SHAMANISM: AN UNSAFE SPACE

From my book-in-progress

Shamanic practices are not ‘tame’ or ‘safe’. They are not an add-on to a respectable urban life, where you become a ‘shamanic practitioner’ alongside being a well-boundaried therapist and respectable member of the parish council. No, they take you somewhere raw, primal, beyond the normal controlling ego.

This is on the one hand threatening, and most people will not want to go there. But it has a delicious, ambrosiacal, irresistible call too, for it is what we are here to do: to transform, and to transform deeply, and unless we can relish that call from the Otherworld, and abandon ourselves to it over many years, that deep transformation cannot occur.

It takes courage, and it takes persistence, and you may not have much obviously to show for it, and we have to learn to live with that, because it is not about that. We may appear to be some kind of ‘loser’ on the world’s terms. But really that does not matter. It is about who you are, and continually being with that on a deep level, together with its occasional periods of crisis – with or without the Sweatlodges and Vision Quests - and other people will pick up on that, they will sense that there is something about you that is deeply alluring, but they may not quite know what it is. They will recognise, however, that you are simply being yourself, you have found the courage to claim that freedom, and this is what they want too, though they may not fully know it. That is what they find appealing. By who you are, you give others the implicit permission that it is OK for them also to be who they are. This is the best kind of teaching, and it is unspoken.

EGREGORE and THE MEDICINE WHEEL

(another short extract from my book)

There is a mysterious way in which symbols and ceremonies acquire power over time. The word ‘egregore’ describes this phenomenon. You may sometimes feel this with stone circles, that tend to be located at spots that have a certain power anyway, but the combination of ancient and modern ceremony at those places adds another layer of power that one can feel.

For myself, this also works with astrology and tarot. They are both symbolic systems that are used for divination, to help unpack who we are. And their ability to do that lies not just in the divinatory ability of the reader, but in the fact that these symbols have been used for centuries or more in the same way. Reality is not just the visible, tangible material world. It is not even fundamentally that.

Consciousness is primary, matter secondary, as quantum physics also reveals. And it is as if when we sit with say the planet Mars, we are also sitting with all those thousands of astrologers from the past and present who have also directed attention to that planet and allowed it to speak through them, it has grown as a gateway to meaning over time. And you find yourself being able to say something to the person having the reading that is true about them, without the prior knowledge one would normally require. And this is magical, it is like the universe already knows you. It enlarges and enchants the spirit of the other person.

And it is the same with the Medicine Wheel. It is also a tool of self-knowledge that has a divinatory aspect. When we use the Wheel to understand ourselves better, we are plugging in to the power it has developed over time, through all the people who have used it in this way. The Wheel has its own power, it needs to be approached with that kind of respect, and any contributions we might make to that tradition need to be done advisedly.

The Simple and Radical Foundation of the Medicine Wheel

A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the morning and thought dammit, stop thinking vaguely about writing a book, start writing it now and see what happens. So I did. I had run 2 long zoom courses on the Medicine Wheel last year, and found I had quite a lot to say once I started ad libbing. So 2 weeks ago I started ad libbing on paper, so to speak, and 25000 words later I'm still going strong. This is really wonderful😎😊 And about time too! Here is a short excerpt:

This Wheel, this Mandala, is so simple, and yet it contains the whole universe, with you at its centre. And it does not describe the universe in the abstract concepts that we are used to in the West – think atoms and dark matter, for example, neither of which anyone has directly seen, but which are fundamental to the modern understanding of the universe. No, think Sun and Rain and Soil and Wind: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. The Wheel brings us back to an understanding of the universe that is immediate to our experience.

This is radical, because for the last 1000 years knowledge of things-as-they-are has been in the hands of specialists, first the priests and then the scientists. And we have become used to there being just one story, that becomes ‘the truth’. This makes our minds disempowered and rigid, and it is one way that these vast collectives that we are all part of nowadays keep the illusion that everything is under control. It produces a certain kind of psychological stability for many people.

But in reality, no-one is in control, and we need to re-learn to hold in our minds contradictory stories about how the universe is “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” as the poet Keats put it, using the term ‘negative capability’ to describe this state of mind.

PLUTO IN CAPRICORN: THE LIMITS OF GOVERNMENT

We are coming to the end of Pluto in Capricorn. What has it been about? Many things, I am sure. Its immediate effect was a reality check (Capricorn) in 2008 for the wild-west of the deregulated financial system. This resulted in western governments borrowing huge amounts to prop up the banks and avoid a second Great Depression, which occurred in the 1930s because the banks had been allowed to fail.

Now as Pluto inches towards Aquarius, and intensified by the conjunction with Capricorn's ruler Saturn, we find governments again borrowing huge amounts to keep the economy going, because of the Covid lockdowns. Now this is something none of us could have easily foreseen, although most astrologers probably knew something big was on its way at the start of 2020.

One way (amongst many) of looking at Pluto in Capricorn is that Capricorn is a sign of structures and responsible governance. Its weakness is that it thinks it can come to control everything. Pluto at both ends of the sign has given us crises of government, in which all the stops have been pulled out to bring things back under control. And left us with huge amounts of debt.

Maybe Pluto is showing us the limits of the power (Pluto) of government (Capricorn). The reason governments try to keep things under control is not just for the survival and thriving of the people; the people also feel psychologically insecure if there seems to be no-one sufficiently in control and there is not enough certainty.

This was part of the function of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages: the enforcement of collective certainties. And interestingly, the Church began to be shaken at its foundations in 1517, at the last conjunction of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn, when Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation. The collective certainties began to crumble, and people were thrown back on their own relationship with God.

A rise in Conspiracy theory has marked the Covid lockdowns of the current Saturn-Pluto conjunction: the "wake up sheeple" people. (Such theories also marked the aftermath of 9/11.) These theories arise more intensely when government is no longer seen to be in control, and does not provide the certainties that we normally expect. (NB I see government as the expression of the collective psyche: it is ours, rather than something imposed.)

Conspiracy theory re-asserts a sense of certainty by attributing events to a dark agency that is 'really' controlling events. Mere facts do not play much part in these fantasies (nor did they in the religious fantasies of the medieval church).

Conspiracy theory helps us understand the psychological impact of the Covid lockdowns. And points us to one of the meanings of Pluto's passage through Capricorn, exemplified at the start and the end: that governments can only control events to a certain degree, and beyond that they are, in a big way, not in control. That we are responsible individually, that we are free, and do not need to orient ourselves through our subscription to collective values, whether ‘official’ or those of conspiracy.

Capricorn is a sign that is grounded in earthy, ‘mundane’ realities. The Native American who said “Don’t tell me about your visions unless they grow corn,” was probably a Capricorn. But the deeper meaning of Capricorn lies in the freedom to be found once we can hang loose to the structures, and not treat them as ultimate realities. This is how Capricorn grows into its adjacent sign of Aquarius. Capricorn sees through the dream of this earthly reality and into the spirit behind it. This is the power of Capricorn that Pluto is showing us: once you do not take material reality as ultimate, you are free to use it and even control it. Capricorn is a sign of the Magician.

Meanwhile western governments are left staggering under huge piles of debt. Who knows what the outcome of this will be. But it is hard to be fully in control of events in these circumstances. That seems to be where Pluto in Capricorn is leaving us: without the steady certainties that both re-assure and trap us. But hopefully with an insight into the inherent limitations of government and collectives generally, and our freedom to know who we are outside of that.

SHAMANISM AS RELIGION

"Shamanism is not a religion" - unlike Christianity, Islam etc is the subtext. It is 'special'. I also used to regularly hear this about Buddhism in my misspent youth. Of course Shamanism is a religion. Look what happens when an indigenous teacher walks into the room: suddenly everyone is behaving differently, they become self-conscious and reverent, because they are in the presence of someone 'holy'.

This is normal. I am not complaining. Most of us project our East - Spirit - to the extent we are not yet living it. It is where we start. It is why Catholics have a Pope. There are healthy and unhealthy religions. A good teacher does not need the projection, and knows how to bounce it back kindly. But I think it is good to be honest about it, at least with ourselves.

ANCESTORS, KARMA, DREAMS and CHOICES

So this link is me talking for 40 minutes this morning on the Zoom Medicine Wheel Course that a number of us have been meeting for since September - with a few more recently joined from the previous course that started in April. A sense of community can build, even on Zoom :) My lockdown has been a fruitful time! 

Today I was talking about the intermediate directions on the particular Medicine Wheel that I use. And these different directions are, fundamentally, just different ways of listening to ourselves and to the natural world of which we are a part. And what else are we here to do, really, but to get to know this unknowable Spirit that dreams itself through us? 

AT THE COALFACE: FINDING BALANCE WITH THE SHADOW

Let's see if I can get this right, and not put my foot in it somewhere. It is to do with the shadow, and our need to have a balanced relationship with it: not to deny it or judge it, but not to over-identify with it either. To the degree we deny it, we become one of the 'good guys' and we see the 'bad guys' as out there somewhere (often in the form of 'the system', or political or business leaders, or anyone who we denounce in a way that makes us feel, if we are honest, secure in the moral high ground); when, on the other hand, we place too much emphasis on the shadow, then it becomes a refuge, we are 'wounded' and that can become a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Now this is where I am trying not to put my foot in it. Our traumas are real, and they can take a long time to even know they are there; the first signs may be that big parts of our lives do not work properly, or we get ill in some way, and it can then take a long time to persuade those terrified pieces of ourselves back into some kind of relationship with our conscious selves (hence the shamanic paradigm of soul loss and soul retrieval).

It is the language of being 'wounded' that I am wanting to chew on. When you are physically wounded, you are no longer able to function normally until the wound heals. But I don't think it is necessarily the same on a psychological level. Yes, we need to be careful and considerate around our traumas, and if we are not aware of them they will tend to come out as anxiety, anger, addiction, violence, self-pity etc. I think most of us have them in one way or another, it seems to be part of the human condition.

But we human beings are also resilient, we can have really difficult stuff going on within, and maybe only those close to us know about it, partly because it is very personal, but also because we usually still have the capacity to function reasonably normally if we choose to do so. And it's as if the language of being 'wounded' can suggest we do not have that capacity, and I do not think it is helpful to think like that. It easily becomes a bit of an identity and not a helpful one, we get stuck in it. And then it is a get-out-of-jail-free card, inasmuch as we don't need to be so responsible any more, we can blame whoever gave us the 'wound'.

I have this kind of reservation around the notion of the 'witch wound', which gets tied into gender politics (which like all collective movements has its own shadow) and exaggerated notions of what happened 400 years ago, along with a literal identification with past-life stories of having been there. It easily becomes a victim fantasy. I am NOT saying it is necessarily or even usually so, and I am sorry if this offends anyone, but I wanted to get it off my chest! While not wishing to diminish the nature of what happened, the real figure of witch executions was between 40 and 60,000, not the 9 million sometimes claimed, and 1/4 of them were men. The larger figure seems to me quite grossly politicised. I therefore doubt there were historically enough witches to go round the number of people nowadays who have past life memories of being executed. So I have no doubt these memories correspond to real experiences, but I think they are best seen as archetypal, pointing to something ancestral that needs healing. But probably not literal like, in my view, many past-life memories are probably not literal.

I think that all along Spirit, the Metaphysical, needs to be our perspective, the idea that our essential nature is pure and abundant and joyful and compassionate. This perspective is the real healer over time: it allows an alchemy that is beyond our understanding or control to be set in motion. And with this perspective, WE STEP OUTSIDE ALL IDENTITIES. The real solution to eg 'low self esteem' is not affirmations to create 'self-worth', but rather not to have any ideas about what you are in the first place, just keep aligning yourself with Spirit and do something with your gifts, however tentative. This is the nuclear option, this is where the megawatts of healing power lie. Not in fishing around in your difficulties on their own level, but by exposing them to the compassionate light of the Great Spirit.

And I think it can be the same with those hard-to-get-hold-of illnesses that many of us experience: the ME, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, auto-immune, multiple sclerosis and so on. They are often the crack where the light gets in. They often suggest unconscious trauma that needs to become conscious; and they are also a call to listen deeply to ourselves and to Spirit, because it is only then that we will get well. Most people do not listen deeply to themselves or to others, and they do not know this. These types of illness are a demand to stop trying to fit in and to be 'normal', and instead to listen to that Other voice.

It takes a long time, it is not easy, but is anything worthwhile created without that? The tragedy is that many people get stuck, to some extent, in the illness phase, it becomes an identity around which their life revolves, it becomes another get-out-of-jail-free card. And that is a miserable place to be, it becomes a tiny circle of life with little room for movement.

So I am saying acknowledge that coalface of difficulties, of shadow that is part of the human condition. Love it, do not judge it, stay with it at least some of the time, and you will slowly see it transform. But do not form an identity out of it, do not disempower yourself by thinking too much that you are ill or wounded. Above all, listen to yourself and trust what is there.