THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS

THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS

Part 1

A Shift in Authority

I want to say something about the shamanic illness, that phenomenon amongst the Shamans from the remote cultures of the Far East, and how that relates to us, what it’s really about. And this is in the spirit of Chaos Shamanism, where we are always asking that kind of question, instead of being overwhelmed by the exotic and foreign nature of these things and maybe bowing down before that. They are humans just like us, and we can always find a reference point in our own experience.

The way it's put, is that the young person who's supposed to become a shaman, he gets ill, because he's trying to be like an ordinary guy, and the spirits come knocking, like the dark stranger in the middle of the night come to tell you your Fate. And they go, “You got to be a Healer”, as well as everything else you do. Because in those cultures, it's not like you become the holy man and you get paid to do it. No, you still have your ordinary life to fulfil, and then you have these duties on top, and people don't necessarily want that.

But also I think it’s more than that. It can be deeply scary, and they're comfortable with who they are, they're comfortable with who they've been brought up to be, because they're being taken outside the sort of collective norms, the collective rules, the collective way of seeing things. That's how humanity works. It's important to recognize that we all think we're individuals with free minds and all the rest of it, but actually we're not. We go along with the collective norms and the collective way of seeing things, and we call that being reasonable. We think we have thought it all through, but we have all our beliefs for emotional, not rational, reasons, and they are given to us with a lot of authority.

And we believe that authority. It was interesting during lockdown, watching people's responses. Most people, they just buckled down immediately, and they believed that there was this really dangerous disease, they really did believe it. I'm not saying they're wrong, but they believed it purely because they'd been told it. I was more skeptical about it, I thought it was unnecessary. And then you saw people in in the opposite extreme, reacting against it, rebelling against it, and coming up with wild theories about secret agendas. That was no better, and was quite characteristic of the ‘alternative’ culture, with its frequent paranoia about authority.

I was a bit rebellious about masks myself, even at my advanced age, and I recognised that, and I just had to get over myself, though it took about 6 months! So there was a bit of self-knowledge for me.

So it was it was fascinating watching the collective at work, you can really learn something about collective humanity at such times.

We see it also with the whole net zero carbon thing. Without going into the rights and wrongs of that, you see how the collective has been persuaded into this kind of emergency apocalyptic thinking. People tend to bow down before politicians claiming the authority of science, and it is not hard for politicians to herd scientists along the lines they need them to go, they are not usually a very courageous bunch.

So it's not very difficult to whip the collective into a sense of crisis. Back in the day, it was the nuclear weapons crisis, then it became the environmental crisis. After that, Covid was the crisis for a bit, and now we’re back to the environment. But now there's the potential AI crisis that might end the world, or so we are told.

I suppose it gives a point of certainty or something, and a sense of right against wrong, something like that. As I said, it's not hard to create these crises in our huge collectives, it’s almost like a virus going round.

So that's the perennial collective mindset, and when you get onto this shamanic path you're stepping outside of it: the Spirits become your authority, your guidance, instead of the collective beliefs.

But it’s usually a process. and quite often what we do is we step outside of that collective mindset into another collective mindset, it’s kind of inevitable. You know, we loosen up a bit, there’s something new in us that we’re listening to, but we don’t fully trust our own guidance from within yet, we look to teachers and traditions, and we accept their authority, and that is natural. But it is limited.

What the Spirits want is for you to trust them fully and implicitly, because they ARE you in a broader sense. But that takes time, it is a lifetime’s work, probably! It is a huge shift, a deep shift. They want you to leave that group mindset behind, not by being anti-it, which often is also a temporary part of the path, a phase, but by living quietly alongside it, probably putting your head in your hands at the nonsense that goes on, but in a sympathetic way, and spreading a bit of that Spirit perspective where you can.

It was certainly gradual for me. And there were crises too, that only resolved by throwing off more of the collective mindset. These personal crises are common, and they bring us back to the Shamanic Illness, because a crisis is what it is.

We don't necessarily want to go there, we want the security, we want the certainty of that previous way of being. It can be a case of better the devil you know. We might be miserable, but at least it’s a familiar misery, we know what’s what. That in a in a way sums up why the shamanic illness occurs: better the devil you know!

So the young Shaman to be, they get ill and it may be an illness that is very hard to diagnose, a strange illness. Now we know that nowadays, don't we, all these all these strange illnesses?

But we'll come back to that. It's not until he accepts the Spirits into his life, that he becomes well again. I'm sure it doesn't happen for all of them like that, or necessarily even for most of them. Some of us are only too happy to accept the Spirits into our lives, because we can find the collective values stifling, we can't breathe. It's like oh I can breathe at last, yeah I bloody will do that, I'll accept this vocation, it gives life, it gives meaning, it gives it depth, it gives all of those things.

So your point of authority is shifting, you no longer look to the rules and norms of the society around you, you look to what Spirit's telling you. Now they're not necessarily contradictory, and in a reasonably healthy society they're not going to be too contradictory, we can do both.

In our counter-culture it can be almost a point of honour to be in an oppositional mode, to be anti-establishment, and certainly anti-Tory. But if you if you look at a traditional culture, a shamanic culture, you don't read stories of the shaman being in opposition to the political leaders, like he knows better. Well maybe he does know better in some ways, but he'd be diplomatic about it, the Spirits will tell him stuff, and there’s a good chance the political leaders will listen to that coming from him. They'd be working together, they wouldn't be in opposition like we so often put ourselves. It is so wrong-headed to be taking political sides, as we often do, and effectively setting ourselves against half the population. Our calling is to go beyond that polarised way of being in the world.

So the Shamans have their own otherworldly authority, Spirit speaking through them, and yet they're integrated with normal life. And that's what we need we need to do. As long as we feel ourselves to be in opposition to society and the way it works in that fundamental kind of way, I think we’re in a kind of spiritual bypass. I think it says something about ourselves, I don't think it says something about our insight: I think it says that we're not bringing Spirit into matter, we are floating above the fray.

Of course society will always need tweaking, but you need to go with it and tweak it, not just sit there in opposition and glue yourself to pavements or whatever, that doesn't achieve anything. You need to work with the culture you are part of, create something, build something. That's because Spirit isn't just about us, Spirit wants to be expressed and do good within society, so we need to be part of that Society.

OK, so I haven't got that far into the shamanic illness. I wanted firstly to make the important point about the locus of authority in one’s life changing, and the implications of that, because it has a lot of bearing on why the Shaman gets ill in the first place. So let’s head directly in again. We do get the equivalent in our society of this kind of calling with people getting ill with lots things like ME, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple allergies, fibromyalgia, all these sorts of gradual diseases that can be debilitating, that are quite hard to diagnose, quite hard to prove they're even there, medically.

This can be very distressing, because they just get called just psychological. And we go no no no it's not psychological, it's real. Well actually, it's both, but of course ‘it's psychological’ suggests you are malingering. Psyche means the soul, logos means the word, so psychology is the word of the soul, it's your soul speaking, saying I'm ill, I am out of balance. All diseases are psychological, but we have this connotation of it's just in your mind, you're malingering. This is because we see the mind and body as separate, in the same way that Christianity saw Spirit and the body as separate, and its offspring science translated that into mind and body are separate. So no, these illnesses are real, but like all illnesses, they're also the soul.

TRANSMISSION and TRADITION

Chaos Shamanism sounds like the opposite of tradition. In fact it's the most traditional of all, because what is tradition? It's a means of fostering, of nourishing, of creating a spirit within the human being in which we're aligned with ourselves, aligned with our own nature, which is the nature of the world. There's no split between us and the world outside. The purpose of any spiritual practice anywhere is becoming aligned with that whole. When I use the term Chaos Shamanism I'm going straight to that alignment.

I talked about transmission before, it is in a sense a sort of osmosis of that deeper alignment from one being to another. One person's open and they receive it: one tree sees the other tree is flowering, covered in beautiful blossoms, and the perfume carries over and inspires the first tree to flower too. I think that’s a much better way of putting it!

There's a book called The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur which I highly recommend. He talks about almost like this sacred tradition, or the perennial tradition, which is about a passing down of this fire from generation to generation. You see it in the culture at large through the western esoteric tradition, which existed, often in secret, alongside Christianity. Magical traditions, astrology, alchemy. You also see it in its own way in the shamanic families out in Mongolia or Siberia or wherever, where there's Spirits belonging to certain families and it's like that fire is passed down, it's shared, it's kind of transpersonal as well as personal, to use our terminology.

That is the real transmission, that is what really keeps a tradition alive, because it IS the tradition in its deepest sense, and it is a universal. A tradition will die with just its outward forms.

So in the modern West, we have no widely accepted traditions, we have no forms that go way back, that have that kind of deep resonance, and sense of being embedded in who we are. You can see people’s longing for it, in the way they will sometimes hang on to every word and every scrap of ritual from a representative of say a Mexican shaman, or pay good money for an online initiation into Mongolian teachings they have to keep secret. Or the attempts to create a ‘Celtic Shamanism’, when all we have is scraps from what was effectively a foreign culture, even if we are genetically related to them.

Be done with it all I say. It’s a poverty mentality. Don’t give your power away to indigenous shamans, we have the power just as much as they do, if we are prepared to put in the work. And don’t scrabble around in Celtic fantasies, in the delusion that you are creating a tradition. Own what you have now, the modern western person that you are. But borrow shamelessly, just like Shakespeare did.

We can borrow forms, like Chaos Magic borrows forms to create their ceremonies. We can borrow forms to help recreate that inner alignment, to help promote it. We can pick and choose, but not in a superficial way, we choose according to where we're genuinely called. We sit with it, we see where we need to go. But it takes time, it's not just of the moment, not just, oh today I feel like this and tomorrow I feel like the other, like you see some people playing around with their identity.

Identity isn’t such a big deal, by the way, it’s a shakey, temporary thing, that is as much decided by other people as it is by us. Indigenous people, who see the self as more relational than we do, would understand this.

So it's deeper than that, these enduring interests. I have an enduring interest and draw towards the Native American Medicine Wheel – for which I have a Chaos idea, but more later - and that speaks to me, so much so that I have written a book on it. So you can be firmly drawn towards certain practices. I'm drawn towards the Far Eastern Shamanism as well, I don't know anything about it but when I see them dancing it's like ah! Because they dance their what we call Journeys, and it's how I work. It's the same kind of inner thing there. Also for me there is astrology, it’s like it is in my bones. And it has a connection with the Medicine Wheel through the 4 elements, which are used in similar ways.

So that's a bit about transmission and the real tradition, the perennial tradition. What we're doing with Chaos Shamanism is we're re-encountering the real, universal tradition. We have the freedom to do so because we're not beholden to all these different ways, valuable as they are, great as it is when a whole community finds its meaning within those forms.

We're somewhere else, and the great opportunity is to seize hold of the essence. We can keep seizing hold of the essence because there's no one stopping us. Well, there's people who attempt to and there always will be, there's people who say you're not allowed to do this practice, you're not allowed to do that, you're not allowed to do the other without this whole list of permissions, or it's deeply disrespectful and cultural appropriation if you even go near it. There's always be these voices going who are you to do this. That keys into our own self-doubt. And of course it plays into the woke guilt, that we are the historical oppressors and we must walk on eggshells around indigenous people and be super-respectful. I am sure a lot of them laugh at us for this. It’s so weak, so life-denying.

So I just say fuck all that, and excuse my French. And my spirit animal says so too, so there! You just have to have the chutzpah, the hubris, the impudence to head out and run a sweatlodge or whatever, when you’ve maybe only been in a sweatlodge once, and you’ve hardly got a clue, but you’ve got a few basics, and you know it did you good. And if you are proper and respectful and go on a twenty-year training instead – and I am not speaking against that – then all those people in your area will not benefit from sweatlodges. Think about it like that. Or Pipe Ceremonies, or Journeying, or Trance Dances or whatever. But for heaven’s sake don’t create an identity out of it, or you’ll do as much harm, without knowing it, as good. A lot of that goes on. Just stay equal to people, and let them see your vulnerabilities, specifically, and that will help keep you in a good place.

The Dalai Lama, he’s known for handing out all these initiations, he'll hand them out to a whole crowd of people. They are initiations into these kinds of inner energies. They have all sorts of different ones in the Tibetan tradition, all these different bodhisattvas, all these different forms that they meditate on.

I heard it said once that you could look at them as frozen spirit guides, which I’m sure a Tibetan Buddhist would love me for saying! But there’s maybe a truth there, like the original yogi in his cave in the mountains has a vision, a powerful figure comes to him, and he passes on that living energy to those who can receive it. But then the tradition gradually gets hold of it and fixes it in words and form and bows down and worships it as the most holy of holies – Tibetan Buddhism loves its sacred superlatives, which they dole out unsparingly on their lamas. So maybe it becomes a bit like through a glass darkly, but there is still some of the original inspiration there if you meditate on it.

So the Dalai Lama has been known to hand out thousands of these initiations, which goes right against the tradition, where people are supposed to be properly prepared, so that they can receive it. And rightly so. But these are exceptional circumstances. These valuable traditions are being lost as his culture is destroyed and dispersed, and some of the initiations may take, some people may be able to really run with them. So good on him, I say!

Not that I don’t have a personal reservation, which is that these Bodhisattva figures lack ordinary humanity, they are transcendent beings. They are beings of light, they are powerful, they have an incredible beauty….. but they lack ordinary humanity. They are full of spirit, but lack soul. That is why I like some of the rough Chan master depictions from China, these shaggy almost beast-like creatures.

Shamanism is immanent not transcendent. It almost seems to be like religion that creates transcendence – which is another way of saying that people get put on pedestals. (I am usually a bit wary when someone says they are a light worker for the same reason. I can feel something missing.)

I think there’s a political agenda when this happens, it is about religions trying to control people by getting them to think that being an ordinary human being isn’t good enough. Well, what have you left if that is taken away, because that is all you are?

But there’s a good point in what the Dalai Lama is doing, and it is similar to our position. We just have to run with these things as best we can.

I don’t want to give the impression that I am laissez faire about this. I am not. I am less so than most, I am quite conservative in many ways. I have lost Facebook friends for saying that people are rarely in a position to be a spiritual teacher of any sort until they are a bit older. They are nearly always creating an identity for themselves out of it, which is obvious to everyone except their followers, instead of stepping back for 10 years and dealing with whatever it is in them that needs to create an identity – which is always at other people’s expense.

But you can run these things without being in the role of teacher. Do it just because people need it, and trust it if it happens, and trust it if it doesn’t happen. Let it be spirit led. It is a great training.

THE SECRET TEACHINGS

So, part six of the unpacking of this idea of Chaos Shamanism. You get Chaos Magic. I had someone explain it to me once, who’d been doing it for many years. What she said is that the way it works is that you create a ceremony for a particular reason, and it's unique, but the way they create those ceremonies is by drawing on other magical traditions. A diligent practitioner of Chaos Magic will spend a fair bit of time researching other magical traditions from all around the world and using that as a kind of databank. So you can kind of see the Chaos element, in that there's no set tradition; rather, you're allowing the form to create itself, rather than having a preset form in which you put your prayers - it's the other way round. It's quite sort of postmodern, you could say.

Maybe you could for the same reason call Chaos Shamanism, post-modern Shamanism. But it’s a bit different to Chaos Magic, because it’s not like our raison d’etre is to create ceremonies for purposes of magical outcomes. When you're doing magic, you're doing it for a reason, and we do magic in Shamanism as well. What is magic? Magic is prayer, and prayer is asking Spirit for an outcome.

You can't predetermine exactly what the outcome’s going to be, it'll often take you by surprise, but outcome there will be if the prayers are heartfelt. How could it not be, because when something is heartfelt, you're connected to the whole universe and the universe responds, the universe cares for us, is benign. In a way that's what magic is, it's an inner thing, it's the secret teaching. The secret teaching is the inner teaching. It’s the intention behind the forms, not the forms or spells themselves, whatever other impression you might have got from Harry Potter!

So we do magic, but it's in the form of prayer, beginning with the expression of gratitude for all those things in our life that work, and then asking where we need help, or where others need help.

So there's one comparison point. The other comparison point with Chaos Shamanism that I want to make has to do with my early Buddhist background.

What's our modern context for Shamanism? Here we are, high and dry in a society that in many ways has lost its roots in that indigenous connection to the natural world, that connection to the elements, that soulful connection to the natural world, and everything that comes out of that. And we're trying to recreate it. We're in a great position because we've got the whole world to draw on, we've got indigenous traditions from all around the world to draw on and to use and to be inspired by. And that for me parallels the Buddhism I was involved with in my 20s and 30s, my misspent youth - that's a joke.

The teacher’s approach was to take the essence of Buddhism - he had spent 20 years or so in the East practicing various traditional forms - and re-express it in a form that's relevant to modern society. So not committed to any one school, but drawing on all of them.

It's a great idea, but his trouble was that he started it far too early, he hadn't really done his own inner work. He was one of these people who had a genuine insight at a very young age, but then identified with that, and kind of remained the same. So his understanding of the essence of Buddhism – which is an inner thing – remained partial, and in some ways quite cold, quite intellectual.

He did have something, but the inner work hadn’t been done, that demolition that happens to you, that underworld journey where you are honest about your demons, you learn to bear them and make friends with them, and allow them to change you - that revolutionizes you and changes the way you see everything. It's like well, that was how I saw things 10 years ago, now I'm saying this and this is how I see the world now, I have grasped something essential that I did not see before. It's that kind of demolition out of which we're initiated, out of which something new is reborn, and it's that, that is of the essence of spirituality, that is the essence of Shamanism. It's an inner thing, and that's what Chaos Shamanism is about. It's about an alignment to that inner thing, and doing whatever practices will support that.

So this other aspect of Chaos Shamanism is the kind of same idea as my Buddhist teacher had. But it is me in my 60s saying it, not him in his 40s! I’ve had more time – and, I think, willingness – to sit at my own coal-face, and in a way develop more humility and a broader self-knowledge. I mean, when I teach I like to begin by talking about the things I find difficult, the things that make me anxious, how I have to make sure I don't drink too much because I do like it, it is a get-out from my creativity, the things that can make me angry sometimes, the things that can make me lose self-possession, the self-doubt I go through, at least in the early stages, with just about everything I do. I like to talk about all those things, because it keeps me on the same level as you, because we are all the same yeah, I haven't got a special experience that puts me above other people. I've just stayed with myself. Live closely to yourself, that's all we're here to do.

So when I am open in that kind of way, then other people feel emboldened to do that, they feel it's okay, that their faults aren't terrible and unique, it's like no you’re the same as the rest of us. We don't need to judge the demons and the tribulations, we just need to come into a relationship with them. It's all you have to do, it's easy and difficult. So it's that process which attunes us to the spirit, to the heart of anything.

Okay, that's my preamble, and that's taken most of this one. I wanted to talk about the Medicine Wheel. Maybe I'll do so in the next one, I might just begin it with this one. What I’ve been doing is asking how do we connect this idea of Chaos Shamanism, of going back to the essence of Shamanism, that essence of what it is to be a natural human being, how do we connect that with one of these traditional practices like the sweatlodge or like the pipe ceremony or like the medicine wheel or the journeying, all of these things I like to do.

And I’m essentially coming at it from the point of view of what they're getting at, why we're doing them. That's what Chaos Shamanism or just Shamanism, the essence of Shamanism is. It’s the secret teaching! In Buddhism you get the secret teachings, the transmissions. I think something can be transmitted from person to person, from Spirit to Spirit. It's not in words, it's not in forms, it's more like being around that person and being open. I went to an online shamanic initiation, it was a three-part course, and the initiation was into was into some sort of feminine goddess. I lasted the first session, but he was recounting the traditional ways they work, which is great but it's not for us, it didn’t mean anything to me. But I felt I got it after the first session, I felt I picked up something out of him, something around him was now around me, even online! (And why not? These things are outside the usual rules of time and space.) So that's the transmission, you just need to be open to it, and this other kind of thing happens.

In traditional shamanic cultures you get spirits being passed down families, from father to son, grandmother to granddaughter and so on, and I think it's got something of that nature. There's a special feeling, do you know how you get that with people who've got that Shamanic connection, from the point of view of that kind of inner energy Spirit work, which some people try and make the whole of shamanism, but it's not. I mean even academics are divided on that, some use it in a that narrower way, some use it in the broader way to mean the whole indigenous inheritance and that's how I use it.

But anyway, particularly that inner energy work, people who work in that sort of way, you can feel it, for me it’s a connection. I also feel that more broadly with Native American stuff, it somehow seems to come my way, I'm not going to big it up, but somehow there's a spirit connection there. So there's that kind of energetic connection there as well, and that's very much the plane that I'm talking about. All these other practices are a support to that inner kind of knowing, that inner connection, it's quite special, it's very alive, it's got a fantastic taste to it, it's like ambrosia, it's like honey and it's always a mystery, but we can't resist it. We know we're meant to be around it, it has that deeper kind of thing in it. I think Tibetan Buddhism can have that, and Shamanism has that, any of these things that have held on to the inner tradition – and it's easy to lose the inner tradition in the outward forms. Chaos Shamanism stands for that impulse to reclaim the inner traditions from their tendency to ossify in forms and hierarchies and books and so on.

SPIRIT and SOUL

CHAOS SHAMANISM 5: SPIRIT and SOUL

So, the Spirit. Part 5 of this Chaos Shamanism series. Chaos meaning a number of things. Today it means the essence of Shamanism. The essence is Spirit, coming back to Spirit, always living from Spirit. That thing in you, we don't exactly know what it is; it's more than us, it's bigger than us, it's the place that we have to live from in a way. That's what Shamanism is about: it's about that, in the context of belonging to the natural world.

So we're talking about what's essential to Shamanism, what's core to Shamanism. Of course that term's already been taken up – ‘Core Shamanism’ - and it refers to a bunch of techniques for journeying to drums and doing healing work on that basis. And you know that's such a narrow way of describing this great project that we're undertaking, which is reclaiming indigeneity. We're reclaiming that indigenous worldview, that indigenous way of feeling about the world and relating to the world, that we've lost in our big religions, in Christianity and then in Science after that: Science is a big religion in its own way, because most of it is based on beliefs in certain absolute truths about the universe, that we have not and cannot verify for ourselves.

Somewhere that soulfulness of the world, that is also fire, earth, air and water or, more concretely, sun, rain, soil and wind, somewhere that connection has been lost. We've got caught up in this thing, you know, we're heading off up there to heaven, or the world's dead and we've got this great technological future before us that will save our souls.

We need to sort of come back to this soulfulness, this heartfulness, this connectedness, this simplicity. There's nowhere to go, there's nothing to do, it's just a life to be lived and this Spirit in us and the Spirits around us.

The Spirits. That's what I began with. What are these Spirits? I don't know. People talk about you know, their animal helper, their Spirit guide. I have different animal helpers that turn up at different times. I mean I do when I work. But also they may just be around. One was around a couple of years ago getting me to write a fantasy saga. But that’s another story.

I began with Core Shamanism in 1997. I did that course, but it's broadened or changed since then. Sure, I can lie down and journey to a drum, but actually the Spirits are just there anyway, like over my shoulder, and they shift into me physically. That's the thing, I don't go and meet the Spirits. Some indigenous people say no they come to you, you don't go to them, they come to you, that's how they say it, they even say there’s something wrong if you go to find them. And that's how it works for me: they come into me, I don't go and find them. I don't journey miles and miles down to a lower world and go looking. I'm not invalidating that, but there’s this other way, and it's just like they're there, over my shoulder, so to speak, because the Spirits are always with us.

They kind of are us and not us. It depends how we define ‘me’. In the narrow sense, no they're not us, they're outside and they come to us. In other ways they are us, in a bigger sense. We kind of are the universe, and there's these helpers which understand us intimately. They know how we're unfolding, they're gods of the unconscious, you could put it like that, but even the unconscious makes it too personal and narrow. This is is something bigger, it's a bigger cosmology. So we must never forget that we're part of a cosmology, an intimate part of a multidimensional cosmos, and we have our contribution to make, which in a way is not for us to explain. It's just whatever does it for us, in a deeper kind of sense!

So that's one way we could see the question of how do I live shamanically? Well, it's belonging to the natural world, being part of it, while also doing that thing that calls you, doing that thing that you love. Life in this sense is a joyful thing. But it can also require courage and patience and honesty. It is easy to make excuses, to put aside the things that really matter in the interest of the things we just think matter, or that we ought to do.

There's the ‘oughts’. Often the people around you, maybe the society around you, will tell you who you ought to be. That's just the way it works, it has its rules, it's trying to survive and prosper, so the collective tells you who you ought to be. Often that's helpful for people, but if you’ve got something else going on, you need to get rid of these oughts, they are someone else's idea. We need to do the things that we love. I mean of course we have responsibilities to fulfil, and that's part of life as well - economics, family - they help us incarnate and connect. But outside of that, and that's why you're reading this piece, you have something you're here to live.

Do you ever get that sense there's something in you, that you haven't lived yet, that needs living? I get that all the time, oh it can be hard bloody work! If I'm not living it I'll drink, too much. So I haven't had a drink now for two months, because it just anesthetizes that, it's an easy way out. It's a kind of creative spark or urge, and eventually you have to go with it. Or you may get ill or something, that is what the Shamanic illness in traditional cultures is about. An offer you cannot refuse! Spirit is essentially creative, we're here to live this creative life.

And you never know what it is that people will love. I mean I'm an astrologer I can look at the chart, but I don't know what it is that interests them, that pulls them, that calls them. It might be horses, it might be astrology or painting, it might be building things, it might be trees. I don't know what it is that gives you your joy, which also gives us our difficulty, something that stretches us.

The Spirits. Now we may or may not know what they are, it doesn't matter, sometimes it's like it's quite clear there's a bear around me, or a wolf, other times there's just something working through me. If you just have a sense of something but that is all, trust it. Not knowing can be good for us humans. The Spirits are there to help and to guide, they will guide us in the direction of that which we love. They support us in that, and it's a challenging place to live from, it's a difficult place, it'll stretch you and it'll give you self-doubt. As well as joy.

So what I'm going to ask you, is what would you like to be good at if you thought you were capable of it, what would do it for you? Because often we put these things aside, because we go oh no I'd be no good at it. I mean self-doubt is natural, it's necessary, because you're not good at it yet, you have to earn that kind of confidence rather than go to an analyst and talk it away. No no no, you have to earn it. And all the other neurotic self-doubt as well that's around, just get good at something you love. That's one of my central maxims for life: get good at something that you love.

And you can think well it's just not practical to do that thing, I can't have horses or whatever. But I think there's always a way, this is where the trust in Spirit comes in. There's always a way to do these things that we love. We get help, we find there's these mysterious openings when we take the initial steps, it’s like the cosmos responds. We can at least do a bit of whatever it is, we don't need to necessarily do an awful lot of it, just a bit to keep that connection. Over time it will grow, and opportunities that you could never have thought of will present themselves.

So that's the that's the main point I wanted to make today. Finding that thing, or those things, that you love. It's a good exercise. Find that thing that you love that you're not doing, because you think it's just not practical, or you'd be no good at it, all these excuses we make. It's about living creatively, it's about the Spirit being able to go beyond just following some kind of set of rules. You're bringing something new into existence, it's your own, and that's the deepest fulfilment, the deepest joy. That really is incarnation. Incarnation isn't just about earning a living and being responsible, no it's about something much deeper and bigger than that, it's about bringing that creative Spirit in, and living it, doing something with it, and that's very fulfilling, very joyful when you do that.

PRAYER and the NATURAL WORLD

 CHAOS SHAMANISM 4: PRAYER and the NATURAL WORLD

So here's the fourth part in this Chaos Shamanism series. God knows how long it's going to carry on for. Well that's the way of it, it's Chaos! Chaos really means staying close to your heart. It can sound a bit hard, a bit harsh saying Chaos. Yeah, it's like there's no feeling or it's an idea, and it's not like that. It's actually about being close to your heart, because your heart doesn't work in that rational human ordered kind of way, and Chaos just means not that.

 

We need that rationality, we need it in order to run our lives, but underneath it all that's not who we are. It's about remaining close to that. I read a book many years ago now called The Spears of Twilight by Philip d’Escola, he was a young French anthropologist who spent two years with the Achuar Indians in the Amazon jungle. He's now a sort of mandarin, a grand guy in French anthropology. But he was a young researcher then, and he lived with these people for two years.  He said for some of them, everything they do is a prayer. I thought wow what a way to live.

 

What does that mean, that everything you do is a prayer? It means you're connected with your heart to everything that you do, and that you're wishing for a good outcome. You're asking with gratitude for a good outcome. Prayer is founded in gratitude. It means a conversation with the natural world, that's one way of putting it, that's a sort of Navajo way. It's not about asking a deity, it's about being with the natural world, because we're part of it. And so it's founded in gratitude, it's founded in this sense that we're taken care of, we're helped, and that we can maybe get further help from that benign power.

 

It's interesting what nature is. I'm going on a slight digression here, but I want to. This is Chaos so I can! We have two kind sof attitudes or archetypes in the west towards nature. We have nature as sort of pristine, as fragile, as Gaia, as the mother who takes care of us. And then there's nature red in tooth and claw, the sort of Hobbesian version. The first one is Rousseau, yeah man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Piece of nonsense, if you ask me. Although we do know how to play as children and we can forget how to play, but that's something else. And then the Hobbesian attitude, you know, life is nasty brutish and brutish and short. So we have these two archetypes of nature running alongside each other, they are contradictory, but that’s ok, we just need to hold those opposites, it’s only the rational mind that has to have everything neatly tied up.  

 

I think the environmental movement tends to lean one-sidedly towards nature as sort of pristine, benign and fragile, and you know we must protect her from the nasty humans, that's the underlying feeling. And that gets mixed up with Shamanism, because of course we love the natural world, we remember we are part of it. But we also know it's tough, nature is red in tooth and claw. The Chippewa Cree used to send their teenage boys naked out into the wilds on their own for a month, with just a knife and a blanket. They would have to learn to survive. Of course, Health and Safety would get you for child abuse nowadays if you did that. But the Chippewa Cree understood and appreciated this other side of nature, how can you not when you are living close to the laws of survival? It is maybe a sign of our softness and decadence that we think of the earth as fragile and in need of our protection.

 

Nature doesn't guarantee your survival. This business of rights to happiness and life and liberty, that's a human invention, nature doesn't think like that. An antelope on the Serengeti doesn't think it has a right to life, it had better look out sharp or it won't have a life anymore!

 

So nature is both, and she can take care of herself, and yes of course we need to take care of her as well, be respectful and ask her for things, we need to take from her respectfully. She has riches that she gives freely to us, she gives us of her oil, she gives to us of her rare earth elements. We humans have this technological inventive genius, and it's part of our nature, in a way it's a unique part of nature, it's something unique we bring to the table.

 

I don’t want to over-egg that uniqueness, because if you read Frans de Waal’s books - he's a great primatologist who died this year – he showed there's nothing in humans that isn't also shared by animals, whether cognitively or emotionally. He's written two books on that: Mama's Last Hug, about animal emotions, mainly chimpanzee, and then another book called Are we intelligent enough to know how intelligent animals are? They sometimes even have certain types of cognition we don't have!

 

So there is a continuity between humans and animals, but at the same time we bring something to the table, this huge inventiveness, and we need to trust it because it's natural to us, and our job is not to oppose that with fear, but to support it and work to keep it in balance. Our shamanic job, if you like, is to keep humanity in balance with where it's going, rather than cling on to a pristine past, as if how we are now is somehow wrong and unnatural and killing the Earth, and all that sort of attitude. You can see this in environmentalism in its extreme form, the fundamentalist environmentalists who hate humanity and all its works, think of humanity as a cancer. That any changes in the earth due to humans are automatically bad, because humans caused them. Well, we're shamanic, we love humanity and we love all of nature: we love the nature of each creature and plant, and we love our own nature. So be discerning in your sympathies for the environmental movement. Not just the obvious nut-jobs who go around wearing death masks and glueing themselves to roads, but the more widespread and less obvious putting down of humanity. It is life-denying.

 

So back to prayer. This ongoing prayer, it would require a considerable depth and attention from you to be living from that place all the time and listening to that place, and not doing something if it feels wrong.  There is a whole other area there, to do with feelings, and trusting feelings and not trusting feelings. It can be one of the shadows of the counter culture that I talked about last time, which is that we may mistrust reason and overvalue feeling: if I feel it, well then I'll do it and it's not like that. We need to consult feeling as part of the whole context in us, the complex in us of feeling, thought, instinct, body, imagination, inspiration and experience. We need to consult all of these things, and through that we gradually learn which feelings to trust and which feelings not to trust.

 

A good example is romantic feelings, they can blow us right off course, I’m sure we’ve all experienced this. And you know if you've woken up and you're in a mood, then you don't trust what it's telling you about the world, that the world's terrible and what's the point of being here, that's your mood and what you learn is that, well you can't just get rid of the feeling, you have to make friends with it and live with it. We learn to tolerate ourselves, as one therapist told me, what she sees herself doing is helping people tolerate themselves. So we're tolerating certain feelings, we're learning to live with them make friends with them, stop judging them, but don't act on them, we need to hold on to ourselves. On the one hand we're not putting ourselves down and judging ourselves, but on the other hand we're quite rigorous with ourselves, we need to be honest with ourselves. That's a whole other area.

 

I think I’ll just stick with prayer for this one, because that's essential and it's what Pipe Ceremony is about, and what the Sweat Lodge is about: prayer. It's about sitting with your life, and firstly giving thanks for what works in it. We forget to give thanks for things like food and shelter and friends and family, we we think oh you know the world's in a terrible state and this society's awful. Actually it really takes care of us, yes it's out of balance in many ways. But that's our nature as humans, we get out of balance regularly. Animals and plants, they know how to live according to their natures, while we're still working that one out, because we are the newborn ones, we only arrived recently. So this ongoing prayer, that is another way of saying what Chaos Shamanism is about. I'm not convinced I've got the right word yet with Chaos Shamanism maybe I'll end up calling it something else, but that's a whole other thing. Chaos has got a lot going for it. Anyway, we'll leave it for now.

Chaos Shamanism is a deep thing

 CHAOS SHAMANISM Part 3

It's quite a deep thing this idea of Chaos. We think of it as a superficial thing, when things just aren't ordered, things haven't been paid attention to, yeah, it seems superficial. But that's using the word Chaos to mean untidy, teenage bedroom, disarray.

That's not the original meaning, as I said in the first part, it comes from the Greek and it refers to the vast Abyss that was there before anything arose out of Chaos. First arose darkness and night, the god Erebus and the goddess Nyx, the male and female dimensions of the dark, and out of them arose light. Also arose Gaia the Earth and Tartarus, the depths beneath the Earth. So everything arose out of Chaos, it's the source of everything. Chaos is that potent source of Life, of everything, of the universe, of the dreaming, of the creation.

This ongoing creation: that's what we're tuning into when we do Chaos Shamanism, we're tuning into the ongoing dreaming of who we are, and the collective dreaming of the universe that keeps it coming into being. But most importantly this ongoing dreaming of who we are, we're tuning into that, we're becoming aware that life isn't something that just happens to us, which is how it seems if you're just looking outwards. If you look inwards as well to the spirit you realize that actually it's been created mysteriously, it's not under our control. Like thoughts, where do they come from, they just seem to come in? Or feelings, how we're feeling today, it's not something we decide on. It's something that we feel the victim of sometimes! Our job is to come into relationship with it all, with this ongoing creation, which we experience through the continual bubbling up of thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations and dreams and hints from spirit too. And events on the outside too, we roll with them when they need rolling with, and we grapple with them when they need grappling with.

Shamanism without the Chaos is religion. In religion you get in the way of the Chaos, you get in the way of that access to Spirit, you put up boundaries of this is how it should be, yeah this is how you Journey and all that. I read this long description on Facebook yesterday. Someone had asked a question about journeying and this whole description came back of the three worlds and exactly what you need to do where and what soul retrievals are about, and it just sounded enormously complicated. But it's not, it's simple, everything is simple. That's what Chaos reminds us of: that everything is simple. It doesn't mean you can't have complexity – which I distinguish from complicated - but there's always simplicity behind it. So when you're doing anything - if you're in a sweat lodge, if you're on a journey to the lower world, if you're dancing around the medicine wheel, if you’re praying in a Pipe Ceremony, if you're doing an astrology reading, whatever it is you're doing, you need to be asking yourself why am I doing it? What's the purpose of it? That is what gives the depth.

There's always this very simple purpose behind everything, which is to be living from that deeper source within us, that thing that's calling us, that thing that is love, that loves life yeah, that wants to live, that has living to do. We're living from that place that has living to do, and maybe death is when you've done the living that was to be done this time, and it's time to go off on the next thing whatever that is.

So Chaos can sound like a superficial thing yeah, and you think you're the one with the real depth because you've done 20 years training with a you know, a Siberian Shaman or a Native American teacher yeah and that's got real depth. Well it probably has so I don't want to go the opposite here, it's a delicate dance of appreciating the depth of proper training that takes many years, and that being true to the Spirit within us at all points. A proper training should lead us to that point where you can just let go of it all.

Sometimes you just need to let go of all those practices you built up, however beautiful. Like the sweat lodge has got so much in it, so much symbolism, everything is symbolic and it's beautiful. And by the way, symbols are not an intellectual thing for indigenous peoples, they do not just stand for something, like let’s pretend. No, they ARE that thing, the sweatlodge IS the womb out of which you are reborn. It also IS the whole universe while you are in it. That’s what ceremony does, it shifts reality and makes it sacred.

So of course there's lots of different ways of doing sweat lodges, as many as there are peoples, and the traditional sweat lodges will have a lot more of that kind of symbolic content than anything we can run. We have to kind of just be true to the spirit, and keep it simple to keep it real, the complex symbolism is not ours, it is foreign, it is something we can probably never be truly part of.

Last time I led a sweat lodge was about five years ago, it was lovely, it flowed, it was like this feminine presence came in and took over and she just led it, and people had a really good time. People experienced it differently, for some people it can be really hot, some other people it's really gentle. The goddess took care of that, and I didn't have much in the way of tradition behind me, just a few basics, but that's all I needed, because I'd done the 20 or 30 years being with myself, which is the real training and which any traditional training will be moving you towards.

In a traditional training they may stick you out on Vision Quests, where it's just you and the natural world, so it's a deep thing and it's a demanding thing. It's very demanding to keep asking yourself what is the purpose of why I'm doing what I'm doing, it's much easier just to go to church on Sunday and do what the priest tells you, or go to the sweat lodge and do what you're told - of course we need to do that as well, because it's a collective thing and that has its own power and it brings Community together and it has its own beauty. We do what we're told, but within it we need to be aware of why we're doing it, we're not just doing it because when we've done it, it’s like good I've done that, I'm a bit sacred, now I'm spiritual. No, there's no point doing it unless you're with whatever it is in you that you're here to be with, we all have something to be here with, to take care of, deep within us.

Okay that was the first point. I've got several more. So we're always going back to the source with Chaos Shamanism. We're respecting tradition, yeah we really honour it, we really learn it when we're around it, but there's always that gap we need to live from, that space where we find our souls, independently of whatever practice or ceremony it is that we are doing. But at the same time we are fully immersed in, wholehearted about whatever it is we are doing.

There's a whole other area that I wanted to talk about, which is a bit separate and I probably won't have time for an awful lot of it. In the same way that there's a gap between us and tradition, there also needs to be a gap between us and the collective values around us. Tradition and the collective values will overlap if we belong to a traditional culture. But certainly there's collective values around us now, they're not all wrong, collective values are necessary, they hold the community together, they are not just the brainwashing that some people think. They orient us, even though we might eventually need to move beyond them. In the same way, religion holds the community together. But these values are necessarily limited, at least in the way they are applied, if not in themselves, and we need to be able to stand apart from that, and that can be quite tough.

If you do this shamanic thing, you're probably part of the counterculture that began in the 60s as a protest against the materialism of society and the lack of spirit, it was necessary. But it has its own shadow, because it was itself a rebellion. We need to be able to stand apart from that collective shadow of the counterculture, which is authority, money and a reflex opposition to the establishment. We end up thinking we're above the world, we're better than the world, we know better, that capitalism's evil and all that sort of thing. Well we couldn't run it any better. You encounter this very often in spiritual groups of whatever sorts, this kind of putting down of the world and it's like we know better. “The world's in a dreadful state.” Well, the world's just the world, it is what it is, it’s not good or bad. And remember news isn’t news unless it’s bad, so we’re skewed anyway by the media.

We need to be part of the world. What happens when you're part of a tradition or some modern spiritual group, is you can feel you're above the world subtly and it makes you feel good about yourself. Well there's no easy get out if you're into Chaos Shamanism: you're part of the world, you're equal with the world, you're in the world, which is what we're here to do, to incarnate, to undertake the difficult task of bringing spirit into matter, and that subtle hubris is not there.

And one final point. Remember that indigenous people are necessarily on the defensive, they have been overwhelmed by modern culture. So it is hard for them not to put our culture down to some extent, or even to a big extent, out of self-preservation. It is understandable and very common, but don’t buy into it. Otherwise you’re just buying into that same old thing and creating a false, superior identity for yourself. But it means taking indigenous people off that pedestal we put them on – can you do that?