SUN, RAIN, SOIL and WIND

 In the last piece I began talking about the Medicine Wheel, and I very briefly said what one was – these 4 stones, which stand for different aspects of ourselves, and for the whole universe too. I focussed on the principle of balance at its heart.  The Wheel at its simplest is four stones, one in each direction: north south east and west. They also correspond to the elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. In a way, it’s that simple.

There are all sorts of other correspondences to these four stones, for they make a cycle. We have, going from East round to North: birth, childhood, adulthood, old age; spring, summer ,autumn, winter; yellow, red, black, white. These are all in the Wheel I use. You get quite different set-ups in different Wheels. There are these Wheels all over the Americas, no one quite knows where they came from, which I think is great, though central America seems to be the main contender.

 

In a way, and I reckon most importantly, the Wheel becomes a symbol that sinks into your unconscious, it becomes part of who you are. That was what happened to me almost immediately when I saw my first Medicine Wheel after years of Buddhism. This was in the 90s. I saw this Medicine Wheel and it just had me it intrigued. I knew nothing about it, but it was like wow here's this thing that is a teaching, and it describes everything, and what I loved about it was that it's earthy, it's here, it's not a teaching about up there, or about what's ultimate in a faraway sense. It is a teaching about what's ultimate here right now, because everything's here around you and within you, we contain all within us.

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Ad Break:  CHAOS WALK near Wrexham, UK Sun 7th July Free event
I was invited to run my 1st Chaos Shamanism event by Matt Beech at a venue in Wrexham. But that was too organised for the Spirit of Chaos, which removed the venue at a late stage, and foiled all Matt's attempts to set it up as an outdoor workshop. The Spirit of Chaos has decreed that it needs to begin where Shamanism begins: immersed in nature. So we will be walking among 250m year old sandstone, used by prehistoric people, visiting caves and standing on cliff edges. We will go off piste among the brown moss, and we will enjoy. We will meet outside the Bickerton Poacher Pub at 11am, and after that the day will take its own course. All welcome.

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Above all, perhaps, it was the intimate involvement of the earth that grabbed me. The earth as alive and sacred. I had been in a tradition for 17 years where that had been put down. Where it was at, were these otherworldly figures that were not ordinary and human. And when the elements were brought in, they were arranged hierarchically, in progressive levels of refinement. The earth element was at the bottom as the crudest, and that was definitely something you wanted to transcend! All it did was to eventually make me ill and unbalanced.

 

It isn’t that Buddhism per se is necessarily like that, though I think it often tends in that transcendent direction. It was more that the Buddhism I was around was westernised, it contained the imbalances around the relationship between the body and the spirit that have vitiated western culture for over a millennium. So I was ill, if you like, because western culture is ill – even though it has a lot of good things going for it – and the shamanic outlook, the indigenous outlook, was the cure for me, and therefore can be for the culture. That maybe sounds a bit pretentious or evangelical. It’s not really, it’s more of an observation or an insight.

 

So my encounter with the Medicine Wheel was deeply healing for me, on a metaphysical level. I've written a whole book on the Medicine Wheel. There's so many things that can be said, that's the beauty of it. The book I wrote was an opportunity to say everything I thought about everything! The Medicine Wheel contains the whole universe – it describes the Cosmos that arises from Chaos - and it's also you, and that's because we are the universe.

 

OK, let’s just pull back to the word Chaos. We are gradually uncovering its meaning as we go along. It is both simple and multifaceted. I can imagine it could get confusing, because I've been unpacking it in lots of different ways, with many connotations. So if you just remember that Chaos brings us to the heart of things, brings us to what we're really about it, brings us to the centre of the Medicine Wheel. Chaos is that vast Abyss that is at the heart of things, that beautiful soft beating heart at the centre of the universe and at the centre of you. Perhaps the best way of envisioning Chaos is to feel that mystery at the heart of you, that force of life that is always in us, heartfelt and joyful. That is Chaos, in the sense that we don’t know where it comes from, it is just something very deep and fundamental. And that is also the Centre of the Medicine Wheel, Chaos in this sense. And the purpose of the Wheel is to help us to keep coming back to that centre in ourselves, which is easily lost amidst the busyness of everyday life, and the collective currents and beliefs and ideas that sweep us up.

 

I want to talk about the Medicine Wheel in as simple a way as possible, because that's what we have to do. We have no traditions, but we can borrow them and we can dance between them, and we can do the same with the Medicine Wheel. In a way it's artificial to adopt one that is really complex, because you can have 20 stones if you like, all with these different meanings and its own beauty. My questioning of that wouldn't be so much because it belongs to a foreign culture, because we can indeed adopt it, but because when you get that complex, it moves up to the brain, to the intellect, which in one way is fair enough, because there's all sorts of nuances of meaning there, but you tend to lose that connection with the symbolism once it gets intellectually complex.  

 

As long as it's simple, the unconscious can hold it, you can hold a symbol that is white in the north, red in the South, yellow over there and black over there, you just hold it there, it can become the centre of your dreaming, the centre of your life, the centre of your universe. That's how I've used it, mainly along with the four elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air; if you like they are Inspiration, Healing, Incarnation and Perspective, just to make it a bit more concrete. It's a way of describing all those different aspects of who we are in a symbol.

 

The Wheel is of course round. It affirms the Greek philosopher Plotinus’ dictum that ‘the native motion of the soul is circular.’ You find that throughout the world, these circles, mandalas. We tend to think in a linear way, that we're going from A to B, and we need to think like that for daily life. But the bigger picture, the motion of our souls, is not linear. It circles in an ever-deepening way around its own centre, which is the centre of the Wheel. We are not ‘evolving’: that is a modern, linear, scientific notion, alien to the indigenous way of seeing the world. Rather, we are continually finding balance within the 4 elements, paying attention to one then the other as needed, while letting the bigger theme of who we are, and maybe our place in the scheme of things, take care of itself. It is not for us to know, with our tiny individual consciousness. It is good to feel that mystery of who we are and what it’s all about, just sit with it, be awed by it. That in itself brings us into balance, for we are living from the centre, the trunk and roots of the tree.

So this exploration of the Medicine Wheel will be about how we find that balance about who we are, exploring these different aspects of who we are not just through Fire, Water, Earth and Air, because even that is an abstraction from what we experience. And Chaos Shamanism is always about spotting the abstraction and coming into experience, into the heart and into the senses.

So for Fire, what we experience is the Sun and its warmth. Fire is, if you like, just an idea behind that experience. The same with Water. Unless you live by the sea, your main experience of water is probably going to be rain. I’m talking natural world here, because that is where the Medicine Wheel is based, rather than indoors, where you could say radiators and taps for Fire and Water. It’s not quite the same! And of course the Earth element is the soil, which we can put our hands into, get them dirty. And the Air element is the breeze, we experience Air when it moves.

So Sun, Rain, Soil and Wind. It is very tangible. It keeps us close to experience when we think this way, even if we are indoors, because they are very present to our imaginations in a sensory kind of way. That simple, raw experience has its own delight and beauty, and it draws us right in to the deeper considerations of life at the heart of the Medicine Wheel.

So you may hear or read all sorts of great teachings about the Medicine Wheel – you may read all this stuff that I am coming out with! – but at the end of the day, you need to drop it all and come back to your senses. That’s an interesting expression, isn’t it, coming back to your senses? There’s a lot in it. It says that is where reality is, rather than the abstractions we are in, necessarily, much of the time.

So these teachings are a pointer towards doing that, like the Zen teaching about the finger pointing at the Moon, and not mistaking the finger for the Moon. This is what religion is. Sitting in the teachings, knowing them all, but not moving to where they are pointing. It can be an effort, even a bit scary, to do so. Much easier to be ‘good’ by having a spiritual tag called ‘shamanic’!

So we drop all of that and we come into experience, into the heart and the senses. We feel the warmth of the sun, the rain and the wind on our faces, we dig our fingers into the soil. Nature is so good at bringing us back to ourselves, she reminds us of who we are, which is her. In a way, that's all the Medicine Wheel is doing, that's all that this great project called modern Shamanism is doing, is bringing us back to that experience of the elements, and bringing us back to who we are. What else is there to do, what else is life about, but continually coming back to who we are, remembering who we are?

That's why amongst the Chippewa Cree, and probably other peoples as well, humans are known as the newborn ones, recently arrived, because we're the only species that doesn't know who it is. You look at the other animals, they know how to live, they know who they are. We're the ones who scratch our heads and get out of balance all the time. So that's why we need things like the Medicine Wheel, to show us how to come back into balance, how to orient ourselves - that's why you have the directions there as well. Maybe I'll bring them in also, but I want to keep it simple, because you can get lost in this maze of meanings, you can become a shamanic theologian! And then you’ve missed the whole point.

THE CHAOS MEDICINE WHEEL

This is the 12th piece on Chaos Shamanism, and I'm coming down to a particular form in a way that I haven't so far. That's going to be interesting. It's easy to get the idea, particularly if you're a bit rebellious, that this is all about being above the forms, about the restrictive forms, and that we're beyond all that. But it's not like that at all, it's the opposite. It's about being able to go into the forms more deeply, because we're approaching them on a level of experience rather than on a level of ideas.

For an example of that, I’ll go over to astrology for a moment. The Sun and the Moon have particular meanings, and they're written down in the books according to the stars behind them, and various other factors. But I say if you're doing the astrology reading, just let the Sun be with you, you can feel the Sun because we know it, we experience it. So then it's as if it'll speak through you, and yes you have all your intellectual understandings and they contribute, but there's this other thing that speaks through you. So it's more that sort of level - it's in us and it's also a bit divinatory or intuitive. We may say things we have no reason for knowing, we just know that we need to say them, we know that there's some kind of truth in them that we would probably never insist on.

We're inspired by tradition but we're not beholden to it. That's how I began this exploration of Chaos Shamanism. We're maybe deeply in some tradition, we understand the Medicine Wheel, the Pipe Ceremony, the Sweatlodge, we appreciate them, we love them, we love to be part of the community that happens when we do them, or the Trance Dance, the Despacho Ceremony, whatever else it is. But while being fully in it, we also have that gap which enables us to be with the real meaning of it rather, than worrying too much about whether or not you're doing it in the right way or maybe what other people are thinking of you.

I was once around a traditionally trained guy from South America. We had built a sweat lodge, and we needed a few leaders of them, because we were going to have several sweats. I asked him if he’d lead one, and he thought about and he goes no I'm afraid I can't. my tradition won't allow me to, because it's not built in quite the right way. I still don't quite know what to make of that.

 

I'm not going to disrespect it, there is something in really holding to a tradition and doing it exactly as you're meant to. It has all sorts of layers of beauty and meaning in it, has all sorts of layers of honouring what's come before, honouring the ancestors who created it. It has all of that, and that's beautiful and you want to be able to do that. But you also want to be able to step outside and just go whatever, I know the essence of what this is about, and sometimes we need to leave the past behind because it becomes the past, it becomes a hindrance.

So in a way I do know what to make of it. When needs must, you drop all of that, you don't just not run a sweat lodge when you know you could do something that would help people. Because that is what we are here to do: help people. Are you here to help people, or to do things in the correct manner?

 

There's a saying by a Native American guy called Jim Tree, who wrote a book called The Way of the Sacred Pipe. It's all about pipes and ceremonies, and he's got this kind of combination of saying really do it with respect, really do it with tradition, but also I want everyone to be able to do it. How you achieve that I'm not exactly certain, but that's what he said, and I appreciate the spirit of that. He also came up with the saying that, “If it works it's real, and if it's real it works.” I think that's a really good principle. So this South American guy could have run a sweat lodge, he could have done a really good sweat lodge. It just wouldn't have been the way he was taught. But he knows perfectly well that you need to just get people in there in a kind of sacred way, and get them praying, getting connected to the stones, all of that, just do it. It's an interesting dance this one.

So Chaos Medicine Wheel. That's what I'm slowly circling around and coming to. It's an interesting exercise, and more than just an exercise, it’s about how we live our lives. So how do we use the Medicine Wheel coming at it from a Chaos point of view?

We need to start with, well what is it getting at? The Wheel, which at its simplest is just 4 stones, is about becoming a balanced human being, balanced within ourselves, and balanced in relation to the world around us. We do this by bringing the 4 stones, and what they stand for, into balance. That's its purpose, that's what the Native Americans say.

So providing we can hang on to that, the feeling of moving towards balance deep within us, as well the understanding of it, then we'll be able to do it, then we'll be able to approach it in a way that that works, and that isn't rigid and that keeps the original purpose of being in balance.

 

We talk in our modern world about becoming whole. That is because we emphasize the autonomy, the primacy of the individual: that is what we value. We maybe overemphasize it. In a way it came out of Protestant Christianity, which itself arose as a rebellion against Catholicism, where only the priests could have a hotline to God, so to speak. And that's a way of keeping people disempowered and under control. So Protestantism goes no, everyone has their relationship to God, we all have an individual relationship to God. I'm not a great believer in the Christian God, but you get the point. I'm more a Great Spirit sort of guy or Great Mystery, the great unknowable. But anyway, there is something of value in that. We all do need our individual connection. But it can go too far, and one way in which it's gone too far is that we forget to value community sufficiently and the natural world around us the. We don't value and respect that as we need to, we easily get out of balance with that.

 

If someone is ill in a community, then that affects the whole community. So that person needs to get well the sake of the community as well as for their own sake. In a traditional setting, you may get the whole community, or much of it, there at a healing ceremony, praying for the recovery of the ill person. The ill person may not even be there if he’s too ill. This kind of thing works. So indigenous people have an experience of the individual as relational as much as they do as autonomous. Just the fact that you can pray for someone and it helps them get well shows you on your pulses just how connected we all are. So that's worth thinking about, because we get so het up about our rights and our identity.

 

There's a book called Drawing Down Law by Professor John Borrows, who is a Native Canadian. In the book he is looking at the different ways the white people and the Indians look at law. He says let's take abortion as an example. We frame it in terms of women's rights over her body, and it's like okay, that works, he respects that and he’s not trying to argue the rights and wrongs of that. But he says the Indians don’t think like that. Let's shift it to their framework where you have a community, and the father is held to account, he is made to be responsible, while the mother gets a lot of support from women, because people are much more networked and connected and part of each other’s lives. What happens as a result is that you get a lot less abortion. So that’s what can happen when you shift from the individual as autonomous, to the individual is relational. Things happen in quite a different way, and it doesn't make one approach right or one of them wrong. Let's forget about all of that, let's just be pragmatic: if it works it's real, and if it’s real it works.

 

To come back to where I started, the Medicine Wheel has as its purpose the idea of living in balance with the world around us, as well as within ourselves. And that idea is perhaps easier to connect with if we can shift our thinking from our notion of the individual as autonomous, in the direction of the individual being relational. If you like, that wholeness that we value is about becoming the whole world, not just a whole person.

THE NOT-KNOWING of CHAOS SHAMANISM

 Chaos Shamanism is not something that you can build a body of knowledge about. It's the opposite. You build an edifice of not-knowing, a deep foundation in yourself of not-knowing. It's paradoxical, but it's when we know, or we think we know, that we limit ourselves.

Gnosis – knowing. It's really about not knowing, the wisdom that wanders into us when we're not fixed about what we know. I've seen the opposite plenty, people quoting all this stuff from Native American cultures, they're English as they come, but they're identifying with Toltec or Navajo or something like that, and they come out with all this stuff, and you can see it makes them think they know something, it's giving them an identity.

 

But the real path, the Inner Path is about the opposite of that. It’s the same with practices that we may spend all these years doing, we think they're going to take us somewhere. “I've done 20 years meditation so I'm actually quite advanced.” Yeah, and then you realize, oh there was never anywhere to go. All I ever had to do was just be with how I am now, and be comfortable with that. Whatever it is, just be with it, just be close to yourself and don't judge it, don't try and make it better. But it can take 20 years of trying to climb this mountain to realise there was never any mountain to climb. It’s why they say the good is the enemy of the best. Because when you’re good, you're always trying to become better. Whereas with the best, you've dropped all of that, you're just comfortable with being you, which the good person never is. You’re like the Lion, King of the Jungle, you just sit at ease just with who you are.

 So, knowing. There's something that Lewis Mehl Madrona says, he's a Cherokee Lakota guy, and also a conventional doctor. He says that in a traditional indigenous society, most people will have a fairly simple set of beliefs about how the world is, and it's only the medicine people who realize that actually we know nothing, it's all the Great Mystery. And that's where their power comes from, because they're not standing in the way with their beliefs about how things are.

He talks about this in the context of postmodernism, the modern philosophy that says there are no absolute truths. He says this is uncomfortable for most people, but sympatico for medicine people. I think postmodernism has a lot going for it, because in a way there are no absolute truths, if only because words can only ever be pointers, not the things themselves. But there is such a thing as objective truth, it is relative from an absolute point of view, but it can be slippery and even insidious to deny it. That is a cat, that is a man - well apparently we no longer know what men and women are do we, even that's breaking down - but no, there is objective truth about all those things. There are simple biological definitions of men and women. But ultimately it's just words, even space and time are not attributes of the universe, our minds create them in order to make sense of our experience. All of it is unknown and unknowable.

And so postmodernism fits very well with being a kind of medicine person or some kind of healer, because you are doing this dance in the flow of uncertainty, and that means Spirit can speak through you fully, you're not standing there with these ideas about how things are, or what power animal you want to turn up, or trying to subtly bolster your identity as a healer because you want to be taken seriously, all that sort of thing. You're just not going there. Or maybe you are, and you may still do a reasonable job, but it won’t be as good as it could have been if you weren’t in the way.

What I took from Lewis is that human nature tends to be somewhat fixed and limited, and that is universal. It's not like indigenous people are somehow magical and spiritual, and we're the ones who've lost it because we’ve been brainwashed or something, which is how some people think. Sure, indigenous peoples have a belonging to the natural world and a respect for it as a living presence that we have lost, but ordinary humanity also functions just the same amongst indigenous people as it does with us. Most people do have a fairly simple set of beliefs about how the world came to be. For modern people, we had the big bang, then there was the evolution of the star systems, and then life came and that had its evolution and here we are. In this way we've also got a simple story that makes us think we know.  

But of course it's not like that if you look closely. It's full of holes of unknowingness that aren't just gaps in scientific knowledge, they're bigger than that, they're more profound than that. You look at any theory, it's like there’s this profound unknowingness that we just sort of sidestep. So what came before the Big Bang? We don't know, it's an absolute mystery, people just don't really look at it. If you ask a scientist, they will say it's before time, so you can't say anything, as if that is a kind of answer. Well that's true, but it means actually you can't know, it's the Great Mystery. Scientific theorizing has brought you to the brink of the Great Mystery. How wonderful, but we want to fantasise that we know, we don't want to not know, so we put the biggest thing of all on the back burner. The arising of Life is similarly mysterious, it is far too complex to have arisen by blind chance. Same with Evolution. Again, that gets sidestepped. Life is also part of the Great Mystery.

Socrates was said to be the wisest man in Athens because he was the only one who knew he knew nothing. That is the actual situation. We know nothing. So Chaos Shamanism is about knowing nothing, and having the psychological and existential wherewithal to live within that. Some of the time, at least. We are only human! Chaos Shamanism in that sense is always for a minority. Most people will need some sort of set of beliefs to hang on to, and we do need some provisional beliefs to live in this world. We need the stories at any rate, because that is what they are, including our scientific theories. Because however much we are aware that the beliefs are provisional, they still feed and delight our imaginations.

I was just looking at a Californian Indian creation story. In the beginning was just water, and earth was needed so people could be made, so a turtle dives down to the bottom of the water and brings back some earth. And it goes from there. That kind of story nourishes me, it feeds me and in a way it goes more deeply in me because I'm not trying to set it in stone as what ‘actually’ happened. It's a story and therefore it's true, it's a truth of the imagination.

Chaos comes from the ancient Greek creation myth, it was there before anything, just this vast abyss of nothing, of unknowability. So there wasn't even the water, or there wasn't even just God at the beginning, there was just the vast Abyss about which nothing can be said, and there's a deep truth in that because that is that is how it is. And then out of that abyss stuff did come, we know that, and we're not given any reason why the first stuff came, because there isn't a rational reason. Order is just our rational understanding of things.

So I think a good creation myth keeps us close to that, well they're all good, they're all great stories, but I'm just making the point about the Greek one, which is it that keeps us close to that initial unknowingness, and the unknowingness is the place we need to live from.

That includes not knowing who you are, being a mystery to yourself. Well yes and no, we need to know who we are in terms of what calls us, what pulls us, what we've learned from experience, what kind of temperament we have. But an identity? If asked at a drinks party who you are, most people have got a simple identity, yeah they'll say I've got this job, I've got this house, I've got this wife, these children and that's fine, that's a regular kind of identity, and maybe we too trot that out sometimes as a kind of mask. But of course it's not really who you are.

So when people stress their identity and how important it is to them and you have to respect my identity or someone else’s identity (it’s usually someone else’s!), I think they are being delusional, to put it bluntly. These eggshells we are meant to walk around about people’s racial, sexual and gender identities, it shouldn’t be such a big deal. Of course we need to be respectful to each other, but this is something different. Identity is neither here nor there, it is nothing in the grander scheme of things. It is a group label, and we are so much more than that. It is our connection to the whole universe that is real and lasting. Of course we belong to certain cultures and it's important to recognize where we belong. But beyond that actually we have this profound unknowable connection to everything, and that's where we need to live from and our identity just gets in the way of that, so get over it!

FOR HE ON HONEY-DEW HATH FED…

FOR HE ON HONEY-DEW HATH FED…

The Shamanic Illness Part 3

 

The Shamanic Illness is an archetypal event, which has come to us from the Shamanic cultures of the Far East. The young Shaman or Shamanka – a traditional term for a female shaman - gets ill and doesn't recover, unless they accept their vocation as a healer, or at least as a person whose life is fundamentally guided by the Spirits.

 

It's what lives through you. It gives you your life force: that's a good way of putting it. It's a powerful thing, and it's quite different to how most people live. So if you have that in you, don't expect to find community, don't expect people to understand you. If you're lucky you'll have one or two friends that you can talk to about this stuff, so just cherish them.

 

If you've been through this kind of dismemberment, and people do sometimes have these like turning points in their lives, they can be really difficult, and in our society we don't have anyone to sort of necessarily to guide us through, to tell us what's happening. It’s often part of my job as an astrologer.

 

It's just like life is no longer making sense, it's a classic midlife crisis if you want, except in the shamanic cultures they seem to have it when they're teenagers! In a way I had it when I was 20, I went through this kind of revolution. It was happening anyway, but three months of magic mushrooms and my metaphysical quest, as I call it, became central. I became really much more serious about that, but I'd also had an initiation into the shadow, into the demons in me as well, and that was really difficult. That's what a bad trip is: it's an initiation into the shadow side, and that's a good thing. It's not like something's gone wrong. We need that initiation, we need to be able to live with it, be friends with it.

 

So the proto-Shaman may well die. That's how serious the Spirits are about us accepting our vocation, accepting what is deeply within us. That mysterious thing around which we cannot plan our life very much, we don't know where it's going to take us. Month by month sometimes, we just have to be open to where the Spirit is pulling us, how it needs us to live. It doesn't work 9 to 5, we may not do an awful lot with it, and we may therefore feel we're failing, we're not properly living it. But no, Spirit has certain things for us to do and they are often deep things. Spirit will send the right people our way, if we don't go chasing and advertising too much for people that we can help. And then maybe we just fiddle around and do other things much of the rest of the time, who knows.

 

We don't have those kinds of worldly judgments of ourselves anymore about being ‘busy’, because fundamentally it's about the calling. It can happen in less dramatic ways, where you maybe just quietly get on with something that has always been calling you, and it doesn’t disrupt your life. Or it happens in bigger life-changing ways, that can be initially very disruptive and difficult, where you no longer live from the values of the people around you, you live from something else that you've had to find for yourself.

 

You see artists living in this kind of way. Ask them what their next painting is going to be, they probably won’t know. It doesn’t work to order. Nick Cave the rock musician works 9 to 5 at his art, but he’s an exception. You may do nothing for ages while something brews below the surface, and then you may do nothing but work for weeks. That is Spirit for you, and the less successful artists – and only a very small minority have major success – will often get judged for not being regular people and regular workers.

 

Here are a couple of lines at the end of The Holy Longing, a poem by Goethe:

 

“So long as you have not experienced this, to die and so to grow, you remain but a troubled guest on this dark earth.”

 

That's where this thing takes you. You will remain troubled, your life will never be quite working. It might not bring you to the point of death, but you will feel something is wrong, there is something in you unlived. You remain a troubled guest in your life, because there is this other thing, and you need to taste that dark earth, bring Spirit into matter.

 

There is also The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge, a long poem that opens with:

 

“It is an Ancient Mariner and he stoppeth one of three

‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye

Now wherefore stops thou me.’ ”

 

The Ancient Mariner had a tale to tell, he had this look in his eye, he'd been to this other place, which is what we're talking about. The Illness takes you to this other place, you've seen this other world, you've seen this other thing, you've seen how things really are behind the usual parameters within which we live and think and value.

 

The Ancient Mariner had shot an albatross, he knew he shouldn't, but he did, and it brought this terrible luck. Everyone died on board the ship, except him. He was surrounded by ghosts and skeletons, the wind died, he was in this dead sea. So he’d been on a terrible journey, and it changed him forever. When he came back, if he saw someone who he knew could listen, he'd grab them and he would tell them. He saw the wedding guest, this guy on his way to a wedding and he stopped him. And the guy was getting later and later for the wedding, but he knew he couldn't but listen to this Ancient Mariner: the look in his eyes, and the compelling tale he had to tell. Eventually he missed the whole wedding, because he had no choice but to hear it. It was an initiation, if you like, the wedding guest was being initiated by the Ancient Mariner.

 

Maybe that's something we do as well. We've been to that place and we've taken back something of it. Here are a few more lines, from the end of Kubla Khan, again by Coleridge:

 

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

 

We have that, and if people come close to us, they will experience that taste, that will help awaken that thing in them. In a way we never know that we're having that effect. We're just being normal when speaking of this thing that is real to us, but to them it's something else, it's like you've got this quality, you've got this something about you, and it speaks to something in them. They may just say you are authentic, and you are, but it can be a deceptively deep and magical and otherworldly thing too. So don't underestimate the effect you may have on other people just by being what for you is ordinary and honest.

Back to the Illness. It's not just that we want to stay in our comfort zone. We also want to be like everyone else, we want their acceptance, we want that belonging. These are deep human drives, and we're being taken out of that in a fundamental kind of way. Of course, we still feel ourselves to be part of humanity, in fact more than ever, but we are also like God’s Fifth Column, we are agents of a foreign power. That gap in ordinary belonging can be difficult. But it also forges us, forces to stand on our own two feet existentially, with roots as deep as the universe.

 

We are often also held back by self-doubt. With these callings, there’s something to do, there's a gift that comes with them. It may, archetypally, mean being a healer of some kind, and the Spirits through you help people heal, become whole, for that is the meaning of heal. But the calling can be all sorts of things : storyteller, astrologer, artist, animal whisperer, whatever. What it is for an individual you never know, it's a mystery - what draws us, what the Spirit tells us this is what you have to do. We don't have a choice, we're drawn towards these things, it's what we have to do. As Jung put it, “Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.” It is a nice way of tying up fate and free will, because life is both fated and free, and they are not contradictory.

 

So self-doubt is often what stops us accepting the shamanic calling. We don't think we can do it, who am I to do something like that? I get this in little ways reguIarly. In 2022 I was writing a fantasy novel that a Wolf had suggested I write. I hadn't written fiction before, and sometimes I'd stop for a month at a time, and I would start crashing. I'd stop because I didn't think it was any good. If I’m honest, I do think it is quite good, the style's a bit maybe undeveloped, a bit rough, but there's a rawness to the tale, there's a nugget in there, and I can write in a way that keeps the reader interested. But I didn't believe in it - I still don’t in some ways! - and so I would crash and I would drink too much, and I'd feel depressed. Nothing was working anymore, I'd try this, try that, everything except that one thing I had to do. As Mary Oliver says, “One day you finally knew what you had to do you, and began.” I'd begin again, and as soon as I'd sit down and start writing, I’d feel ok again.

 

So the self-doubt is part of the initiatory fire. We all go through it, we have to earn our confidence. In the end you just have to do it anyway. Singing, that's another one, no one wants to sing because they're no good at it! Yeah, we're all no good at it, and we're worried about what other people will think, all of that sort of thing. But there's this calling in you, you need to do it, it requires grit, it requires courage. But there's also joy in there, and you feel that you've got your life when you do it. So claim that calling when it comes knocking at your door. Or rather, let it claim you. And it might come knocking very hard!

THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS Part 2

 THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS Part 2

The Heart of Initiation

I'll begin with Mary Oliver’s poem The Journey. I’ve abridged it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice—

though the whole house began to tremble

and you felt the old tug at your ankles.

"Mend my life!" each voice cried.

But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do….

Little by little, as you left their voices behind,

there was a new voice which you slowly

recognized as your own, that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper into the world,

determined to do the only thing you could do—

determined to save the only life you could save.

In a way that's what this theme of the Shamanic Illness is about. It's about claiming your life, claiming your own life, not just being part of something, a role, a well-defined identity that you can trot out at social occasions, which is how normal society works. It's how relationships also work, psychologically we adopt roles. There's nothing wrong with division of labour and all the rest of it, but we are in a role, and in this initiation that is the Shamanic Illness, we are stepping outside of that.

There's something very powerful that wants to claim us. And it can force the issue, so to speak, by making us ill. In my mid-30s I had a fatigue for a few years. I call it fatigue rather than tiredness, because I wasn't tired in a normal sense. I just couldn't carry on in the way I had been. The fatigue was like the plug had been pulled, there was no energy there. I realized that I'd taken my life force as my own to use, and that's not how it is, you are used by it, we are in the service of life. Life has this plan, this blueprint, this something or other, this destiny, this fate, the something writ for us in a gentle living sort of way, where we have choice all along, and it's about responding to that, it's about going yes to that.

So I'd been I'd been very wilful, overseeing a Buddhist set-up in London - several communities, businesses, a public centre, all according to certain ideas. Ideas which I’d stopped believing in, but still I pushed myself to do this thing, that maybe it would come right somehow. I was doing it to kind of prove something to myself, which isn’t necessarily all bad, and to the people around me. After I'd been running it for a while, we somehow pulled it all together and it reached stability, because it had been in a bit of a crisis. As that point approached, I started going into a kind of meltdown, in which I could apply myself to nothing, unless it was like this mysterious thing called Shamanism which was buzzing around in my head, or astrology as well, they both of spoke to me.

When I listened to that kind of inner ambrosia, for that's how it felt, instead of listening to these ideas from outside myself, this Buddhist tradition and the teacher, I had all the energy I wanted, I was full of fire. I'm not saying the ideas were wrong, but they weren’t mine, and I’d been using them in the wrong way, trying to change myself from the top down, so to speak, instead of allowing the depths to speak on their own terms.

I think this is central to the recovery from the Shamanic Illness: learning to listen to something deep within yourself - to the Spirits. And acting on that, having the courage to do so. It may not make sense from an ordinary point of view, it may be very threatening to your ordinary life and to what other people around you think. I had to leave the whole life I was in and the friends I had and a lot of people who were prepared to say you've got it wrong. "Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice." I had to leave all of that. It took me right through my 30s, this process, this turning about.

It was a turning about in the sense that my point of reference underwent a major shift from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’, so to speak. It had always been considerably ‘in here’ – I’d been attempting to practise Buddhism, after all - but it shifted decisively in that direction: my point of authority, my guidance, was now within, even though it took me some years to fully trust that. I would slip in and out of it. But it was enough to catapault me out of the life I had, my whole world, and to start afresh.

So there was this voice within, in that deeper place that is beyond the narrow self, that had its own agenda for me. It was, in a way, who I’d always been, without knowing it. That is what these crises do. They remind us of who we are in a deeper way, that we have, so to speak, forgotten, and we need re-initiating into that, because it is so outside who we have been up until now.

Initiation is something we don't have in a formal sense in our culture. In some traditional cultures, you get the thing with the boys where they'll get chucked out into the wilderness, and they’ve got to learn to survive. There's maybe certain physical scars put on them, all that sort of thing, they're taken away from the women, they're brought into the world of the men, it's time for that. Women have their own initiation when they become capable of having children and all of that. Giving birth is of course an initiation, and men don’t have that, which is why initiations need to be created for them. For one thing, men need to learn to bear suffering, something that happens to women naturally through childbirth.

We don't have ritual initiations, and sometimes people bemoan that. “We haven't got initiation so we can never discover this profound thing, we can never move on to these next stages properly, we never become proper adults, because it is initiations that move us on in this way. “

I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. It's not the Chaos Shamanism way of looking at it. The ordinary way of looking at it, the religious way if you like, is that you have these forms and you have to go through them to come out the other side initiated. Chaos Shamanism always says form is secondary, it's finding the meaning of these things, and living that. So what is at the heart of initiation? At the heart of initiation is something new being born in you that isn't just a rearrangement of the old, and you need to be opened up in order for that to happen.

This is why in in the rituals you get put through these quite extreme circumstances. They demolish you, you don't know who you are anymore, maybe you're naked in the darkness, you don't have a name anymore, you're waiting for a new name to come. All these sort of things create a space in which the old has to die – or at least is suspended. That's what happens when you go into a sweat lodge: it's a death and a rebirth, you go naked into the darkness, and you come out reborn, as a new person. So these forms just point to that and they can help with that.

But - and here’s the Chaos point – initiation is something that happens anyway. Life initiates us anyway if we're open to it, if we're lucky, painful as that can be. Many people, maybe most people, are content just being normal, they don't want anything outside of normal and that's fine, that's who they are. They have their own particular path to do, and life will still initiate them on to the next stage in the usual kind of way.

But if you're reading this, then there's something else going on that needs to be listened to, the ongoing initiation into the new, that life becomes once you’re on this path. Life may initiate you from the outside, you can lose all sorts of things, particularly if you're not being open in the way that the universe wants. The Spirits have chosen you, you could say, and they’re not going anywhere. You may lose people close to you, they may die, you may lose your job, you may lose your health, you may lose your money, all these things can happen that are really painful. They demolish us. Well these things can happen anyway, but sometimes they happen for this purpose of taking us apart, so this new thing can be born. Or rather, so that we can decide at long last, after many trials, to claim it, as in the Mary Oliver poem.

It can be a long slow process, and it brings us back to the health thing, the Shamanic Illness. People can lose their health, and I think when the illness is hard to diagnose, that is particularly key, it is particularly showing us, look there's something you need to listen to. And then you may gradually, over the years, get well. I mean even now, 30 years later, I will get twinges of this fatigue if I start pushing myself, if I have too much of a plan about what I'm going to do, and I start doing it. So I'll do 10 minutes gardening, and then I just can't do anymore, not because I haven't got the capability, but because of the way I'm going, “right I'm going to get all of that done”, the Spirit goes no no no, we'll decide what you're going to get done, not you, just go at it in a gentle reasonable sort of way, and we'll tell you when to stop and start, and when you're functioning from Spirit you can keep going forever, you’ve got all the health you need.

I’ve emphasised the hard to diagnose illnesses as particularly suggestive of Spirit being at work. But it can easily be more straightforward than that. You regularly hear about how, say, cancer has changed someone. I mean, the Spirits really means business, they are prepared to kill you if you don’t yield to them. They have a different perspective on death to us, and they are not fluffy! They demand everything of us.

So this Shamanic path is a serious thing, your physical as well as your psychological survival may depend on it. It is not an add-on for Sundays. It is the most important thing in your life, it is the sine qua non of everything else. And it is deep, its roots go as deep as existence itself, into the vast, bottomless abyss that is the original Greek meaning of the word Chaos.