I haven’t got any answers. It is just something that I sit with from time to time. I wonder about individual consciousness and group consciousness, and whether there is more room for individual consciousness in our type of society. And I wonder about creativity: we live in a ferment of it, technologically, artistically and metaphysically. In a traditional society, the emphasis is on – well, tradition, and knowing that deeply. That has its own strengths. But we have access to so many different ways of seeing the world, that our relativism can open us up to.
In his book Coyote Medicine, Lewis Mehl Madrona says that post-modernism, with its lack of absolute certainties, is hard for most people to live with - unless they are shamans, who get their power from this alignment with the flow of Spirit. And at the same time he says that, in his experience, most tribal people have a fairly simple set of certainties and beliefs by which they live. And he quotes another elder who said that to the effect that all creation stories are provisional, really we don't know how everything came to be.
I think it is the same in the modern world: most of us want a fairly simple set of certainties to live by. Science provides them: the Universe began with the Big Bang; Life arose through Evolution, driven by natural selection; and when we die, there is extinction. We know where we stand. Quantum Mechanics, that brings consciousness and uncertainty into the equation, is too subtle ever to catch on in the mainstream.
So modern people are the same in that kind of way. Most people want simple certainties and do not have a burning metaphysical quest, though they may wake up to that during the course of their lives, you never know.
The sheer size of our societies allows for the creative ferment, and an escape from what can become a cage of just one way of seeing the world (which suits many people.) From the viewpoint of the individual, that is a very good thing. From the point of view of the group, I think it is more difficult, because in our large societies we are collectively governed by impersonal rules rather than relationships. I think that has an alienating effect for many. I’m not sure there is any obvious way round this. It causes many people to react blindly to the authority of these rules, as though they are being oppressed by a ‘them’, and they think they are demonstrating their individuality by standing up to it. In fact, these rules – or laws – have usually been worked through and refined in practice over time, there is intelligence behind them.
I think our large societies create divisions between people purely because of their size and the impersonality that comes with that. It takes an effort of imagination not to slip into those divisions.
Then there are the teachings themselves, our Medicine Wheels and Shamanic Journeyings and Sweatlodges and other Ceremonies. We can never be part of the traditions from which they came, though we can be inspired by them and learn from them. That frees us to concentrate on what it is in those practices or ceremonies that works, and to re-invent as we need to, based on having connected to them deeply in our own experience: that takes time. We can be in a hurry and not realise the depth of things.
Given that, we are not beholden to tradition, there is no penalty for re-inventing and going our own way. This is another aspect of the creativity that I think is possible in our modern culture. Indigenous cultures are characterised by the preservation of what has come before, and slow adaptation to changing circumstances. They perhaps understand the collective aspect of consciousness better than we do, that it isn’t just a mob thing, but something that can be supportive and heightening, particularly in Ceremony. But we moderns don’t have to hold our creativity at bay in the interests of the continuity of tradition, because we have no tradition. There is a way we can be very alive by being true to the new ways that Spirit, which is unfailingly creative, is always showing us. Maybe this is something new that the ancients did not have.
Last year I wrote a book on the Medicine Wheel. I have no traditional training in it. Just a course or two with someone who wasn’t traditionally trained either. I wrote about it from the point of view of the sense I had made of it myself, in my own lived experience. I claimed the freedom to do that, I made it clear it was not a traditional exposition, I made plenty of my own additions, and drew in references from our own culture. That said, it wasn’t as simple as it sounds. I had had 40 years of being on a transformational path before I wrote the book, which I meant that I knew what I was talking about, experientially. That is one of the book’s strengths. And on that basis, I re-invented the Medicine Wheel.
I am attempting a bit of that with shamanic journeying at the moment: I am about to run an event in Wales on Embodying the Spirits, and I want to take it right back to my own experience. Put aside the words I have learnt like soul retrieval and de-possession and just do the work, and find out a few weeks later what it was that I did. So again, I am attempting to re-invent. I think a live tradition is always being re-invented, it is ever fresh in that way, and the re-invention emerges naturally from being true to one’s own experience. It is not a superficial thing, I think it takes years to be ready to do that. But nevertheless, we have that creative possibility in our culture, that I don’t think is there to the same extent in traditional cultures.
