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!
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