SHAMANISM and CHRISTIANITY

Been wrestling with Jordan Peterson and the storyteller Martin Shaw. Public intellectuals who claim that Christianity is an advance on the pagan religions. Lying in bed this morning, prostrated with the lurgy, I felt my heels dig in at a deep soul level. They are both wrong, and I'm not having any of it! It is their own need for certainty, and cheaply bought. It leads to dominant behaviour over other faiths and even over whole cultures.

True faith is more subtle than that. That is why I am Shamanic. There is no holy book, no holy founder, no historical event on which to base an easy certainty. Just you and the natural world as a living presence. It is the original way, always there to fall back on in a simple act of remembrance. Of course, you could in turn view Shamanism as 'better' than what came after. There is no stopping some people. But I think it less easily lends itself to that, as there is less that is tangible to centre such a belief around.

 

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FOOLS CROW and CHRISTIANITY

What I really object to in Christianity is their attitude of thinking themselves 'better' than other traditions. And in particular as representing some kind of advance on indigenous ways, which become 'primitive' by implication. Christians may conceal this attitude, but it is there as soon as you view Jesus as a unique historical event. It is a hidden poison.

The Native Americans had Christianity forced upon them. Of course they did: being a more advanced religion, it was for their own good. Nevertheless, an accommodation can be reached. Here is what Fools Crow, a great 20th century Sioux Medicine Man, says:

"I am still a practising Roman Catholic. I go to Mass once or twice a month. At the same time, we live according to the traditional religious beliefs and customs of our people, and we find few problems with the differences between the two. Many things we believe about God are the same.

"Today, most Sioux feel as we do, but it was not always this way. Some of the things the new faiths said were hard to take, especially their belief that we did not know the true God and that Sioux medicine and ceremonies were things of the devil. So we rejected these views until their positions began to change."

 

 

Above is the book on Fools Crow that I'm reading. There are two of them by Thomas E Mails. The 2nd is called 'Wisdom and Power'

RAIN Part 1

We come on to Water in this exploration of the Medicine Wheel, with Chaos as our foundation. And so it's also an exploration as we go along of what Chaos might mean. The term is there because we're in a unique position. We don't have tradition, and that is a loss but it's also a gain. It means we're free to delve into the essence of all these different Shamanic ways you find around the world. There's something universal about them. What is it that is universal? What is at the heart of them, what are they all getting at? Chaos Shamanism is about remaining close to the heart of Shamanism, and asking these kinds of questions.

It's the connection to Nature, to the Natural World that is fundamental. The softness and the care the natural world gives us, which brings us straight into Water, the South of the Wheel, or rather Rain. Water is in a way an abstraction, though it's not really, it’s alive to our imaginations, but it kind of is abstract because it's a generality, whereas Rain is more specific. You can see it running down the window pane like tears: tears of sorrow, tears of joy. That's the place we’ve arrived, we're in something very personal now.

We began with this bigger thing, the Sun, the element of Fire: warmth, initiation, inspiration, new life bubbling in, and where does it go to? Well it can go straight across the Wheel into the body as a sort of fated event. A new phase of life, arising naturally and inevitably. And it also goes around the Wheel as well, into the emotions, and that's where we learn how to live with it. It's Fire that keeps our emotions bubbling up, we don't have control over what we feel, our feelings are a mystery. In fact we don't even know what we're feeling half the time, let alone where the feelings come from. Well, particularly and maybe schematically if you're a bloke, and particularly if you haven't got much water in your chart astrologically. We still have strong feelings, it just takes longer to know they are there.

So that's the first task of this place of Rain: to pay attention to what you're feeling, all the time. That happens in your body - in the trunk of your body, in your heart, in your stomach, right through you. In your vitals. This is the big learning of the Water place. Paying attention to feeling, and living from that. It’s what we forget to do. Maybe we are even deluded enough to think we are rational creatures who operate from reason! Research has shown, as if it is needed, that we make decisions emotionally, and we espouse beliefs emotionally. Reason is applied post hoc as justification, that is all it is. We live from emotions anyway, so we may as well be aware of them, be honest about them. Otherwise we are just an unconscious human being, and who wants to be that?

Why is Water the element of feeling? Because it moves a bit, and yet is contained. It's not like Air or Wind, which moves all over the place unrestrictedly, which is more like the Mind. It's not like Earth, which is fixed like the body. And it's not like Fire either, which moves pretty fast also, it roars upwards, soaring inspiration. But feeling nevertheless moves – we talk about being moved by something. And yet it's also contained. So Water describes well these currents that go through us. Water IS that. These indigenous correspondences aren’t just symbols standing for something, they ARE that thing, because they partake of its nature, as we have just seen in the case of Water.

So we pay attention to what we feel, and we try and live from that place.

The emotion of trust belongs here in the South. I've learned to come from trust in the way that I do the videos on which these written pieces are based. In the way I teach, I haven't even got a notepad with headings written on it. I start with a few ideas to talk from and I just let it unfold, and that means I often surprise myself, there is room for the Spirit to come in with its halfpenny worth, that wouldn’t be possible if I had it all planned out. That approachwould kill it for me, I wouldn’t take the joy that I do.

There is something very traditional about this approach, which with a live audience could be called responsive. You are trusting in the process, that is where we begin. I mean, you need to know what you are talking about, you need a proper background and training. But then you throw that up in the air and let Spirit have its way, according to who you are talking to. Spontaneity.

Trust in life is the foundation when we are newly born. We trust in our mother, our existence is founded on implicitly trusting that we will be taken care of. That's where our psychological security comes from. So in a way you could argue the basic emotion is trust. And we're not just cared for by our physical mother. When we get older our physical mother has done her job, and so we can release her from that, thank her for that, and we discover the Earth is our real mother. The Earth takes care of us. The Earth is also red in tooth and claw, she is challenging, and we cannot ignore that. But for now, we're just concentrating on this benign caring aspect, which we learn to trust in as adults, ideally as a natural development from the trust we had in our parents.

I used to have a traditionally trained Native Canadian guy come and stay with me. You know how nowadays if someone's telling a story, they have it all prepared beforehand, and then they tell it, and that's great. I love going to storytellings myself, and telling them myself sometimes. They belong to the North, to Air and Wind, so we'll come to that. It is stories, scientific or otherwise, that tell us our place in the cosmos and show us how to orient.

Anyway,back to the South and trust. So this Native friend, he didn't work in our way. First of all, he didn't need to prepare his stories, because he'd been traditionally trained in dozens and dozens of them. He’d been sort of singled out as a youth, all right here's a sort of wise man or healer or whatever, and he was trained in the tradition and he knew all the stories, it was an oral tradition. He knew the meanings and how to expound them. So at a storytelling he would ask people to ask him questions about something that was relevant to their life at the moment. One person would ask a question, then another, and then another, and at a certain point a story would present itself to him to tell in response to the audience, and that's what he would do. He wouldn't necessarily give a neat explanation for why that particular story, but that's what he would do, and that's a certain kind of trust. You just trust in what's happening, and that enables you to be responsive.

You can easily tell the difference can't you, between someone who is reading out a script, and someone who is talking off the cuff? Watch my short videos on youtube at Chaos Shamanism to see what I mean. This piece is an edited transcript of a spontaneous talk. If I had been reading out a pre-prepared script, it would no doubt be better English and tighter, but it would also lose some flow. Sometimes of course it's necessary to read out a paper or whatever, but it's not half as alive, because what matters is that kind of spontaneity and play, and the opportunity for the speaker to be fully and easily him or her self.

This brings out another aspect of the Rain element, which is also the child as a stage of life: namely, spontaneity and play. That is how the child lives, and it is what we often need to re-learn as adults, instead of thinking we need to be dutiful and serious all the time. Children know what they want in a straightforward way. We adults don't always know what we want. We can end up confused. But kids know what they want. We need to go back to that, we need to keep it in the first place, not even go back to it. We need to always keep that playful element. I like to sometimes read children's books - Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, stuff like that. It brings you back into that. And it is vital for creativity. This Water place is also a place of creativity, because if your creativity isn't play, it's not really the full shebang, it's got a big bit missing. This is a point Jung made, just to quote an authority! So the videos behind these pieces I'm doing are play for me. I've got to enjoy them or I won't really communicate my being, because it's communicating my being as much as the words I use that matters. And hopefully in reading this you will be able to hear me talking and partying!

Play becomes joy, the rain on the window pane as tears of joy running down. Joy is different to ordinary happiness and contentment, which occurs when there's something you wanted and you've got it. It's dependent on the external: you've got a happy family, you've got a good job, you've got all those things, and you're content and you're happy, and that's great and that's good when that happens. But then there's something else, there's an inner joy when the spirit flies, when we're answering a call deep within us and living from that it. If we are expressing and creating from that place, then there's joy, and it can happen amidst worldly misery. It has the spontaneity that the child has in his or her play, so in a way the child experiences joy too, and as adults we experience joy when we remember to go back to that child place and trust, whatever our circumstances.

The child in a way has a naïve trust, and we have a different type of trust to find. It's not just a naive trust, although it contains that child-like attribute. It is a trust that comes from the fact that in many ways the world cannot be trusted, but still we trust in the benignity of the universe. Actually I think faith is a better word than trust here. I’ve been using trust because that is what came down to me, but it’s too psychological. Faith has a bad name, because it has connotations of blindness. But that isn’t what I mean. Faith connects us more explicitly to the Great Spirit, the Great Mystery, to something Other that we cannot know, but which we trust implicitly and which is the foundation of our life. How irrational is that? Faith is the confidence we have in life in a general way. Confidence itself comes from fides faith, and con with. Confidence is irrational, because it assumes a good outcome with knowing it.

It is faith that gives the emotional strength that is the potential of the South. Without faith, we cannot be both resilient and sensitive. Some people are very tough because they have thick skins, and that is all. But be like Armadillo, I say: develop a tough skin, put yourself in the fray; but keep a soft heart.

The story of Job in the Old Testament is illustrative of the type of faith that I mean, though I don’t necessarily appreciate what God did to the poor man. Job was a righteous and prosperous man, and Satan said to God that Job had faith in God only because he protected him. So God set out to prove Satan wrong, and utterly destroyed his life. Job considered the destruction to be God’s will, but nevertheless maintained his faith in God. So Satan was proved wrong.

This is the type of faith that I mean. That however bad things get, we do not shake our fist at the Great Spirit, we do not go into blame mode. We find ourselves able to keep our faith in life. This is a very deep and rare thing. But the testing we have as adults, the suffering and disappointments we inevitably experience, give us the opportunity to look deeper, beyond outward circumstance. Life in this sense forges us.

Chaos Shamanism is not a fluffy path. It looks at the darker, painful side of life full in the face, it demands fortitude of us – what we have come to call trauma can be this kind of character-forming vicissitude. And within that, we find faith and joy. A deep light shines from our eyes.

And here is the 10 min video on which this piece is based:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_aAhlel3w

THE SUN Part 2

 (Continuing the series on Chaos Shamanism)

The irruption of the Sun in a big way into our lives can cause a crisis. We maybe have one big one in our lives, a turning point, or maybe we have more than one. The shamanic illness is such a crisis. It's a crisis of something new trying to come in. We can go through this whole thing and we may not know what it is for much of the time. Sometimes we do know, it's like it's this thing to be claimed, though we may not be ready for it. Sometimes we know where we're going, we know there are these qualities, these gifts in us but we're not ready, the old has to be demolished first. We might think we're ready, but we're not, and it's like the spirit knows, and will hold us back. A bit of help from someone who’s been through this kind of thing – who maybe has a sense of the Spirits knocking at your door – can make a big difference. Help you start to anchor you to the new reality that is coming upon you.

 

So sometimes these times of change, of crisis, of illness even, of unknowing, can go on and on for years. I spent about three years in the early 90s where anything I tried to do outwardly just seemed to go wrong: it just didn't work, it always just went to pot. But if I listened to the inner voice that was emerging, that was drawn to Shamanism, then I felt fine. But even that was a slow and gradual thing. It took its time, it had its own course. We're not in charge: that's what it showed me. This is one of the great learnings that we get from the Sun, because this is where Spirit comes in, it feeds into the rest of the Wheel. It comes in the East, the Sun, and it then informs the other directions.

Or you could say it goes straight from the East across to the West, you could look at it like that as well, because opposite the East is Earth, Soil, which is body, which is Incarnation. So it's Spirit coming into matter, and it's outside of our control. Spirit events are outside of our control, and Earth events are outside of our control. Take the body: we have two arms, two legs, we're human, and we didn't choose that. We didn't choose to be born and we won't choose our moment of death, probably. We don't choose when we get ill. So similarly with these Spirit events. The Sun is inspiration, and it is well-known that we don’t choose that, inspiration comes calling at a time of its choosing. This insight is a great antidote to the western myth of the lone hero carving his place against a hostile nature. That heroic myth is vital – it gives courage and a sense of adventure – but it needs to be in the service of nature, or the feminine, if you like. It tends to think it is top dog, and that is where it gets out of balance.

 

The axis across the middle of the Wheel is called the Blue Road. It's the axis of Fate, you could say. And running from North to South is the Red Road, the Good Red Road as it gets called. You could call it the axis of Free Will. We have choice here, because it is Water and Air, Emotion and Mind, and that’s where we can manoeuvre, that’s where we have choice about what thoughts and feelings we’re going to give free rein to, and what we are going to keep at bay and not act on, or not let take over our minds. And that then provides fertile soil for when the Blue Road activates, when Spirit comes in. It has more of a place to land. This is for later, but I just thought I’d bring in this bigger picture briefly.

 

I just wanted to say a bit about a bit more about the nature of these crises. You get them delineated in Psychosynthesis, which is a sort of slightly Jungian Psychotherapy School. A guy called Assagioli started it, he was around at the time of Jung. He has this thing called the Self (a bit like Jung.) It's kind of transpersonal, and at certain times in life it's time for a new element of Self to be born, but the old has to readjust itself, because when a new element of Self is born, it's not an add-on. It's a new centre, like when I wrote at the start of the Shamanic Illness chapter about a shift in authority. There's a new centre to us, and everything has to be re-arranged, our whole life has to be re-arranged around that. Of course, that is often a crisis, and then eventually we know what it is we have to do, what it is we have to accept, what it is we have to live from. It can be like, “I can't carry on living like this,” we can get driven to that point. This is how Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, sometimes works for an astrologer. And once you’ve given in, so to speak, something new can happen. When you stop doing that, it can be tremendous relief, like letting go of what had become a great burden.

 

You can see these periods of change starting sometimes when the energy starts to go out of something that you've been strongly engaged in, and it's time for it to die, so that a bigger self can be emerge. It’s like you fall out of love, but you don’t notice it at first. The enthusiasm, the passion you had: you suddenly notice, oh it's been leeching out, it's not there anymore. It's dying, and you maybe find that hard to recognise or accept, so you struggle to get it back again.

But that's not the way to go. The way to go is to trust it. We'll get to trust when we do the South. But it's a big trust process. There is something new to be found, and you have to trust in that, even though you may not know what it is. But of course, the human tendency is to scrabble for a handhold in what has the become the loose and sliding shingle of our old life.

 

The East, the Sun, is the Timeless. The South is the Past, the West is the Present and the North is the Future. You can get the sense of a design, a pattern to your life at these times, when you're strongly in the East, it's like suddenly there's illumination, and it's outside of time. I was watching a Siberian woman called Snow Raven, you can look her up on YouTube. She gave a long interview, and she says that her people, whose culture is strongly shamanic, believe that everything is always happening at once, there is no past, present and future. And they're quite right. She puts it in terms of belief, but really it needs to be an experience. It's hard for us to experience that as human beings much of the time, it’s not really a place to live from. We need ordinary reality most of the time, or we’ll get out of balance. But it's good as a belief that you maybe have a sense of on a day-to-day basis, but which opens out into mystical experience at special times. When the Shaman is doing his journeying, for example, and is with the Spirits. Beliefs are OK, they are very useful pointers, providing you have some kind of feeling for their veracity, and not just something you want to be true, which is the norm for human beings. Everything at all times happening at once: it's not something we can put into words or understand in any kind of normal way. But that is the light of the Sun for you. Take a light particle: Einstein told us they don’t experience time, they arrive as soon as they leave. So there’s a connection!

I also want to say something about teachers, who we also find in the East. They are the bringers of light, of inspiration, they show it to us, they remind us of it in ourselves. Teachers perform such a great service, and they've also got a bit of a bad name! They've always been up to their tricks, one way or another, because they are human, but they also bring gifts. A good teacher needs to be personally ready to teach, in other words in good relationship with his own shadow. He will have a shadow, he will have all those usual things that we have - self-doubt, anxiety, insecurity, anger, cruelty, a pretty bunch. We'll come to the shadow later, but we do have all those potentials within us as part of being human. We don't like to admit it, we like to think we're a good person who doesn't have things like that.

 

Sometimes you can learn as much from the teacher's faults as you can from what he has to offer. A teacher usually does have some gifts to offer, they have something to say and you can learn from that. But usually, well invariably in my experience, there's something out of balance also going on around them, and it becomes a matter of can you live with that? Can you even see it? That's the first thing you learn, is to be able to even see their Shadow. Can you see the way that they need everyone to love them? Or how they need everyone to believe what they believe? Or the way they demonize and cast out anyone who doesn't fit in, anyone who criticizes them, reduces it to their problem? Or the way, maybe, they are fuelled by ambition and the desire to make a name for themselves – which is legit and even necessary in a worldly context, but not OK in this context, at least not too much of it.

All these sorts of currents tend to swirl around them, to a greater or lesser degree, and you can really learn from that. And actually, that can also be what saves you. Because sometimes we go in there with a teacher, and yes it helps, and our own kind of metaphysical connection strengthens, we learn to take it more seriously. But we also lose something, we get drawn into their orbit. We get drawn into that energy field around them, which has its own kind of rules and hierarchy, that people will create, with the best will in the world on the part of the teacher. Unless the teacher is really sure of himself, it is then hard for him not to feed off that adulation to some degree and so become complicit. But of course, he may well have catalysed it in the first place.

 

One of my litmus tests with a teacher is, can I hang out with them in an ordinary kind of way? Can I feel them, or do they have a shell around them? Can they listen to what I say, or do they always have to have the upper hand, to be in the teacher role?

 

So we give our power away, if only because everyone else is doing so. It is very hard to resists these collective dynamics. A good teacher will know how and when to hand it back. He won’t provide you with answers, he won’t tell you how to live, he’ll always be nudging you in the direction of trusting your own inner guidance. That is the only job of a teacher! Not to teach you stuff, not to tell you how things are, but to get you to trust your own nascent wisdom. ‘Educate’ comes from the Latin ‘educare’, to lead out what is already there.

 

Realistically, we are rarely ready to fully trust our own inner guidance, though not many people will admit to that. So the teacher accepts that people need a person and a teaching to look to, to rely upon, to some degree, and that may go on for years. People can easily spend their whole lives making just a small shift in this respect. And that is fine. They are doing what they need to do.

 

There are plenty of teachers who won’t throw you back on yourself, because they need you as a disciple. Of course, they will claim to be promoting your metaphysical independence, and that they don’t want followers. Of course they will say that, they all do. And you need to be able to stand back – with the gap of Chaos Shamanism, that ability to stay close to your own experience and not be thrown off it – and see the actual situation.

 

It won’t win you any friends if you talk too readily about what you see, because people need to be in that vortex around the teacher, and who knows what it is they have to learn? But it will save you, if you act on it, if you trust it. Because it means you are trusting your own voice, your own inner guidance, in the face of a collective who do not want you to, who will do their best to make you doubt what you see if you speak it. Speak it if you can, there is a test of courage! I have been in that situation, and it is painful, but it can really forge you. It is, however, temperamental. Some people will just slip away quietly, and good on them.

 

So in this sense, we can be grateful to the teacher, maybe through gritted teeth, for his or her egotism. When we see it and go our own way, maybe after some struggle – because the teacher has, after all, helped us, and that can make it hard also to doubt him – then we trust our own inner guidance as never before, we can really start to own ourselves in a deep way. We come to the centre of who we are.

 

And here is the 10 min video on which this piece is based.

THE SUN

THE SUN Part 1 (Chaos Shamanism series continued)

I'm going to launch into the Wheel proper, so to speak. In other words, the four directions around it. We've been looking at the centre of the Wheel, its chaotic heart. Chaos in the sense of that mystery out of which our experience is always unfolding: our thoughts, our feelings, where do they come from? We don't know. Why are we here, what's the universe about, how did it begin, how will it end, where did life come from? All these are unknowable and unanswerable. We live from that mystery, and the purpose of the Wheel is to keep bringing us back to that, because that's when we're in the centre: when we know who we are, when we know we know nothing, and that we can know nothing. We have something, but it can't be put into words. It's like we know that we're part of this whole shebang, this whole universe and we kind of know we're connected to it all, we feel it. I reckon that's what happens after we die: we get connected to all of that, and we remember oh yes of course, why did I think I was separate?

 

We will now unfold the Wheel into its four aspects of Fire, Water, Earth and Air. East, South, West and North, in that order. Google Medicine Wheel stones and you’ll get the idea of what it looks like. I suggest you have a Wheel while you are reading this, it will make it more experiential. You just need four stones, one in each direction, use your local church to work out which way is East.

 

You can paint them if you want – yellow, red, black and white, in that order. It is what I have done, but you don’t need to, in fact I think you gain something in having raw stone, so to speak. It can be anywhere, maybe in your garden or maybe on your table, maybe you take it down sometimes. But it's good to have it as a sort of reference point. More than that, it becomes a symbol, it gets in you, it even carries your dream. I had that when I was in a caravan for a while, between lives, so to speak. I had a Medicine Wheel outside, on the grass, the sheep would tread on the stones and chip the paint! And the Wheel was just like carrying my life forward, I didn't quite know how it was going to go, but I could feel it was carrying the dream of my life. So the Medicine Wheel can do that. It can be your whole life.

 

But without further ado, let's go on to specifics. Because what I want to talk about is each direction, or rather each element, in turn and what they’re about and how to bring them into balance, beginning with the East, beginning with the Sun, with Fire, because that's where things begin.

 

As I say, I want this to be experiential. So have your Wheel somewhere, but also experience the Sun. The Sun's just come out just now as I'm writing. Go outside and experience it, let it just hit your face, just enjoy the sense pleasure of that. Okay, nothing might go through your mind, and you might not have any great insights, but nevertheless you are connecting to an ancient symbol, an ancient reality. A symbol doesn't just stand for something, it IS the thing, it IS the new life of the East. That's what Fire is, it's the new life in us that's always bubbling up. The Sun brings new life and growth literally in the natural world, and it is the same thing with our Spirit.

 

So there's that to be connected with, it's always there; it's in the nature of life to be always moving on, it doesn't stand still, it's always unfolding into the next stage. Who knows, the next stage might even be death? But that doesn’t mean less life, it's just life in a way that we don't necessarily understand.

 

We can sometimes have a sense of a design for our lives, a larger pattern that peeps through at moments of great change, or when we look back on our lives. Maybe even our death has that sort of sense – like Socrates, who needn’t have died when he did, but his daimon suggested otherwise. But death is also a cut-off point, it is a complete mystery. So the Sun is also all that level of things. And it's initiation. So there's all sorts of things we can talk about here.

 

But as I say, begin by going out and experiencing the Sun. There's an ancient power to it that can speak through you, it will feed you, and you’ll be paying attention to that new life in you. It's so important to do that, because of course we get caught up in the everyday. Just keeping life going life can just be about survival, it's maybe a luxury to think in terms of creating and bringing in the new. It's like, I'm just trying to put bread on the table, I'm just trying to make sure I can pay the next gas bill, I'm trying to get the kids off to school. Fair enough. But however much there is of that, there's always the new life, there's always at least a trickle of that, and you need to remain with that feeling. You may not be able to do an awful lot with it. But it may be just your ordinary life that has that trickle of new life, you may have young kids, you're watching them grow and you're keeping them growing, that is the new life it. Or it might be a new job that interests you in some way. So Fire may be coming out through the ordinary, or it may not be. If the ordinary is only needs must, then you need to find it one way or another.

 

Start inwardly: what is it in you that wants to live ,that isn’t being lived, that you would love to be doing, or or that you feel you have to do? Often we're on this kind of path because there's something we have to do, it's the daimon. The daimon comes in like an archangel from the Sun, from the East. So think about that in your life, what do I HAVE to do?

 

It can be good to look back on your life as well, look back on what's done it for you during the course of your life; what did it for you when you were a kid, what gave you that sense of magic and wonder and openness and imagination, adventure, excitement? It's all those kinds of qualities that are in the Fire of the Sun. And what did it for you as a teenager, and what did it for you in your early 20s and so on? Maybe write it all down and look at the connecting golden thread. You'll see there's this bigger design that's been unfolding all the time.

 

When I was a kid, there was a picture book with a wizard in it, and that has always stayed with me, it had a sense of wonder for me. In my teens, it was the occult, reading about that, that fascinated me. I liked to wear a dressing gown that stood for the magic. And eventually as an adult, after some wrong turns, it became Shamanism and Astrology: both grab me from deep within, and have done for years. And you can see the thread connecting all those things.

 

So trace your life back in those sorts of terms, come to know yourself in that way, to take that side seriously. Because society at large doesn't necessarily take it seriously, why would it? It's not the job of society at large to take it seriously, its job is to make sure that we're safe and that there is prosperity. That's what it's there to do. We can feel a bit railroaded by that, and maybe also by our parents’ ideas for us. But their job is just to get us to the point of being a functioning member of society. So there’s a good chance your aspirations and your imagination wasn’t affirmed, and that’s because most people are just normal, they are muggles, to use JK Rowling’s term for it. You just need to just claim it and take it seriously, and don’t rely on anyone else taking it seriously.

 

If you look back on your life, you'll see that when you were happiest, when you were most fulfilled, was when you were doing whatever that thing was that did it for you at the time. I had a big thing at the beginning of 2024, writing was no longer enough, whether it was books or regular posts for Twitter and Facebook. Something in me was going a bit mad, and I realized I had to speak. So I started making short videos, and everything came right, I flourished again. There's something in me that comes out when I speak, that isn’t there when I write, that is needed in the world, it’s not just about me, these daimonic callings usually aren’t.

 

Those things that drive you mad when you don't do them, that's the daimon, and it's ruthless. It may well sacrifice things The philosopher Kierkegaard arguably sacrificed his engagement, because his daimon required him to be unmarried. The same was required of the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, via a dream interpretation from Jung himself. The daimon is not necessarily interested in our happiness. All that matters to it is that we do the thing we're meant to be doing. It may not give us ordinary happiness, but it will give us joy, and that is something worth sacrificing a lot for. I saw a manic-depressive talking on a documentary, and he said the extended misery he went through was worth it for those moments with the angels that also came. You can find a good exploration of this theme in Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire.

 

Anyway, I’m making it sound more dramatic than it maybe will be for most of us. The point is there is always new life in us to be lived, and the Sun, the first point of the Wheel, if we spend time with it, will remind us of that, ask that of us, show us what that new life is.

 

And here is the 10 min video on which this piece is based:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhZSdOPE-Sk