This article originally appeared in Fifth Estate.
After twenty years of
teaching shamanic practices to small groups in several circles in Washington
and California, I found the
results to be mixed. In the groups in which I participated, there were many
moving visionary experiences, but the flabby jargon of the human potential
movement left important messages missed amid incessant psychobabble.
Contemporary shamanism,
which grew out of the human potential movement of the Big Sur-based Esalen Institute,
rapidly became subsumed into the New Age culture as the latest fad/religion. In
two or three decades, aided by workshop leaders, it has become lost into the
pop culture. While the permutations were endless, pervasive alienation remained
a constant. As always, money, sex, and power ruled.
That shamanism has been
compromised is not to say that altered states and working in trance cannot
offer us a personal healing direction. I know from experience that lives can be
changed through shamanic work. A deep trance, engendered in a variety of ways
and entered with intention, can be transforming.
The value of shamanism as
taught in the contemporary culture may be that it provides some level of
psychotherapy, some level of energetic balance, some palliative response to
stress along with feelings of community and slightly less alienation. In some
cases, shamanic practice may provide actual healing of disease or easing of
struggles with death.
My own struggle with
shamanism centered on skepticism and the understanding that we can fool
ourselves into believing almost anything. My training was in agriculture and
science. I was not one to accept much on faith. I continued to bounce between
shamanic visions as projections of the psyche and as visitations from a separate
spiritual world.
By the time I stopped
teaching a few years ago, I had come to understand that the distinction
probably didn't matter. My work and studies since have convinced me that
contemporary religious and psychological shamanism represent part of a
catastrophic human error which took place at the beginning of history, and that
contrary to the notion that it has been around for tens of thousands of years,
indigenous shamanism is more likely a transitional phase between the
consciousness of hunter gatherers and the alienation of contemporary state
religions.
Lives as numb wage slaves
Faith healing comes in many
costumes, and shamanism is one of them. We can wear skins or robes. We can beat
drums or play pipe organs, burn sage or incense, sing to the element of water,
or submerge ourselves in the river. Both the "laying on" of hands and sleight of
hand can be efficacious. We can sing to our bear or sing to Jesus, whirl like a
dervish, whip ourselves until we bleed, play with rattlesnakes, dance in the
sun for four days, or starve ourselves in caves. Take your pick. Each can make
less painful our lives as numb wage slaves.
If we can ignore that tiny
voice crying for real freedom and calling us back to the circle, our economic
and religious subservience will help us pretend to be something more than the
imprisoned domestic animals we are.
A large problem remains.
Shamanism, or any of the other religious choices as currently practiced, will
not turn us from the global abyss. To believe shamanism and religion can bring
about some form of planetary healing is much like the notion that more
technology will solve our environmental problems. Transference, sexual abuse,
misinterpretation of serious pathologies, and lack of ethics, all typical of
the human potential movement, combine to further alienate and separate.
Benign attempts at healing
by unskilled and uninformed devotees, while perhaps not causing serious harm,
can impede solid, long-term movement toward better health. To put it plainly,
shamanism draws some seriously crazy folks, and many leaders are happy to look
the other way as long as the fees are paid.
Contemporary shamanism
teaches vertical, hierarchical religion
For those of us arrogant
enough to assume we have mastered this reality enough to explore another, our
shamanic practice should pull us toward radical anarchistic action. We've been
hearing from, and paying huge workshop fees to shamanic leaders for decades
about "connecting to spirit," but their message sidesteps industrial capitalism,
the religions to which it is connected, and open, public, radical changes
flowing from our spiritual work. The reason for this omission is clear.
Contemporary shamanism teaches vertical, hierarchical religion. The focus is on
what Mircea Eliade, in Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,
described as the "journey," rather than presence in this biological world.
Agriculture, religion and
government have not brought us a better life. The price we have paid for these
abstractions is far too high. The amusing charm of a small transistor radio
hanging from a tree in an upper Amazon village belies the toxicity of the
poisonous little gadget.
Writings of Morris Berman,
Paul Shepard, Joel Kovel, Stanley Diamond, John Zerzan, David Watson, Derrick
Jensen, Lewis Mumford, and others have led me to conclude that we should not be
attaching religious symbolism and meaning to shamanic experience, but instead
should seek a practice which takes us to the awareness that preceded the
alienating beginning of agriculture and religion.
We should attempt a return
to what Berman calls paradox, free of time and language. Even brief experiences
of integration might help us build decentralized communities centered on our
insight.
Return to "primitive
wisdom"
An intentional use of
altered states can obliterate the duality that has led to the domination and
destruction of our world, an experience of unity, what Sigmund Freud called the
regressive "oceanic experience," what Jung called a progressive return to
"primitive wisdom," and what Morris Berman, in Wandering God, termed the
"paradox" of hunter-gatherer consciousness, "a diffuse or peripheral
awareness," and in his earlier book The Re-enchantment of the World,
called "participatory consciousness" in which "the sacred, such as it is,
simply is the world."
Unfortunately, shamanic
practice as taught imbeds us in pathological constructs. Linear, vertical
thinking has brought us to disaster. If we leave religion behind, trance
practice can lead us to an egalitarian culture of biological integration. We
must reject the religious rituals and notions of upper and lower worlds. We
must cease our efforts to ascend and return to living completely here, in
ourselves, on this earth, as integrated beings.
The dominant power
structures under which we exist are only too happy to have us live in the
illusory and impotent condition of duality, and most humans will sit and do
nothing during this time of inexorable unraveling. Only a few will work to
recover our history as integrated, wild beings.
Our hunter-gatherer
ancestors are still close. Wiser and healthier than we, they are calling us
back from a technological and religious cliff. Small, egalitarian, tribal
circles of paradox can return us to the awareness of our ancestors of 10,000
years ago, before they unwittingly brought us religion and planted the seeds of
our destruction.
We can reject the linear,
oppressive, hierarchical, and alienating forms of religions that have swept our
world and begin to live in an archaic, anarchistic, sustained way that begins
to heal our planetary home.
We must be done with
leaders
We need not travel to other
realms. We must learn to step through a barrier and arrive here. Trance brings
us home. School is in the garden, the forest, the prairies, the rivers. The
teaching we need will not come from priests, gurus, shamans, or scientists. Our
circles must be egalitarian and built on a solid mistrust of all power.
We must be done with leaders
and their overwhelming lusts for money,
sex, and power, impulses so integral to our culture they routinely go
unnoticed. We must find ways to explore our way home without the intervention
of individuals and organizations that propose equality on the surface but
simply duplicate the power and alienation they've learned in the academic and
capitalistic culture.
A Taoist nun once said,
"There is no practice." I think she was right, for those who have already
merged with the living world around them. For the rest of us, if we sing,
dance, eat our plant helpers, and there are spirits who care enough to help us
return, they will. If we don't impose our notions of sacred, goodness, power,
and importance on our visions, ourselves, and the other beings we encounter, we
may be able finally to rest.
The rapture is not a naked
ascent into heaven. It is a naked return through a diaphanous membrane to our
wild, natural, biological home.
Image by Monsiuer Haze, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
