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Article by Michael Finn
Copyright Michael Finn

“The wiser part of you, your sorcerer, realises that life is ultimately something beyond your mind and changing body. No one theory can completely explain anything and the origins of even your simplest impulses, seem to be connected with the universe itself. In light of this, the apprentice tries to befriend the unknown.” (From, “The Shaman’s Body by Dr. Arnold Mindell, Harper Collins 1993) Shamanistic traditions are replete with absolute intimations of our connections to the living planet on which we survive, albeit tenuously, and which expresses itself to us, constantly.

Extract from “The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram. (First Vintage Books Edition, February 1997.)

“To be sure, the Shaman’s ecological function, his or her role as intermediary between human society and the land is not always obvious at first blush, even to a sensitive observer.We see the sorcerer being called upon to cure an ailing tribesman of his sleeplessness, or perhaps simply to locate some missing goods; we witness him entering into trance and sending his awareness into other dimensions in search of insight and aid. Yet we should not be so ready to interpret these dimensions as ‘supernatural’, nor to view them as realms entirely ‘internal’ to the personal psyche of the practitioner.For it is likely that the ‘inner world’ of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth.

When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinant object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness (in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself – the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

But in genuinely oral, indigenous cultures, the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life.It is not by sending his awareness out beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact with the purveyors of life and health, nor by journeying into his personal psyche; rather, it is by propelling his awareness laterally, outward into the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface. The magician’s intimate relationship with non-human nature becomes most evident when we attend to the easily overlooked background of his or her practice.Not just to the more visible tasks of curing and ritual aid to which she is called by individual clients, or to the larger ceremonies at which we presides and dances, but to the content of the prayers by which she gestures that she enacts when alone, the daily propitiations and praise that follow from her toward the land and its many voices.” “Moreover, it is not only those entities acknowledged by Western civilization as ‘alive’, not only the other animals and the plants that speak, as spirits, to the senses of an oral culture but also the meandering river from which those animals drink, and the torrential monsoonal rains, and the stone that fits neatly into the palm of the hand.The mountain too, has its thoughts.The forest birds whirring and chattering as the sun slips below the horizon are organs of the rainforest itself.”

THOUGHT

The survival and stability of the human species is going to require a revisiting of the traditional wisdom, the lore of ancestors, insights of our forebears. We shall have to reconnect with that which we’ve grown away from. Shamanism should not be regarded as a bygone, other culture (relic) practice. Urban life is sterile and shallowly dimensional if it strives to exist without roots (into the earth) and access to the subtle realms.

Shamanic practices have, by and large emphasized the access to ‘altered’ states.These ‘extra sensory’ forays were generally designed to facilitate aspects of everyday survival e.g.:-

• Healing sickness
• Divining environmental phenomena
• Hunting and communal survival (guidance)
• Auspicious occasions e.g. initiatory rites of passage
• Collective needs and collective state changing rituals
• Generational linkages

Practices, despite variance between cultures, engage in uncommon dialogue outside of normal channels, downloading information essential to survival.

In a nutshell, a shamanic practitioner engages a fuller spectrum of consciousness (awareness), of potentially experienceable reality, both personal and trans-personal.

Western culture today is generally developing a ‘cultural anaemia’.

“Given the opportunity for a full life span, one passes through a series of different identities.It is the natural project of the ego to manage the existential anxiety of the person by stabilizing life as much as possible.But the nature of life clearly presumes and demands change.Approximately every seven to ten years there is a significant physical, social and psychological change in a person.Consider who you were at 14, at 21, at 28 and at 35 for example.While all of us are strung out along a continuum, we do have common passages to make.It is possible to generalize these cycles and identify a social and psychological agenda for each phase. While it is the hubristic assumption of the ego that it is in charge of life and that its vision will hold for the years to come, clearly there is an autonomous process, an ineluctable dialectic, which brings repeated deaths and rebirths.To acknowledge the inevitability of change, and to go with it, is a fine and necessary wisdom, but our natural tendency is to resist the dissolution of what we have managed to accomplish. Yet as Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and other observers of the social and anthropological scene have suggested, our culture has lost the mythic road map which helps locate a person in a larger context.Without a tribal vision of the gods, and their spiritual network, modern individuals are cut adrift to wander without guidance, without models and without assistance through the various life stages. What the rites of initiation hoped to achieve was separation from the parents, transmission of the sacred history of the tribe to provide spiritual grounding, and preparation for the responsibilities of adulthood.In our own culture there are no meaningful rites of passage into adulthood and thus many youth prolong their dependency. Our culture has become so heterogeneous, and has lost its mythic moorings in any case, that we can only transmit twentieth-century beliefs in materialism, hedonism and narcissism – with some computer skills thrown in.None of this provides salvation, connection to the earth and its great rhythms, meaning or depth to one’s journey.”

(“The Middle Passage, James Hollis, Inner City Books)
http://www.innercitybooks.net

Evidence that western and developing cultures drift into straits more and more bereft of a solid organic core, can be easily seen. Obvious symptoms include the likes of:-

• Disparity, especially in terms of resources, and therefore, opportunities
• Incessant warfare
• Global degradation, environmental leeching and toxic buildup
• Directionless drug-oriented generations
• Terrorism’s rise and its enduring nature

The ubiquity of drug-focused culture is an everyday reminder of a ‘lost-souls’ phenomenon.Mind-altering substances are/were utilized in shamanic traditions within a context, a determined purpose (e.g. spiritual quest).

But in the urban haunts and suburban shallows, drugs are perpetual quasi-saviour; a liberator from the demons of disenchantment, cynicism (the bottomless variety) boredom, spiritual lassitude, depersonalization, unemployment, depression, anxiety and so on. But the magical antidote is merely the shadow of ‘poison to the spirit’.It incarcerates its victims in vicious cycles and no momentum can be raised.The rudder is loose, the wind blows not against the sails...

Especially in ‘western’ realms, we witness this inexorable rise in drug use/abuse, running parallel with the gradual demise of meaningful rituals and rites, and other endangered species such as the extended family and close, intimate, trust based social circles, local TLC dispensers and necessary wailing walls.

I am not suggesting a model of a perfect world, rather a return to a nourishing societal cohesion, which exists, with awareness, in the lap of a celebrated mother earth. My vision for all beings:-

What is it we want?
To fully experience our aliveness.
To feel in our bodies a streaming, like the rush of the river over stones.
To be awake alert and responsive in our limbs, and sensitive in our fingertips.
To feel as if our inner and outer reality is congruent and that our efforts are rewarded by a sense of satisfaction.
We aspire to have our private lives nestle within the valley of a public world, which we can affirm.
We long to feel connected to each other.
We want to be able to embrace and be embraced.
We want to live the lives of our bodies, to permit us to fully live our lives; Chinese Medicine is a beginning."
- Ballantine -

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