OF FIRE AND WATER: TAKING THE SPIRIT SERIOUSLY

I've been struggling with a knotty problem for some time. Any parent knows that a child is born with its own independent spirit that has nothing to do with you. We cannot be reduced to our DNA and environment. Studies of identical twins prove this, where they may have very different characters despite identical DNA and early environment. And yet when addressing the soul we often behave as though all we are is a product of DNA and environment. Some psychotherapists get very worked up with me when I point out the obvious corollary, which is that childhood conditions are not as formative as we are led to believe: such a belief is the product of a reductive materialist outlook that is often at odds with the psychotherapist's metaphysical beliefs.

Moving into the shamanic sphere, another corollary is that ancestral patterns are not as formative either. We make too big a deal of them because of the cultural belief that conditions - whether DNA or environment - are all, with the spirit almost an optional extra. If you are doing ancestral work, you need to root out this belief, or you will over-emphasise and so misunderstand its influence.

We do not take the spirit seriously enough, even though it is the strongest conditioning factor of all. We are not effects, or victims, of DNA and circumstance. Sure, trauma, that overused word, shapes us. But at bottom, it doesn't. I am wary of the 'trauma' peddlers and their message of victimhood. At bottom there is something pure and powerful that is beyond it, that is able to stand up to anything and make something of it, even though it may take decades. At bottom we are cause, not effect, and this is a real experience.

The soul and its origins are inherently mysterious. This does not suit a materialist scientific culture which wants explanations for everything. So we say yes of course we have a spirit, and then carry on as if we don't. We want scientific respectability, and we want words and reasons for everything, and the spirit doesn't work that way. 500 years ago it was heretical to deny the existence of the spirit. Nowadays it can be heretical to insist too strongly on its existence. You wouldn't find it asserted in a standard psychology book, yet it is the main part of who we are.

So what I've been struggling with is how to describe the relationship between the spirit and the influences it meets, whether DNA, family, culture or ancestry. I needed a metaphor, for there is no scientific explanation.

The metaphor came to me while driving in Scotland a few days ago: it is fire meeting water. The spirit is fire, and the conditions it meets are water. Our lives are the synergy between them, the hot steam that arises and transforms. This metaphor has a deeply traditional resonance, for what else is the steam within the Sweat Lodge?

Fire is cause, it is the living and moving element that will burn you if you come too close. "Trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home," sang the poet Wordsworth. The fire is sacred, it is an emanation of the Great Spirit, 'the holiest of everything', and our lives are for the same reason a sacred task.

Water is the containing element. It is the mother, and the conditions of our life, everything we are born into. Water too is sacred. It is the feminine to the fire's masculine.

Fire meeting water may be a gentle simmering over a long period, or it may be fiercely boiling, as at times of initiation. In any case, it is the most helpful way I know of thinking of who I am. It is metaphor not concept, so it speaks to the whole of me. And it has its roots in ancient conceptions of the elements, both European and American, and carries the power of that.

I view the fire as primary in any consideration of my life. In that way I am no longer tempted to reduce myself to my childhood or my ancestry. And because both the fire and the water are sacred, I trust the callings within me (fire) and the conditions I meet (water), testing as that they often are. My life is an ongoing synergy between fire and water.

I make a point of not looking for childhood or cultural or indeed any explanations of who I am. Childhood could just as easily have been a mirror for the propensities I arrived with, as it could have been the cause of them. At the same time, I hold my childhood closely, I feel it deeply. It has given me certain struggles that have forged me as an adult. I used to view it as a list of things that went wrong that I needed to correct. I don't view it like that any more, for who am I to judge the purposes of the sacred? My childhood was what it was, much of it is lost to memory, and that is as it needs to be, for we are not creatures of the past.

The fire burns in the present, while the water contains, but is not limited to, the past. Their synergy creates the future.

This elemental way of looking at who we are is to be found in the Medicine Wheel. We come from the East, Fire. It goes round the Wheel and interacts with the Water of ancestors and family, and in this way a personality is formed that inhabits a body and this world – the Earth of the West. The Air of the North gives the ability to stand back and have perspective on the crucible of Fire and Water: in that way we can co-operate with and hold the transformation process.

The Dragon-Dreaming

I haven't posted recently, because I have been writing a fantasy novel featuring Merlin. The idea came to me while travelling in Arizona at the end of March.  Here is a chapter I recently wrote: 

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Dragon-Dreaming

Winterfire rolled through the deep blue vault, a carpet of white cloud far below him, the sun huge and red on the horizon. His favourite game: chasing the sunset. Small hands were touching his scales, caressing them. That was nice. He did a back-flip for the sheer pleasure of it, and swooped up to find the sun had won the game.

Now the sun was directly above, and Winterfire stared directly at his old friend, as only dragons can, while he continued to roll high in the sky. Breakfast. Chasing the midday sun, his second favourite game. The sun that stoked his fires, built the reserves of cold truth-seeking flame.

There were the little hands again, stroking. And tickling. Now there were claps of thunder and bursts of coloured lights.

The hill at Fenny Castle shook slightly. It was night-time, and the surrounding levels were silent. The lights of Glastonbury shone in the distance. Earth. A distant memory stirred. A sense of urgency to visit something forgotten. The little caring hands became more insistent. The hill shook again.

Winterfire awoke for the first time in 1600 years. A full-sized dragon reared up from the depths of the hill and paraded itself atop Fenny Castle. At least, for those with eyes to see. And he was angry. This had been no natural sleep. He could feel the enchantment falling away in wisps about him. Morgaine. With a mighty thrust of his back legs, and a single beat of his wings, he was airborne. He soared upward and circled the skies above, breathing fire indiscriminately, roaring his rage. He was the power in the land, and he had been neutered by that woman.

The fairies were in his mind, speaking. It was a close-run thing, they were saying. We kept you here. Winterfire collected himself. The other Dragons of Avalon, what about them? Why wouldn’t she have glamoured and obliviated them also?

“We’re coming too,” he heard the fairies say. Winterfire swept down to the hill, and a multitude of fairy beings glimmered onto his back. He shot up at speed, and then glided the few miles to Glastonbury Tor. It was in a spirit of play, serious as the mission was. The fairies, who came in all sizes, from a few inches to ten feet high, could have simply wished themselves at the Tor. Winterfire’s trajectory too was driven as much by his intention as by his wings. They all lived close to the dreaming, they flashed in and out of the human world, and as such the normal rules of the possible were softened.

He landed on the summit of the Tor, and was startled to see the ruins of a church, only its tower remaining. He realised at that moment that he must have been gone a long, long time. And that the Dragons within the hill might be too far gone into the dreaming to return.

“The church and the people drove us away too,” said the fairies, who spoke as with one mind. “We kept a low profile after the church was built. It was the modern tourists who finally did for us. We’ve been worried about the Dragons for some time.”

Winterfire felt himself into the mound. Their sleep was very deep. It could go either way. They hadn’t been tended by the fairies in the way that he had. Three of them, each in their own cavern deep under the earth. There was a point in the sleep of Dragons beyond which they did not return to this world. Humans had always been prone to deny the dreaming, to see this world and nothing else. There were always those amongst the fairies who said why bother, why struggle to remain, because the humans did not even pay lip service any more?

The breathing of the Dragons was deep and expansive in the Otherworld, but barely perceptible in this world. They would not wake quickly, as he had, if they awoke at all.

Rosewing, who trailed beauty wherever she flew. Earthtreader, the most readily visible to humans, who would be easiest to bring back. And Phoenix, whose fire both destroyed and laid the seeds of renewal.

A lively breeze blew across the top of the Tor, funnelled by the church tower. The fairies leaped in the air, letting it carry them. Winterfire meanwhile was moving deep within the hill, calling the fairies down as he did so.

Many hands were soon tending to the sleeping dragons, as Winterfire entered their dreamings, which coalesced and fell away from each other, in rhythm with their shallow breathings.

Earthtreader was deep within a live volcano, flowing lazily with the lava, joyfully anticipating the next eruption, which would project him high into the sky above. Winterfire joined him, floating alongside in the cauldron of molten rock. Their minds touched, as he felt the fairy hands all about, urging the sleeping Dragon back to this world. Winterfire dreamed himself deep within the earth below, down to its molten core, stoking and goading it. Already there was a stirring within Earth-treader’s mind as he felt the touch of Winterfire’s. The liquid earth boiled and roiled from its very depths, while Winterfire continued to stoke it. The pressure grew and grew until it could no longer contain itself, and a massive wave surged upwards. The explosion was massive, a super-volcano. Winterfire reminded himself that this was the dreaming, where all things were possible, and to keep the connection with Earthtreader.

The sheer size of the explosion, far greater than he had anticipated, shocked Earthtreader out of his deep forever dream, towards the mind of Winterfire and into wakefulness.

“It was Morgaine,” said Winterfire. “Welcome back. You’ve been gone for 1600 years. We need to wake Phoenix and Rosewing. If it’s not too late.”

Earthtreader was slow to anger, unlike Winterfire. That would come later. He had a job to do. As the most present to this world, he would be most effective at drawing the other two dragons out of their much deeper dreamings.

Phoenix would be the easier case, albeit still very tricky. Earthtreader dived into her mind and her dreaming, where she spent her days and nights guarding a vast pile of dragon-gold. The fairies were already there, skipping over the hoard, picking up nuggets of it and pretending to run off with them. This was beginning to irk Phoenix, who had been sleeping the peaceful sleep of ages, gradually merging with the gold. There was already a golden sheen to her scales. Once the merging was complete, she would be lost to this world.

“It’s not yours,” whispered Earthtreader, mind to mind. “It can’t be yours. These are the riches you reveal with your fire. Remember the people, the people you destroy and renew. The world needs you.”

He felt his words land in Phoenix’s mind, but she continued to dream, to relish her hoard. Her sleep was, however, disturbed at the edges. She fretted at the thieving fairies, while staring blankly at the mind of Earthtreader, unable to entirely ignore it.

“You’ve been enchanted,” said Earthtreader more forcibly, “there is another world you have forgotten. Come with me.”

Phoenix had always been partial to Earthtreader, and her mind began to reach towards him, despite herself. She loved the dream she was in, she didn’t want it to end, not ever. Earthtreader felt the link was now strong enough for something more drastic. He joined her fully in the dream, and disappeared the gold. Phoenix brought it back, and Earthtreader disappeared it again. A tussle ensued, in which their minds drew closer together, while flashes of wakefulness glanced across Phoenix’s dragon mind. Earthtreader was gaining the upper hand, and pressed home his advantage. He was not up against the true dreaming, which would have been a more equal struggle, but the enchantment wrought by Morgaine, which he had himself already broken.

The dream gold was now gone. Earthtreader was holding it, as it were, behind his back, refusing to return it. Phoenix stared at him, shocked and confused, but realisation was slowly dawning. When it happened, it was very quick. She reared up and blasted flame over the remaining presence of the dream gold, that had been conjured up by Morgaine to entrap her. And with it her renewed life in this world began.

There was just Rosewing left in the enchantment. The fairies were busy caressing her, but none save Phoenix could detect her breathing. They were all able to enter her Otherworld, a canvas of spectacular yet subtle colours that were unknown in this world, where they drank in the beauty that surrounded and infused her. Rosewing seemed to entirely belong in this world. Phoenix, as another female, was able to move closest to her essence. She knew it would be touch and go. It was certainly not going to be a quick awakening, as it had been for herself and the other dragons.

Phoenix breathed the full force of her fire, stoked by the beauty of Rosewing’s world, over the sleeping dragon. This was not the brutal act it seemed, for dragons feed on each other’s fire. Within that fire fell a carpet of flower seeds, which as they unfurled would attract Rosewing’s gaze, drawing her into the beauty of this world. But it would take time, if indeed this was any longer possible. It was a sad, sobering moment. Dragon and fairy tears fell on Rosewing’s scales. There was love as well as beauty for her here, if any remembrance was to stir, if the memory itself of this world had not entirely vanished.

It was time to go. There was work to be done. The three Dragons rose as one into the night air, Earthtreader giving a mighty departing lash of his tail at the ruined church tower atop the Tor. The earth shook as it had not done for centuries, and the tower collapsed in a heap of rubble.

PROMETHEUS and THE MEDICINE WHEEL

 

FAITH

At the centre of ourselves, at the centre of the Medicine Wheel, at the centre of the universe lies faith. It is the all-encompassing pillar that supports life, the world-tree on whose branches can be found the multiplicity of life. Faith is the sense of the sacred, of that which has highest value. It is the prioritising of what the Lakota call Wakan Tanka - the 'holiest of everything'. Keep that priority, and you will remain fundamentally on track.

Faith is something we have lost, that we even look down on as irrational. But you look at the faith that went into building the old churches, the huge resources and sacrifice over hundreds of years. It was deep ceremony. Sure, there was a fair bit of nonsense around it as well, and the requirement to believe in a miraculous ancient event. But the sheer power and centrality of it to people's lives is evident, and it is the normal state of affairs for humanity. 

Shamanic faith is like this: it is the sense of the sacred power within the natural world, that is its foundation, that continually dreams it into being. Life is sacred. We can give thanks for our life, just for the simple fact that we exist, many times every day.

A SURE FOUNDATION

Why are there 4 directions? Because we have a left and a right, a front and a behind. These are the 4 basic ways we use to orient ourselves, to know where we are. This is the foundation of the Medicine Wheel - a philosophy and a symbolism that is as profound and intricate as you like, yet rooted in everyday experience. And who is it that we are? We are made of what the world is made of. It comes to us very concretely as Sun, as Rain, as Soil and as Wind. Or Fire, Water, Earth and Air. I call them Initiation, Emotional Awakening, Incarnation and Perspective. The Directions and the Elements interweave according to which Wheel you are using. Between them they tell you who you are and where to go.

This is the beauty of indigenous ways. They are rooted not in abstract concepts, or belief in the divinity of historical figures, but in immediate, concrete experience. They therefore provide the most reliable foundation from which to live.

During the Covid lockdowns I wrote a book on the Medicine Wheel. Buy it, leave a rating on Amazon, and I will give you a free astrology reading 😀

 

The cover of my next book, out in Dec. Actually, that's not quite true. The 1st in my fantasy trilogy, The Stolen Queen, is due out in June.

COMMUNITY

We all want community. But you're not going to find it, not if you are serious about being true to who you are. That is not what regular humanity wants, for whom belonging comes first. At best, you will have a few friends where you won't always agree, but where open discussion is still possible. Even then, such friends will come and go over the years. Maybe beyond that there are one or two friends where there is a spirit connection, like a breath of fine air, who have been sent to you, that endure, and who you know you will always cherish. But that doesn't make it easy, for the spirits still want us to learn  

SHAMANISM and THE MODERN WORLD

The great project of modern shamanism is continually to reclaim the natural human, within our headlong technological trajectory. It is a difficult task, and extremely interesting. Technology is natural to humans. In some ways we know better than the world, in many ways we do not. We need to work alongside humanity, and be wary of the counter-cultural assumption that it is all corrupt. That is a self-serving cop-out, a spiritual bypass.

 

THE UNIFYING MYTH OF SHAMANISM

The unifying Christian mythology of the West collapsed because it had separated itself from the natural world. The Spirit lay elsewhere. Nature was looked down upon, the province of the beasts. But we are nothing other than the natural world, it is she who nourishes us, cares for us, ensouls us. Shamanism understands this: it is its foundational living idea. We do not have a complex mythology to replace the Christian story. But we do have this one very simple story: nature is ensouled, and we are indivisible from her. That is enough. That story is deep enough and connected enough to carry a civilisation on its shoulders, one that will not this time collapse from its internal contradictions, much as the indigenous societies never seemed to collapse for this reason.

 

FAITH

Thinking out loud late at night in my van in the Peak District. Faith has always underpinned my life. I had a deep experience of it when I was 22, listening to a Buddhist talk about faith. I had a deep, joyful experience of homecoming. I felt I'd found something I'd been looking for all my life without knowing it. Buddhism was the nearest vehicle to hand. But there was always a wholeness, a soulfulness that was lacking.

 

Shamanism gives me that fuller experience of faith. Faith in what? Not in anything objective. That is why it is a nonsense to talk about the existence of God as if he can be objectively apprehended. It is faith in the subjective pole of existence, which begins with the personal experience of Spirit, and expands to the realisation that the one Spirit underlies and underpins everything.

 

Spirit is vast, compassionate, all-powerful, and all-knowing. It is not an aspect of life, it IS life. You look at what went into building the old churches, and it is apparent that our ancestors experienced a level of faith of which we have no conception. We truly live in the Dark Ages. 

 

This is why I object to the teaching of Shamanic healing ways as a mere add-on to other modalities, which may themselves have the need for rational respectability lurking behind them. That is all wrong, it is the cart before the horse.

 

Shamanism begins with the experience of faith in the Spirit, and in the natural world, to which we belong, as the expression of Spirit. You may or may not end up doing healing work, coming out of that foundation of faith, that takes years to build, and which is the stuff of life. Fools Crow's remarkable healings were always based in prayer to the Great Spirit, to 'the holiest of everything', as he more literally translated Wakan Tanka.

THE GREAT FORGETTING and THE GOD-SHAPED HOLE

The first task of Shamanism is to address The Great Forgetting in European culture, that we belong to the natural world. It began several thousand years ago with ancient Greek rationalism, and continued with the Old Testament dominion over nature given to man, along with Christianity's assigning of the world to the Devil. 

This divide was inherited by Science, and remains with us today in the form of the mind-body split. Its resolution is not so much an intellectual problem, as an experiential quest. Sheer time in nature is one way. Trance Dance, in which the body yields ecstatically to the spirit, is another way. Sweatlodge, that immersion in the elements in the context of community and prayer, is another.

 

CORE SHAMANISM and THE GOD-SHAPED HOLE 

There are a number of criticisms of the use of the word 'Core' in 'Core Shamanism', which you can find on ChatGPT. My criticism is that it tends to reduce Shamanism to a set of techniques, because there is no supporting cultural context, no deeply rooted mythology in which it would find its place. Such a mythology is centred around ultimate realities, around the Great Spirit, ‘the holiest of everything’, as Frank Fools Crow translated it.

We do not have such a mythology. But we can still come into deep relationship with the Great Spirit, with the Chaos, through paying attention to what gives life meaning and having the courage and resolve to live it. It is this that is truly ‘core’. Without this foundation well in place, your healing work will be superficial, and you will tend to try to create an identity out of being a healer, to fill the ‘God-shaped hole’ in your life.

TEACHER PLANTS

(From my current book, Chaos Shamanism: Reclaiming your Indigenous Soul.)

I feel qualified to say something about what are called Teacher Plants, even though it's not something I really do. This is because they were foundational for me back in 1978, all those decades ago, at the tender age of 20. A group of us found thousands of what used to be called magic mushrooms in the Mendip Hills in Somerset in the UK. We were all students at the University of Bristol. Over the next few months, I was taking them regularly, a lot at a time, 100, something like that. We had dried them to preserve them, and made a tea, which we drank.  It had a profound effect on me. I didn't have any kind of guidance or anything like that. I was on my own, which is how it's felt most of my life. I've never ended up with a teacher that I've been able to stick with. It's not like there's people I remember that I'll always look up to. It's more like I got taught stuff, but somehow the Spirits put me on this path where I have to work it out myself, and that's not a bad thing. The teachers I ended up around all had holes that were too big. A good thing about teachers with big holes is that you can develop a critical faculty, it helps you claim your power back. So thank you teachers for the big holes!

Anyway, I could probably have used a bit of guidance with the mushrooms. Over a period of just a few months, the autumn of 1978, these teacher plants - to use the modern parlance - helped me make my metaphysical quest central. They deepened me, friends noticed that I became more serious. They opened me up. Whenever I took them, I ended up in this deep place, though probably the predominant experience was not pleasurable. There were times when I was in the heavenly realms, it was beautiful. But quite a lot of the time, it was dark, there'd be a crashing depression descending on me, and my father's face would appear to me in this sort of demonic form, like Adolf Hitler.

I was always struggling to get away from these difficult experiences, always hoping the next trip would get back to being one of the nice ones.  It was decades before I looked back and realized that these so-called ‘bad trips’ are maybe best seen as initiations into the shadow. It was arguably a premature initiation into the shadow for me, because I wasn't able to do anything with it, I was just sort of thrown by it. But even then, it deepened me. The shadow may not be a pleasant experience, but it is a deep experience.

It is a deep experience because we are taken to meet our demons, which tend to live below the surface of conscious experience. We would rather not experience them, because they are painful and because it can feel humiliating to have to own that we have this darkness within us, it can demolish our ‘positive’ self-image in a way that many people cannot perhaps handle. So they remain below the surface, unacknowledged and sincerely projected onto others, who become the bad guys: politicians, parents, exes, neighbours. Maybe they merit being the bad guys in some ways, but it carries an extra charge, we make them worse than they are, we ‘awfulize’ them, it is very personal.

So I was initiated into a consciousness of this darker side of life. Of course my father wasn’t really a demon, he was just an ordinary guy with a marked authoritarian streak about who I was meant to be. He wasn’t even aware he was doing it. But I had spent my childhood subject to that, and here I was aged 20 being shown what it had done to me. It had made me authoritarian too, which I transferred into the spiritual realm, I became quite dogmatic. Being shown: it was the Spirits who showed me the psilocybin mushrooms, it was the Spirits (or you could say, the Unconscious) who then revealed to me my heavenly and shadow sides, and who then prevented me from finding mushrooms in any numbers ever again. People say to me it’s easy to find them, you live on Dartmoor, here is where to look. But there are never any there, and to be honest I’m not particularly bothered. These days I will very occasionally take mushrooms or LSD if they come my way, as a sort of inspirational re-set. I took Ayahuasca a couple of times in the Amazon in 1999. It is never world-shaking for me. I like it, I always have a good time these days, I think because I have a better relationship with my shadow. But I had the deep initiation they can give all those decades ago. It was foundational, and it is still with me.

These experiences gave me a new metaphysical centre. 18 months later I found myself being swept into a Buddhist group, where I wanted to make their practices a full-time thing. The strength of my response, its consuming nature, took me by surprise. I had thought of my metaphysical quest as just a side of me, a serious side, but not as central as it turned out to be. It was arguably something that was going to happen anyway, but the teacher plants certainly sped it along.

They were an initiation for me into what gave deep meaning to life. They opened me up, so that immediately following these experiences I fell in love with a young woman in an entirely consuming way. That was another initiation, coming hot on the heels of the first one. Nothing much came of it, I was heartbroken, but it was for the best: what a projection for an ordinary young woman to carry. It was a tough initiation into my own heart: I needed to be hurt, cauterised, and then spend the rest of my life remembering it, allowing the emotional and imaginative depths that it portended gradually emerge. Oh to have had someone to guide me in all this! But I’m not sure I could have listened. I was far too rebellious against anyone who appeared to be any kind of authority.

I've always felt about these plants that they can indeed be an initiation, but after that comes the real work. They are not an ongoing path in themselves. I was really glad when someone I was doing some astrology for, told me that they'd been working with a teacher in the Amazon jungle. They'd been taking Ayahuasca under his guidance, in a proper traditional way. The teacher said that after you've done your Ayahuasca sessions, the real work begins. The Ayahuasca is just a starting point. I thought good, that's what I've always thought, but nobody seems to say it. It's not a path in itself. It's an initiation, and occasionally we may return to for a bit of inspiration. Maybe it is an ongoing path for some, you can usually never rule anything out about anything. But I’m going to stick my neck out and say that for the great majority of us, it is not an ongoing path. It becomes a distraction if we treat it in that way, or even make a bit of a cult of it.

There seem to be plenty of people at the moment who assume that this is what Shamanism primarily IS: the ingestion of plant medicines. I have had the experience of someone finding out I do Shamanic things, and immediately wanting to know if I had access to plant medicines. Shamanism has its fashions like anything else, and this one will probably pass.

I met an academic researcher into teacher plants, and my impression of him was that he had taken too many drugs in his life! He would talk at length about the profound experiences he had had, as if that was the main thing, and which substances could take you furthest, could take you to what was most ultimate, where this reality shockingly broke down completely, and you saw things as they really are, outside the constructed reality that the brain provides. He had certainly had these experiences, but his emphasis was wrong. They are to be talked about circumspectly, if at all, and as a guide and inspiration for living on this planet, in this material reality. In this reality, he was middle-aged, yet dressing and behaving, in some ways, like a teenage rebel. It is a bit like people who identify with the profound experiences that can occur in shamanic journeying or in meditation. You can end up with arrested development in this reality, however profound your experiences may be in other realities.

There is a regular psychedelic conference in the UK called ‘Breaking Convention’. I’m sure it is a useful event, but the title to me is wrong. It is a counter-cultural cliché to be anti-establishment, to think you know better, and ultimately it goes nowhere. Something like ‘Making Peace with Convention’ would be a genuinely radical title for the counter-culture, and make the point that we need to move towards society, bringing our wisdom with us. It is we who need to change in order to be more part of society, rather than it being society that needs challenging to be more like us, something that will never happen to any great degree.

The emphasis needs to be Incarnation, the West of the Medicine Wheel, because that is what we are here to do. Teacher plants give us an experience of the Fire of the East. That then needs to be integrated; it needs to be used to help us incarnate further, more deeply, instead of using them as an escape, a spiritual bypass. It is a dance. Several years after my experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, I felt myself arrive fully back in this reality. I had been subtly away all that time because of the depth and intensity of what I had been through. I was not aware that I was subtly not here, until I found myself back. You see some people who do a lot of this kind of stuff. Yes, they are privy in an ongoing way to some esoteric experiences, which gives them a sense of validation, and there is often a gentleness about them. But you can see they are not quite here, and there are probably psychological reasons why they do not want to be fully here. You maybe need to be especially aware if you have an addictive temperament. It may be that you need a regular input of non-ordinary reality to stay balanced – the sign of Pisces can be like this – and if you’re not getting it by non-chemical means such as music and meditation and the natural world, you will feel drawn to having that experience by chemical means.

You’re not supposed to say things like drugs and magic mushrooms and psychedelics and tripping any more, you’re supposed to say Teacher Plants and Plant Medicine and Psilocybin. People can get quite serious and religious about it, and in a way that is fair enough, but it can also close things down a bit. There’s a big no-no around doing these substances ‘recreationally’, people look down on that. But I think why not do it recreationally sometimes, just have some fun, don’t be so serious? When we play, things can happen that couldn’t otherwise. When we play, we are whole. The best creativity comes out of play. I try to keep this book as play as I go along, but I don’t always succeed when I have a load of video transcripts to edit. The videos themselves, however, remain a lot of fun.

The psychedelic world, like the Chaos, is feminine. We yield to it, just like we yield in the Sweatlodge. It tempers and broadens and deepens the ego in this world.

My main point about these plant medicines is that they are a deep initiation, they can open you up in all sorts of ways. Some people have visionary experiences that they will never forget; it's like having a big dream or something. You need to keep it with you for the rest of your life, and let it inform you. You've been shown something outside of this constructed reality that we live in. We get these glimpses sometimes, don't we? That is the cognitive side. The emotional side is that the universe is nothing but Love. This reality is just a construction, a shocking construction, but it goes incredibly deep, it seems so ultimately real to us. It's the Matrix, and these plant medicines can take us outside of that. Maybe it's like what happens when we die, because similarly this brain-constructed reality breaks down.

Like all forms of Shamanism, the Teacher Plant way becomes religion to some degree; it is inevitable. The Chaos perspective is the dance around that. Someone came to me who had a traditional teacher in the Amazon. They're had been doing the Ayahuasca and everything that comes with it for some years. There was a lot of practice and discipline around it. It was a whole path, and it was the central thing in their life. At a certain point, this person got the feeling that they wanted to stop doing it, and go back to Europe and do art work and have children. They were in conflict about this issue, which is why they had come to see me for some astrology. Their main doubt was that if they left the Amazon, they would be backsliding spiritually, because they would have left that particular discipline behind, which the teacher emphasised had to be kept up. And leave it to do what? To have children. How could that possibly be as spiritually significant as this profound way they were learning in the jungle?

That's a really interesting point, when the teacher says one thing and your instincts are telling you something else. What do you do? It's a crisis. My answer was, well you always need to follow that thing in you, you're here to learn to follow your own guidance, and that has grown out of all the work you have done so far with this traditional teacher. A good teacher will always guide you to do that. To that extent, I think I'm a good teacher. (I’m probably crap in some other ways!) I just say identify what’s in your heart – and sometimes that can take a while – and then follow it. It is what we are here to do. I don’t need disciples, because I put my trust in Spirit. If there are people wanting to be around me and perhaps learn something, I will trust that and say yes to them. If there is no-one coming my way, I will trust that too, I won’t think there is something wrong, or that I am inadequate. It is a liberating way to be, and the way to be of most help to others, because Spirit can get on with its own designs, without me and my anxieties about who I am getting too much in the way.

I don’t have a particular tradition that I am trying to draw people into. Maybe one day I will start some kind of community around Chaos Shamanism, who knows? I will let Spirit decide that one.

Spirit tends to show itself through what we want to do, often moment by moment. It certainly doesn’t show itself through what we ‘ought’ to do – that, again, is religion. This person’s life in the jungle had turned into an ‘ought’, and the ‘want’ was back in Europe.

So this indigenous Amazonian teacher was limited. He hadn’t created an ethos where his pupil felt free, rather the opposite, and that speaks of his own needs. A lot of teachers are like that, maybe most are to some degree. But they perform a useful function. They provide the initial framework that we often need to get our house in order, cut down on the drinking and all that, and take our first steps. And then they get attached to having us in that pupil position, they feel validated by that. They will all of course say you are free to come and go and do other things, but that may not be the underlying vibe. I banged on earlier about taking indigenous people off the pedestals we often put them on, and this is a good example.

So my advice to this person was, “Follow what's in your heart. I'm not going to tell you what to do, that's definitely not my job. My job is to bring you closer to what's in your heart.”

This is a crucial point that many people reach, whatever path they are on. The teacher has brought them so far, by sailing alongside his ship. But now it is time to take a breath and head out on your own into the deep ocean. It is something you know you have to do, it takes courage, it will give you the adventure of your life, and you will not be at rest until you do it.

The Amazonian teacher reminds me a bit of the Buddhist teacher I once had. He had founded a Buddhist Order, and I read a seminar extract once in which he was asked if there could be positive reasons for leaving his Order. He was a logical, cerebral kind of guy, and he laid out at length, with remorseless reasoning, why to leave was inevitably ‘spiritual catastrophe’. That says it all. It was why I eventually felt I had to leave it, and it was a huge thing for me, because it had become my whole life. So I could sympathise with this person and the conflict they were in.

Like everything, we need a perspective that has room for Spirit to have had a part in the situations we find ourselves in. The whole journey can prove to be exactly what we needed, from the initial supportive framework, to the conflict at the end, in which we learn to seriously trust our inner guidance, because we put it before the guidance and judgement of the person who had been our teacher.

The Plant is a Teacher too, and needs to be treated in the same way. The Teacher Plant gets us going, helps us find that initial vision of life, outside the bounds of conventional ways of seeing the world. But eventually we trust our own guidance, we do not need to get it from a substance any more, however sacred. It brings me back to the earlier point, where I said that Teacher Plants are not an ongoing path. That is a good point to end on.