. We saw how disastrous that was with Communism. (The far right is as nothing compared to the far left when it comes to mass murder.) We can only ever free ourselves individually. Trying to change the world is usually an avoidance of the responsibility we have for our own souls.

Whether our huge modern collectives of people can have a mythology that is not to some degree authoritarian and crazed is something to which I do not know the answer. When there are fewer people, a tribe can govern itself more through relationships than rules. And that keeps things human, and keeps the mythologies softer. Most people will always want a simple belief of some sort about the universe and how it came to be; you need people who are listened to who can dance around that, in the knowledge that really we know nothing about how the universe came to be, and never will. The healers and medicine people, if you like. Or, in our context, the poets.

I think Shamanism does provide the necessary basis for any society to be healthy. The modern world needs Shamanism. We have a big mission on our hands, we have a whole world to convert! But I don’t mean that evangelically. It is more like a spirit we can convey in a natural kind of way, without actually trying to, simply by being ourselves, and letting people come our way rather than seeking them out.

We do nevertheless have some ideas to convey: for example, that the whole world is alive, inspirited, and why would it not be? That we belong intimately to the natural world, there is nothing in us that is outside of that. And the simple, but world-transforming, idea of regularly expressing gratitude to the earth for her bounty.

THE BATHROOM SWEATLODGE

The purpose of the heat in.a Sweatlodge is to melt you out of your rational mind, and into your heart. Failing that, I find a hot bath helps. One that is sufficiently hot that it takes a while to get into. And you just lie there and let the heat have its way. Occasionally hold the back of your head under the water so your brain gets it too. It will set you up for the evening, bring you close to yourself, which is what we are really seeking when we reach for the alcohol, or whatever our self-medication is. Just before bed is good for deep sleep. Just before work in the morning may not be so good: the left-brain has its claims and its uses. 

 

 

Above is the view over Moretonhampstead and Dartmoor from my bathroom window.