SHAMANISM AND HUMAN DESTINY

Shamanism needs to be part of where humanity is headed, rather than part of the opposition - in this case a fantasy of what the remote past was like.

Shamanism reminds us to water the roots of the tree, reminds us that we belong to mother earth, who is alive, and that we are nothing but her. At the same time, there is a glorious destiny unfolding in the branches of the tree, humanity's cultural and technological inventiveness, which is only gathering pace. How do we remember the roots as we soar into the sky? That is our great shamanic task as humanity re-invents itself as an interplanetary species.

 

 

It is the shamanic comfort zone to live in opposition to the modern world, to think we know better. We don't. Humanity has a destiny that the likes of Elon Musk and Silicon Valley are turbo-charging. We are an irrelevance if we do not allow ourselves to be thrilled by that adventure, if we go to that default counter-culture place of anti-oil (the earth's bounty), anti-nuclear, anti-modern medicine, anti-GM, anti-capitalism... the list goes on: it is tedious and life-denying and it goes nowhere.

 

We need to seize our love of the roots of life, ignore the bad news that the media perennially gives us, and bring that to the unfolding adventure of humanity.

KEEPING IT SIMPLE

Maybe all I mean by the word Shamanism is that the universe has a soul, the world has a soul. It's not an intellectual position, it is something felt. And that's all there is to it. Keep it simple, keep your eye on what is real.

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 'Core' Shamanism complicates the Otherworld. It is simple: stuff works through you. That is our gift, and that is all you need to feel. Thinking you have to know what it is, and what it is that you have done, can make you doubt your experience. It can take you away from the Great Mystery that lies at the heart of everything, from which we draw whatever powers we may have. Those gifts are not ours, they belong to the universe and are there for everyone. There is not even an Otherworld, for the Spirits are always with us.

DARTMOOR

 At Fernworthy Reservoir a few days ago

where a Frost Wand found me

At Crazywell Pool today

 

where the Ice King had left his crown on the bank of the leat

SELF-DOUBT

There's only one thing worse than doubting yourself, which is not doubting yourself. It is entirely normal and even necessary. Self-confidence has to be earned by becoming good at something. Self-doubt can be the fire that keeps pushing you. Or makes you give up. And then you come back, because you'll go mad if you don't come back.

I have been plagued by self-doubt all my life, not just until I've got good at something, but until I know I am good, which can take a lot longer. It has happened with astrology, with shamanic work, with writing books....

The thing about our sort of work is that there isn't an obvious measure of right or wrong, unlike say fixing a gas boiler. I am talking about a deeper kind of confidence in who we are, that can feel excruciating because we are baring our souls to the world. Virginia Woolf would feel suicidal in response to critical reviews of her work.

It is a tough one. There is an initiatory fire to be gone through if you have a calling, but would you want it any other way? Of course the approval of the world can help get us started, but ultimately we need to know for ourselves the value of what we have done. In Shamanic terms, we trust our connection with the spirits; we may not understand their purposes, but we feel the value. In some ways, the lack of recognition from the world can be a help, a worthy opponent that pushes us onwards on this deeply solitary path: in this solitude we find the fire in our souls, and our connection to everything.

Chewing over self-doubt with people is one of the things I do. My shamanic work is mainly talking, but do not be misled. My spirits implicitly meet your spirits, if we are talking openly, and enriching things happen for both of us. Above all, perhaps, I will support you in the long initiatory fire of your self-doubt, and I will listen as you talk of that which you love.

SHAMANISM VS THE DOOMSTERS AND GLOOMSTERS

I was watching with grim fascination the head of a Buddhist Order that I used to be part of. He was emphasising what a terrible state the world is in. He said the world has always been in a terrible state, but that it is particularly terrible right now.

My view is that the world just is what it is, it is humans doing what humans do and always have done, and there are good things and problematic things within that. We kind of need the challenges of the problematic things. As Dostoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, if humanity ever did create a utopia, it would destroy it, if only to assert its own free will.

So what is it about religions damning the world? We see it in Christianity, where the world is the creation of the Devil, and humans are tarred with Original Sin. And we see it in Shamanism also: it is almost axiomatic that benighted, greedy humanity is destroying the natural world and that we know better.

There is an unconscious dishonesty here that goes deep: the worse the world is, the more spiritual we are with our 'enlightened' attitudes; the more virtuous we become when we go about saving the world from itself. Another term for it is 'spiritual bypass': when we imagine a good, identify with it, and see 'bad' as out there instead of where it truly lies, in our own hearts. This is what all these Buddhists, Christians and Shamans are avoiding in their condemnation of the world. Muslims too, no doubt.

The western world is having a particularly bad dose of 'everything is terrible' at the moment. I doubt people in China, one generation out of rural poverty, see it that way!

I think it is our responsibility as shamans to oppose this pessimism, to repeatedly point out that which is good in the world, and for that basic optimism to shine through in the way we are. Because if we feel close to Spirit - and that, after all, is the point - then we feel joy, and we want to embrace this brief period called life while we can.

So enough of this climate apocalypse stuff, enough of this condemning humans as thoughtless and greedy (most people are just trying to get by!) Instead, rejoice in human brilliance and ingenuity and adaptability: it is what we bring to the table of life, and Spirit is cheering us on as our technological inventiveness increasingly races forward. Of course it brings imbalance, but that can and is being addressed.

To condemn humanity as a cancer, as many do, is itself a disease. Love humanity.

Things are at a stage where to you are liable to be attacked if you point out the good trends in the world, as though that is a denial of the bad things which, we are told, constitute an existential crisis.

Here are some of the good things: Hundreds of millions are coming out of poverty as the East industrialises; vast areas are greening over due to higher CO2; agricultural yields are at an all time high, and we are starting to give land back to nature; the world is net being reforested; as the world warms, so do far fewer people die from cold, well outweighing the extra heat deaths; fewer people are dying from climate incidents because we adapt; we live amidst unprecedented peace and prosperity. (Look up Bjorn Lomborg for a fuller, referenced account of these trends.)

Will that do? It is our responsibility to be informed of these positive trends as a counter-balance to the problems of the world. It is our job to help people out of the slough of pessimism into which they have sunk. As healers, where else do you begin?

Of course, people are attached to their slough of pessimism: it gives them a group identity, it makes them feels like they are on the side of good, and it protects them from their own misery. So it's not easy, and you won't always get thanked for it. You will lose a few friends. Some people will think you are unhinged and in denial. But that is always part of the shamanic territory, for we can only help and heal to the extent that we have stepped out of herd-think. That is an ongoing task, for the collective pressures to think in particular ways are powerful and alluring, however wrong-headed.

OPEN TO INVITES...

I'm not a great advertiser of myself. But I reckon I'm good at running workshops of many varieties. It's something I love to do. I've been at it for nearly 40 years in one way or another. In my youth it was Buddhism. After a major revamp that turned into Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Pipe Ceremonies, Sweatlodges, Trance Dances and just general chewing stuff over: maybe my favourite 😎 I do astrology and tarot too. I prefer not to plan too much, and let things unfold in their own way.

The point of a teacher is to edge you in the direction of your own inner guidance. That is why I say cherish the things you don't agree with me about. If you've been reading this blog for a while, I will almost certainly have said some things you don't agree with 🤣

I have 2 books as a sort of CV (pictured), published by Moon Books in 2022. I'm not that inclined to set up workshops myself, but if you would like me to come and do something for an evening or a day or even a week, I will probably say yes, enthusiastically. Anywhere in the world! As long as I don't lose money on it. Happy to sleep in a tent. Or my van  😊

OF COLONISED INDIANS

A traditionally-trained Chippewa Cree guy who used to stay with me said that 'Native Americans' refer to themselves as 'Indians'. It was just the white people who call them Native Americans. So now I refer to them when I can as Indians. And sometimes you will get taken to task for that by whites who think you are being disrespectful. It happened to me recently, from someone has a bit of Indian blood in them, but is very identified with that, even though they had never met an Indian until recently. No discussion was possible, she was fierce about it: saying 'Indian' was like using the 'n' word about black people.

Personally I'd rather call people by the name they call themselves, rather than one invented by guilty whites, and then adhered to dogmatically by an imaginary Indian.

Another word I'm wondering about is 'colonised'. In this case it refers to the dominant, conquering culture taking away the identity and culture of the conquered people and telling them who they should be in terms of the values of the dominant culture. Any process of telling people who they should be at a formative age is 'colonisation': an Indian teacher told me I had been colonised by my early boarding school experience.

Indians often need to go through a process of 'decolonisation' to reclaim their original culture. The word brings in the connotation of 'colonialism' as an unmitigated evil. There was nothing good, for example, about the British Empire in modern discourse, and academics who look for the good as well as the bad get shunned. As did Nigel Biggar for writing the book pictured below.

This may sound harsh, but 'colonisation' is where Indian-as-victim meets modern woke culture, which turns any number of people into victims, and demands that we as privileged oppressors bow down before them. Some Indians are in victim mode, some are not. The Dalai Lama could easily be in victim mode, but he never has been. He gets on with life, and does not attack the Chinese. It is not some form of 'denial'. He just refuses to bear a grudge and complain about what was a huge injustice, when to do so would be futile.

My Chippewa Cree friend told me it is often the warrior cultures amongst the Indians who go on and on about what happened to them, for it is a matter of wounded pride that they have been conquered.

But isn't colonisation what has happened throughout history, when one people conquered another? You'd better adapt to their culture - allow your mind to be colonised - or you will not flourish, you will be squeezed out. If Indians want to flourish, they had better adopt the white man's ways. It doesn't mean they can't also hold on to, and reclaim, their traditional ways: the conquering culture of the US is unusually liberal in that respect, by historical standards. It is great they can do so, for there is much in the traditional indigenous ways that we have forgotten, to our detriment in the modern world.

Even if you are not part of a conquered culture, you will be colonised: your culture will tell you, as a child, who you are. It may do that with greater or lesser degrees of liberalism, but tell you it will. It is not a victim thing, but a necessary thing that suits most people. Some of us may eventually find it to be a cage that we have to struggle our way out of, because we have something deeper of our own to find. But that is a minority thing, and that struggle for our own values, with opposition from the mainstream, can be exactly what we need to find them.

So yes, all of us may need to 'decolonise' our minds in some respects. The reclaiming of a sense of the sacred, for example, denied as it is by materialist atheism. But don't get into blame mode about it, or you will perpetuate the colonisation: victimhood easily becomes a religion in itself. That is why I think the current narrative about slavery is as much about stirring up ancestral grievances - from something that ended generations ago - as it is about justice. Think Dalai Lama.