SPIRIT and SOUL

CHAOS SHAMANISM 5: SPIRIT and SOUL

So, the Spirit. Part 5 of this Chaos Shamanism series. Chaos meaning a number of things. Today it means the essence of Shamanism. The essence is Spirit, coming back to Spirit, always living from Spirit. That thing in you, we don't exactly know what it is; it's more than us, it's bigger than us, it's the place that we have to live from in a way. That's what Shamanism is about: it's about that, in the context of belonging to the natural world.

So we're talking about what's essential to Shamanism, what's core to Shamanism. Of course that term's already been taken up – ‘Core Shamanism’ - and it refers to a bunch of techniques for journeying to drums and doing healing work on that basis. And you know that's such a narrow way of describing this great project that we're undertaking, which is reclaiming indigeneity. We're reclaiming that indigenous worldview, that indigenous way of feeling about the world and relating to the world, that we've lost in our big religions, in Christianity and then in Science after that: Science is a big religion in its own way, because most of it is based on beliefs in certain absolute truths about the universe, that we have not and cannot verify for ourselves.

Somewhere that soulfulness of the world, that is also fire, earth, air and water or, more concretely, sun, rain, soil and wind, somewhere that connection has been lost. We've got caught up in this thing, you know, we're heading off up there to heaven, or the world's dead and we've got this great technological future before us that will save our souls.

We need to sort of come back to this soulfulness, this heartfulness, this connectedness, this simplicity. There's nowhere to go, there's nothing to do, it's just a life to be lived and this Spirit in us and the Spirits around us.

The Spirits. That's what I began with. What are these Spirits? I don't know. People talk about you know, their animal helper, their Spirit guide. I have different animal helpers that turn up at different times. I mean I do when I work. But also they may just be around. One was around a couple of years ago getting me to write a fantasy saga. But that’s another story.

I began with Core Shamanism in 1997. I did that course, but it's broadened or changed since then. Sure, I can lie down and journey to a drum, but actually the Spirits are just there anyway, like over my shoulder, and they shift into me physically. That's the thing, I don't go and meet the Spirits. Some indigenous people say no they come to you, you don't go to them, they come to you, that's how they say it, they even say there’s something wrong if you go to find them. And that's how it works for me: they come into me, I don't go and find them. I don't journey miles and miles down to a lower world and go looking. I'm not invalidating that, but there’s this other way, and it's just like they're there, over my shoulder, so to speak, because the Spirits are always with us.

They kind of are us and not us. It depends how we define ‘me’. In the narrow sense, no they're not us, they're outside and they come to us. In other ways they are us, in a bigger sense. We kind of are the universe, and there's these helpers which understand us intimately. They know how we're unfolding, they're gods of the unconscious, you could put it like that, but even the unconscious makes it too personal and narrow. This is is something bigger, it's a bigger cosmology. So we must never forget that we're part of a cosmology, an intimate part of a multidimensional cosmos, and we have our contribution to make, which in a way is not for us to explain. It's just whatever does it for us, in a deeper kind of sense!

So that's one way we could see the question of how do I live shamanically? Well, it's belonging to the natural world, being part of it, while also doing that thing that calls you, doing that thing that you love. Life in this sense is a joyful thing. But it can also require courage and patience and honesty. It is easy to make excuses, to put aside the things that really matter in the interest of the things we just think matter, or that we ought to do.

There's the ‘oughts’. Often the people around you, maybe the society around you, will tell you who you ought to be. That's just the way it works, it has its rules, it's trying to survive and prosper, so the collective tells you who you ought to be. Often that's helpful for people, but if you’ve got something else going on, you need to get rid of these oughts, they are someone else's idea. We need to do the things that we love. I mean of course we have responsibilities to fulfil, and that's part of life as well - economics, family - they help us incarnate and connect. But outside of that, and that's why you're reading this piece, you have something you're here to live.

Do you ever get that sense there's something in you, that you haven't lived yet, that needs living? I get that all the time, oh it can be hard bloody work! If I'm not living it I'll drink, too much. So I haven't had a drink now for two months, because it just anesthetizes that, it's an easy way out. It's a kind of creative spark or urge, and eventually you have to go with it. Or you may get ill or something, that is what the Shamanic illness in traditional cultures is about. An offer you cannot refuse! Spirit is essentially creative, we're here to live this creative life.

And you never know what it is that people will love. I mean I'm an astrologer I can look at the chart, but I don't know what it is that interests them, that pulls them, that calls them. It might be horses, it might be astrology or painting, it might be building things, it might be trees. I don't know what it is that gives you your joy, which also gives us our difficulty, something that stretches us.

The Spirits. Now we may or may not know what they are, it doesn't matter, sometimes it's like it's quite clear there's a bear around me, or a wolf, other times there's just something working through me. If you just have a sense of something but that is all, trust it. Not knowing can be good for us humans. The Spirits are there to help and to guide, they will guide us in the direction of that which we love. They support us in that, and it's a challenging place to live from, it's a difficult place, it'll stretch you and it'll give you self-doubt. As well as joy.

So what I'm going to ask you, is what would you like to be good at if you thought you were capable of it, what would do it for you? Because often we put these things aside, because we go oh no I'd be no good at it. I mean self-doubt is natural, it's necessary, because you're not good at it yet, you have to earn that kind of confidence rather than go to an analyst and talk it away. No no no, you have to earn it. And all the other neurotic self-doubt as well that's around, just get good at something you love. That's one of my central maxims for life: get good at something that you love.

And you can think well it's just not practical to do that thing, I can't have horses or whatever. But I think there's always a way, this is where the trust in Spirit comes in. There's always a way to do these things that we love. We get help, we find there's these mysterious openings when we take the initial steps, it’s like the cosmos responds. We can at least do a bit of whatever it is, we don't need to necessarily do an awful lot of it, just a bit to keep that connection. Over time it will grow, and opportunities that you could never have thought of will present themselves.

So that's the that's the main point I wanted to make today. Finding that thing, or those things, that you love. It's a good exercise. Find that thing that you love that you're not doing, because you think it's just not practical, or you'd be no good at it, all these excuses we make. It's about living creatively, it's about the Spirit being able to go beyond just following some kind of set of rules. You're bringing something new into existence, it's your own, and that's the deepest fulfilment, the deepest joy. That really is incarnation. Incarnation isn't just about earning a living and being responsible, no it's about something much deeper and bigger than that, it's about bringing that creative Spirit in, and living it, doing something with it, and that's very fulfilling, very joyful when you do that.

PRAYER and the NATURAL WORLD

 CHAOS SHAMANISM 4: PRAYER and the NATURAL WORLD

So here's the fourth part in this Chaos Shamanism series. God knows how long it's going to carry on for. Well that's the way of it, it's Chaos! Chaos really means staying close to your heart. It can sound a bit hard, a bit harsh saying Chaos. Yeah, it's like there's no feeling or it's an idea, and it's not like that. It's actually about being close to your heart, because your heart doesn't work in that rational human ordered kind of way, and Chaos just means not that.

 

We need that rationality, we need it in order to run our lives, but underneath it all that's not who we are. It's about remaining close to that. I read a book many years ago now called The Spears of Twilight by Philip d’Escola, he was a young French anthropologist who spent two years with the Achuar Indians in the Amazon jungle. He's now a sort of mandarin, a grand guy in French anthropology. But he was a young researcher then, and he lived with these people for two years.  He said for some of them, everything they do is a prayer. I thought wow what a way to live.

 

What does that mean, that everything you do is a prayer? It means you're connected with your heart to everything that you do, and that you're wishing for a good outcome. You're asking with gratitude for a good outcome. Prayer is founded in gratitude. It means a conversation with the natural world, that's one way of putting it, that's a sort of Navajo way. It's not about asking a deity, it's about being with the natural world, because we're part of it. And so it's founded in gratitude, it's founded in this sense that we're taken care of, we're helped, and that we can maybe get further help from that benign power.

 

It's interesting what nature is. I'm going on a slight digression here, but I want to. This is Chaos so I can! We have two kind sof attitudes or archetypes in the west towards nature. We have nature as sort of pristine, as fragile, as Gaia, as the mother who takes care of us. And then there's nature red in tooth and claw, the sort of Hobbesian version. The first one is Rousseau, yeah man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Piece of nonsense, if you ask me. Although we do know how to play as children and we can forget how to play, but that's something else. And then the Hobbesian attitude, you know, life is nasty brutish and brutish and short. So we have these two archetypes of nature running alongside each other, they are contradictory, but that’s ok, we just need to hold those opposites, it’s only the rational mind that has to have everything neatly tied up.  

 

I think the environmental movement tends to lean one-sidedly towards nature as sort of pristine, benign and fragile, and you know we must protect her from the nasty humans, that's the underlying feeling. And that gets mixed up with Shamanism, because of course we love the natural world, we remember we are part of it. But we also know it's tough, nature is red in tooth and claw. The Chippewa Cree used to send their teenage boys naked out into the wilds on their own for a month, with just a knife and a blanket. They would have to learn to survive. Of course, Health and Safety would get you for child abuse nowadays if you did that. But the Chippewa Cree understood and appreciated this other side of nature, how can you not when you are living close to the laws of survival? It is maybe a sign of our softness and decadence that we think of the earth as fragile and in need of our protection.

 

Nature doesn't guarantee your survival. This business of rights to happiness and life and liberty, that's a human invention, nature doesn't think like that. An antelope on the Serengeti doesn't think it has a right to life, it had better look out sharp or it won't have a life anymore!

 

So nature is both, and she can take care of herself, and yes of course we need to take care of her as well, be respectful and ask her for things, we need to take from her respectfully. She has riches that she gives freely to us, she gives us of her oil, she gives to us of her rare earth elements. We humans have this technological inventive genius, and it's part of our nature, in a way it's a unique part of nature, it's something unique we bring to the table.

 

I don’t want to over-egg that uniqueness, because if you read Frans de Waal’s books - he's a great primatologist who died this year – he showed there's nothing in humans that isn't also shared by animals, whether cognitively or emotionally. He's written two books on that: Mama's Last Hug, about animal emotions, mainly chimpanzee, and then another book called Are we intelligent enough to know how intelligent animals are? They sometimes even have certain types of cognition we don't have!

 

So there is a continuity between humans and animals, but at the same time we bring something to the table, this huge inventiveness, and we need to trust it because it's natural to us, and our job is not to oppose that with fear, but to support it and work to keep it in balance. Our shamanic job, if you like, is to keep humanity in balance with where it's going, rather than cling on to a pristine past, as if how we are now is somehow wrong and unnatural and killing the Earth, and all that sort of attitude. You can see this in environmentalism in its extreme form, the fundamentalist environmentalists who hate humanity and all its works, think of humanity as a cancer. That any changes in the earth due to humans are automatically bad, because humans caused them. Well, we're shamanic, we love humanity and we love all of nature: we love the nature of each creature and plant, and we love our own nature. So be discerning in your sympathies for the environmental movement. Not just the obvious nut-jobs who go around wearing death masks and glueing themselves to roads, but the more widespread and less obvious putting down of humanity. It is life-denying.

 

So back to prayer. This ongoing prayer, it would require a considerable depth and attention from you to be living from that place all the time and listening to that place, and not doing something if it feels wrong.  There is a whole other area there, to do with feelings, and trusting feelings and not trusting feelings. It can be one of the shadows of the counter culture that I talked about last time, which is that we may mistrust reason and overvalue feeling: if I feel it, well then I'll do it and it's not like that. We need to consult feeling as part of the whole context in us, the complex in us of feeling, thought, instinct, body, imagination, inspiration and experience. We need to consult all of these things, and through that we gradually learn which feelings to trust and which feelings not to trust.

 

A good example is romantic feelings, they can blow us right off course, I’m sure we’ve all experienced this. And you know if you've woken up and you're in a mood, then you don't trust what it's telling you about the world, that the world's terrible and what's the point of being here, that's your mood and what you learn is that, well you can't just get rid of the feeling, you have to make friends with it and live with it. We learn to tolerate ourselves, as one therapist told me, what she sees herself doing is helping people tolerate themselves. So we're tolerating certain feelings, we're learning to live with them make friends with them, stop judging them, but don't act on them, we need to hold on to ourselves. On the one hand we're not putting ourselves down and judging ourselves, but on the other hand we're quite rigorous with ourselves, we need to be honest with ourselves. That's a whole other area.

 

I think I’ll just stick with prayer for this one, because that's essential and it's what Pipe Ceremony is about, and what the Sweat Lodge is about: prayer. It's about sitting with your life, and firstly giving thanks for what works in it. We forget to give thanks for things like food and shelter and friends and family, we we think oh you know the world's in a terrible state and this society's awful. Actually it really takes care of us, yes it's out of balance in many ways. But that's our nature as humans, we get out of balance regularly. Animals and plants, they know how to live according to their natures, while we're still working that one out, because we are the newborn ones, we only arrived recently. So this ongoing prayer, that is another way of saying what Chaos Shamanism is about. I'm not convinced I've got the right word yet with Chaos Shamanism maybe I'll end up calling it something else, but that's a whole other thing. Chaos has got a lot going for it. Anyway, we'll leave it for now.

Chaos Shamanism is a deep thing

 CHAOS SHAMANISM Part 3

It's quite a deep thing this idea of Chaos. We think of it as a superficial thing, when things just aren't ordered, things haven't been paid attention to, yeah, it seems superficial. But that's using the word Chaos to mean untidy, teenage bedroom, disarray.

That's not the original meaning, as I said in the first part, it comes from the Greek and it refers to the vast Abyss that was there before anything arose out of Chaos. First arose darkness and night, the god Erebus and the goddess Nyx, the male and female dimensions of the dark, and out of them arose light. Also arose Gaia the Earth and Tartarus, the depths beneath the Earth. So everything arose out of Chaos, it's the source of everything. Chaos is that potent source of Life, of everything, of the universe, of the dreaming, of the creation.

This ongoing creation: that's what we're tuning into when we do Chaos Shamanism, we're tuning into the ongoing dreaming of who we are, and the collective dreaming of the universe that keeps it coming into being. But most importantly this ongoing dreaming of who we are, we're tuning into that, we're becoming aware that life isn't something that just happens to us, which is how it seems if you're just looking outwards. If you look inwards as well to the spirit you realize that actually it's been created mysteriously, it's not under our control. Like thoughts, where do they come from, they just seem to come in? Or feelings, how we're feeling today, it's not something we decide on. It's something that we feel the victim of sometimes! Our job is to come into relationship with it all, with this ongoing creation, which we experience through the continual bubbling up of thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations and dreams and hints from spirit too. And events on the outside too, we roll with them when they need rolling with, and we grapple with them when they need grappling with.

Shamanism without the Chaos is religion. In religion you get in the way of the Chaos, you get in the way of that access to Spirit, you put up boundaries of this is how it should be, yeah this is how you Journey and all that. I read this long description on Facebook yesterday. Someone had asked a question about journeying and this whole description came back of the three worlds and exactly what you need to do where and what soul retrievals are about, and it just sounded enormously complicated. But it's not, it's simple, everything is simple. That's what Chaos reminds us of: that everything is simple. It doesn't mean you can't have complexity – which I distinguish from complicated - but there's always simplicity behind it. So when you're doing anything - if you're in a sweat lodge, if you're on a journey to the lower world, if you're dancing around the medicine wheel, if you’re praying in a Pipe Ceremony, if you're doing an astrology reading, whatever it is you're doing, you need to be asking yourself why am I doing it? What's the purpose of it? That is what gives the depth.

There's always this very simple purpose behind everything, which is to be living from that deeper source within us, that thing that's calling us, that thing that is love, that loves life yeah, that wants to live, that has living to do. We're living from that place that has living to do, and maybe death is when you've done the living that was to be done this time, and it's time to go off on the next thing whatever that is.

So Chaos can sound like a superficial thing yeah, and you think you're the one with the real depth because you've done 20 years training with a you know, a Siberian Shaman or a Native American teacher yeah and that's got real depth. Well it probably has so I don't want to go the opposite here, it's a delicate dance of appreciating the depth of proper training that takes many years, and that being true to the Spirit within us at all points. A proper training should lead us to that point where you can just let go of it all.

Sometimes you just need to let go of all those practices you built up, however beautiful. Like the sweat lodge has got so much in it, so much symbolism, everything is symbolic and it's beautiful. And by the way, symbols are not an intellectual thing for indigenous peoples, they do not just stand for something, like let’s pretend. No, they ARE that thing, the sweatlodge IS the womb out of which you are reborn. It also IS the whole universe while you are in it. That’s what ceremony does, it shifts reality and makes it sacred.

So of course there's lots of different ways of doing sweat lodges, as many as there are peoples, and the traditional sweat lodges will have a lot more of that kind of symbolic content than anything we can run. We have to kind of just be true to the spirit, and keep it simple to keep it real, the complex symbolism is not ours, it is foreign, it is something we can probably never be truly part of.

Last time I led a sweat lodge was about five years ago, it was lovely, it flowed, it was like this feminine presence came in and took over and she just led it, and people had a really good time. People experienced it differently, for some people it can be really hot, some other people it's really gentle. The goddess took care of that, and I didn't have much in the way of tradition behind me, just a few basics, but that's all I needed, because I'd done the 20 or 30 years being with myself, which is the real training and which any traditional training will be moving you towards.

In a traditional training they may stick you out on Vision Quests, where it's just you and the natural world, so it's a deep thing and it's a demanding thing. It's very demanding to keep asking yourself what is the purpose of why I'm doing what I'm doing, it's much easier just to go to church on Sunday and do what the priest tells you, or go to the sweat lodge and do what you're told - of course we need to do that as well, because it's a collective thing and that has its own power and it brings Community together and it has its own beauty. We do what we're told, but within it we need to be aware of why we're doing it, we're not just doing it because when we've done it, it’s like good I've done that, I'm a bit sacred, now I'm spiritual. No, there's no point doing it unless you're with whatever it is in you that you're here to be with, we all have something to be here with, to take care of, deep within us.

Okay that was the first point. I've got several more. So we're always going back to the source with Chaos Shamanism. We're respecting tradition, yeah we really honour it, we really learn it when we're around it, but there's always that gap we need to live from, that space where we find our souls, independently of whatever practice or ceremony it is that we are doing. But at the same time we are fully immersed in, wholehearted about whatever it is we are doing.

There's a whole other area that I wanted to talk about, which is a bit separate and I probably won't have time for an awful lot of it. In the same way that there's a gap between us and tradition, there also needs to be a gap between us and the collective values around us. Tradition and the collective values will overlap if we belong to a traditional culture. But certainly there's collective values around us now, they're not all wrong, collective values are necessary, they hold the community together, they are not just the brainwashing that some people think. They orient us, even though we might eventually need to move beyond them. In the same way, religion holds the community together. But these values are necessarily limited, at least in the way they are applied, if not in themselves, and we need to be able to stand apart from that, and that can be quite tough.

If you do this shamanic thing, you're probably part of the counterculture that began in the 60s as a protest against the materialism of society and the lack of spirit, it was necessary. But it has its own shadow, because it was itself a rebellion. We need to be able to stand apart from that collective shadow of the counterculture, which is authority, money and a reflex opposition to the establishment. We end up thinking we're above the world, we're better than the world, we know better, that capitalism's evil and all that sort of thing. Well we couldn't run it any better. You encounter this very often in spiritual groups of whatever sorts, this kind of putting down of the world and it's like we know better. “The world's in a dreadful state.” Well, the world's just the world, it is what it is, it’s not good or bad. And remember news isn’t news unless it’s bad, so we’re skewed anyway by the media.

We need to be part of the world. What happens when you're part of a tradition or some modern spiritual group, is you can feel you're above the world subtly and it makes you feel good about yourself. Well there's no easy get out if you're into Chaos Shamanism: you're part of the world, you're equal with the world, you're in the world, which is what we're here to do, to incarnate, to undertake the difficult task of bringing spirit into matter, and that subtle hubris is not there.

And one final point. Remember that indigenous people are necessarily on the defensive, they have been overwhelmed by modern culture. So it is hard for them not to put our culture down to some extent, or even to a big extent, out of self-preservation. It is understandable and very common, but don’t buy into it. Otherwise you’re just buying into that same old thing and creating a false, superior identity for yourself. But it means taking indigenous people off that pedestal we put them on – can you do that?

CHAOS SHAMANISM Part 2

This is the second of the Chaos Shamanism video casts. I hadn't planned on a second but there it is, that’s Chaos Shamanism for you! Maybe there'll be more after that, I don't know.

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I wanted to talk about tradition, because Chaos Shamanism is outside of tradition, it's about being sensitive to the Spirit at all points and prioritizing that, putting that before tradition or teachings. Now that might sound like arrogance or hubris, yeah who are you to have a different opinion about the teachings around this other guy, he’s an Elder, maybe he's in his 80s, isn't that disrespectful? Who do you think you are? Well no it's not disrespectful.

I went through this one myself in my late 30s. I was part of a Buddhist set up and there was a teacher and he must have been in his 70s by then, and something in me changed. It's like I'd imbibed what he had to say, and I’d benefitted from that, but I could increasingly see the limitations of how he saw things as well, where he’d got it wrong. I started putting my own judgment in this first, and other people would try and make me doubt myself. “Oh you just haven't understood,” they would come back at me, because it's very natural for people to think well here's this guy, it's the Buddha, it's Jesus, it’s the Dalai Lama, who are you to say that they're wrong and you're right?

But it's often the limitations of the teacher that are kind of the greatest gift to you. because that's where your soul is calling out, “I don't agree with that, I don't agree,” and you say to your soul “shut up, who are you to have an opinion?”  But you you need to have that opinion, so you need to find the things you don't agree with and cherish them, they will save you!

People regularly say to me that they don't always agree with me, but they never say what it is they don't agree with, they're just saying I don't always agree with you, and I go well good, it would be dreadful if you did always agree with me, you’d be like some sort of cult member. To be fair it seems to be women who say that. The men just come out and say what it is, they are more happy to risk a debate, men are known for being more disagreeable!

So there always needs to be that gap between us and whatever tradition it is that we're inspired by, that has nourished us. Chaos Shamanism stands for that gap, if you like the soul speaking behind that gap.

So where are we in terms of tradition? This is the main point that I want to come at. Because we don't have one in the modern world. There's the remnants of Christianity and that still works for some people, there’s Islam for some people. But even then for Christianity it's not a unifying myth in the way that it used to be, because you've got a very different unifying myth  -  well it's not even unifying, the scientific myth well in a way that is unifying for a lot of people, but it lacks the sacred, it lacks spirit, so it’s not really unifying.

We haven't got one myth for the culture and we haven't got one tradition that goes back and that's not normal. But there's a freedom in that as well as a limitation, and this is where Chaos Shamanism comes in. There's a freedom in not having a tradition that you feel obliged to be part of, I mean imagine being a woman in a Muslim culture and you wanted to go your own way and not marry who you were told to marry, well that would be absolutely outrageous, you'd go through a huge amount of self-doubt, you’d need an awful lot of courage and self-belief to do that.

And it's the same in any traditional culture if you want to live outside of the way it sees the Universe, even in an indigenous culture well it wouldn’t be very easy would it? The Muslim example I used was quite extreme, but it illustrates the point, that it is very difficult to live outside the norms of your culture.

Maybe in some ways we overvalue breaking free of the norms because of our emphasis on the autonomous individual. The norms, albeit often restricting in some ways, can be very old and contain a lot of depth, apart from their function of holding the community together. That is what the term religion comes from – that which binds together.

So you don’t want to be just re-inventing old traditions without deep consideration. The elders can, slowly, they've earned the right to because they've mastered the tradition. So we do have this freedom just to follow our own spirit and where it calls us and to take from whatever speaks to us whether it's shamanic traditions  - Native American, Australian whatever it is, African, in my case astrology.

All these different things that are around that can speak to us. In a way that's the spirit of the New Age, and of course it has its own downsides as well, it can be approached superficially and that's what I want to get at here, is how do we do this? We have this freedom to follow our own spirits and to build something that really suits us, but it's not just like going shopping and picking and choosing, it's not whimsical, it's deeper than that. Maybe you decide to align yourself with a tradition, or at least dive into it for a while. I don't think fully aligning yourself with any tradition is ultimately the right thing to do, because ultimately we are outside any tradition.

Traditions are there to help our individual soul sort of unfold and find its connection to everything and its own gifts and its own meaning and all the rest of it. They are there to serve us, they are not things in themselves. But if we're part of a tradition we need to master it, and master ourselves, before we have the right to reinvent, otherwise it does get superficial.

But most importantly we need to master ourselves. I don't mean in the sense of mastery over, but we need to have been with ourselves for many years. That's the real path: being with ourselves, coming close to ourselves, and that brings us close to everything. That in a way is what any tradition is about, is bringing people close to themselves, because people have got busy lives and they tend to naturally look outwards and not inwards and to assess the values they're living from, what values they want to live from and what deeper choices they have, about who they're going be. It's like almost that's what life's about, is choosing moment by moment who you're going to be. Do you want to be the sort of person that lies, that is dissembling, that is not courageous about who you are? Well sometimes we are like that, but then we realize we've let ourselves down.

So it's that moment by moment choice, and it's just living with ourselves outside of any tradition, just living with ourselves as a human being, because we have a knowing that is inherent, we have a conscience that is inherent: something in us feels wrong if we don't tell the truth, and that isn't just brainwashing, that isn't just cultural conditioning. In a way the cultural conditioning reflects that kind of innate knowledge in us.

So we're always living from those choices about who we want to be and that is what Chaos Shamanism is. It's about always living from that, and we have this freedom, that's the great thing. So I do astrology, and I kind of I reinvent it as I go along, I do the medicine wheel, I do journeying I do all these things.

The Medicine Wheel is  a good example. I wrote a book about it in 2021.  I'd had no formal training in it, yeah no traditional training at any rate, and I reinvented it for myself. What gave me the right to do that was that I'd spent like 40 years with myself, struggling with myself, making my mistakes yeah, willing to be with my shadow stuff, not anaesthetising my demons too much, being honest with myself. Enough of the time, at any rate. Of course I've made mistakes, but that that was my main qualification to write that book.

Now some people would say it's cultural appropriation, you've got no right to do that, it's a foreign culture, and a minority oppressed one at that, you are stealing what little they have left. Well some would say that, others would not. It's not like this blanket statement saying that is cultural appropriation. Some Native Americans would say that, or Indians as they call themselves, yeah, and some wouldn't say that. Some would say go for it, you need to run with this thing, these teachings are valuable so run with them and make them relevant to your land.  

So this is how Chaos Shamanism works: you stay with yourself, you learn about yourself, learn how to be over probably decades, and then that gives you the right to run ceremonies, to teach. You have something to say and the right to reinvent as you go along. There's your empowerment: you don't get initiations or empowerments from outside yourself, you get them from within by staying with yourself, staying at that coalface of who you are, warts and all, and there is joy in that as well as difficulty. It is more difficult than worldly achievement, but not so obvious. It’s a slow path, Okay bye for now.

CHAOS SHAMANISM - the Written Version!

OK, so I know a load of you aren't so keen on the short videos I've been making. You'd rather scan a written piece and move on. Fair enough. That's how social media works. With that in mind I have lightly edited the transcript (provided by youtube) of my 1st talk on Chaos Shamanism. It took a while, but I'll do Part 2 as well if you like this one 😎 Below is a painting by Jackson Pollock. Maybe he can be a patron saint of Chaos Shamanism?

I'm going to talk around an idea I've had for what I call Chaos Shamanism. I've looked it up on the net, there don't seem to be many references to it, so I can probably pinch it for my own!

I came up with it about a week ago because I almost had like this visionary moment in some Fairy Woods in a Doncaster. I started talking about teaching Shamanism - like offline, in person - I don't know what the term is for it these days. I don't currently do that, but I know I'd be good at it. I just don't quite know where to start. But I just started talking, and it just all came out, and I was just feeling so deeply about it, I was weeping as I talked.

It's like there's something bubbling up within me, something strong to say and I'd love to do it. but I'm not in a hurry. I'm hungry, yes, but I don't think I have much to prove: I'm old enough to have had most of that knocked out of me! Besides which I wrote a few books a few years ago and I found a publisher and so that's sort of taken care of: “Okay, you've done something now!”

So, Chaos Shamanism. I came up with the idea because I thought what would I teach, what type of shamanism would it be? Well, it wouldn't be any particular kind of school or tradition, and the reason for that is you see in spiritual traditions the sort of breakaway attempt to return to the source when it becomes religion. Because that's what people do: they turn it into religion, they turn it into a set of forms which they bow down and worship, a teacher that they bow down and worship. And they think that's the thing, and aligning themselves with that is what will make them holy or whatever it is they are trying to become – enlightened, spiritual, maybe just better than other people! All of those things.

But it's not about aligning yourself with a tradition, it's about aligning yourself with your own guidance, that which comes from within you. That is what people find very difficult, but that is what a good teacher does. A good teacher doesn't go, “Follow what I say, understand what I say, because I have thought it through much more deeply than you ever could.” Well, he may have done but that's not the point, which is don't align yourself with a tradition, but benefit from a tradition, be inspired by it, appreciate its depths.

Of course, all teachers will SAY don’t follow me, follow your own wisdom. And you have to work out how much they mean that by what the people around them are like, and by what you are like around the teacher. Do you lose something?

Traditions may be thousands of years old and they carry egregore with them, the energy that builds up over time around ceremonies etc, and that is powerful. That egregore is a gift from the ancestors! So we need to respect traditions, but not be beholden to them. At the end of the day you always have to step back: it's about you and your own soul, and if you are shamanic your soul is the natural world, you and the natural world are the same, we belong to the natural world.

The natural world is alive, it's inspirited, and that is the foundation of shamanism, because that is the foundation of how indigenous people are in the world. It's not even an idea for them; for us that has to be an idea, but for them it's like it's the air they breathe. “Well of course it's alive, of course we're part of the natural world, what crazy person are you that you could think otherwise?”

Well we are those crazy people, we have this dead universe. Christianity fell apart and gave rise to a dead universe. Why did that happen? Well maybe because it had an image of torture at the middle of it: the crucifix. However profound its teachings might be in certain ways, it is also an image of torture bang at the centre of people's mythology of how they see the universe, with this threat of eternal hellfire too. So now we have a dead universe. It's almost like we're in cultural trauma from what the crucifix did to us, it created despair and a dead universe yeah and we haven't woken up yet, we are still numb.

Of course the universe is alive, we're alive, everything's alive, rocks are alive, you can feel their presence: these big rocks you want to talk to them you want to love them. I live on Dartmoor, I see that a lot.

So this is what Shamanism has to offer the modern world: a remedy for this great forgetting that the world is alive and it's inspirited and it takes care of us and it's beautiful, and we don't put the spirit somewhere else up there in heaven: it is here.

Nature worship, that's what it's about. I don't know if you watch Jordan Peterson on youtube, I’d recommend him, but I have an issue with him, he tries to put down how we feel about the natural world as Baal, worshipped with a Golden Calf in the Old Testament, and condemned by God. Mere nature worship, he thinks of it. Well no you're wrong Mr Peterson, nature contains everything, we contain everything we contain the whole universe.

So Chaos Shamanism. Chaos, that's an interesting word because we think of it as mere disorder. Well yes, it it's not order, but neither is it disorder or disarray, which is what it came to mean. It's the ancient Greek word, it refers to the vast abyss of Unknowing, the Great Mystery out of which everything arose, yeah what came before the Big Bang is the Great Mystery, Chaos is about that. So it's great Mystery Shamanism.

We think because we can't order things in human terms then that is a negative, it's disorder, it's disarray. Well that's just the limited rational mind. Chaos Shamanism is Great Mystery Shamanism, and it's out of the Great Mystery flowing through us, because we are it, that we have our own inner guidance.

You see this kind of return to that kind of source in other religions. You see it in Buddhism, they have sunyata, which is emptiness, which is a bit like chaos. It's the great void, the Great Mystery. So then people turn sunyata into a thing, so you have to go no no, emptiness is itself empty. All right, so you then have a two types of sunyata, and they have to keep doing that because people turn it into a thing. So it's a continual process of rebelling against people's tendency to turn ideas or practices into absolutes, taking them literally, writing them in stone. And then they tell other people they're not being respectful because they didn't hold the pipe in the right way, or they didn't give thanks in the right way, that's disrespectful to the pipe. Well I'm not saying no to that, I do respect tradition, but actually it's the spirit that matters.

There’s a good story from Tibetan Buddhism about someone who was reciting the mantra of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and he recited it Om Mani Padme Ox for years, and it worked, it changed him. But he’d got it wrong, it should have been Om Mani Padme Hum. But it still worked because he was doing it with the right intention. So you see the point.

In medieval Christianity they had dancing in the churches, and they stopped that, because when you dance you make your own connection with the spirit, and you can’t have that if you’re trying to run a religion. So with that in mind, maybe that is what the Sufi dancing is about, a return to a direct connection with the spirit within a formalised religion.

So that's what we need to do with Shamanism continually, because you see it happening you see it turning into religion left right and centre all over the place, not because anything's going wrong, but because that's what people do. They think there really is a lower world and a middle world and an upper world and that power animals live in the lower world and spirit guides live in the upper world and the middle world's where you go to find your lost keys. OK, there's a certain amount of truth in that, but really it's just Spirit working through you, it has no name or form. So if you just feel that working through you, it's not that you haven't got there yet because you don't know what your power animal is yeah and that you're backward, actually it's probably that you're forward, you don't need those intermediaries. I mean I love my animals, don't get me wrong, I love all of that, but they are intermediaries, it's the warmth of the Great Spirit comes through them, their physical presence, the physical presence of power animals, of animal helpers reminds us of the physicality of Spirit yeah.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” that's what Mary Oliver the poet said. You don’t have to be good, you don't have to repent, she said, you only need to do that and then you have your source of guidance and joy.

Moment by moment. Chaos Shamanism is about listening to the spirit and listening to that inner guidance or outer guidance, it's kind of both yeah, but listening to that guidance moment by moment and living from that, putting that first, putting your guidance before tradition, respecting tradition, but that inner guidance needs to feel comfortable around the tradition, and there may be bits that don't feel comfortable, so don't think there's something wrong with you yeah, trust that inner guidance, trust the bits that feel right and discard the bits that don't and a good teacher will always guide you towards that.

Chaos Shamanism: inspired by tradition but not beholden to it, and listening to Spirit at all times.

CHAOS SHAMANISM

Perhaps the reason the universe is widely seen as inanimate, as dead, is because we are still collectively traumatised by the gruesomeness of the crucifix as the centrepiece of our old mythology. 

 

Shamanism, the reclaiming of indigeneity, of how people were in the world before big-time religion took over, is a remedy for that trauma.

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MORALITY vs PSYCHOLOGY

'Spiritual bypass' is better described as the sin of pride, in that we have awarded ourselves a spiritual status; and the sin of dishonesty, in that we are not owning the evil in our own hearts.

Good old-fashioned morality has a lot going for it. It doesn't care what happened to you in your childhood, or about diagnosing you with exculpatory psychological syndromes. It says here is what you are doing wrong in the eyes of the Great Spirit, which is also the voice of your conscience: change it, or you will continue to suffer, and to be out of balance with yourself and with the world.

 

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And a 10 minute video on what I am calling Chaos Shamanism: Inspired by tradition, but not beholden to it. Listening to your own guidance at every step.

 

A CREATION MYTH: THE RETURN OF THE GIANTS

Here is a story that runs counter to the current human narrative. Life is abundant by nature, and is always unfolding into new forms, guided by the care and imagination of Mother Earth. The plants were the first to cover the earth in their abundance. The animals, a different kind of life, were enabled to prosper by the plants. It was the time of the giants, both plant and animal.

But as the plants flourished, they used up their food, carbon dioxide, storing it in their bodies as they died and rested underground.

 

Humans arrived when CO2 had reached a record low: much lower and plant life itself would have been threatened. Plants by this time existed in nowhere near the abundance of their glory days, and most of the giants were long gone. Humans quickly spread over the earth, and in the blink of an eye by geological time, began to use the buried plants for their own prosperity. Insodoing they also began to give food back to the plants, which responded with the great re-greening of the earth that we are starting to see. Already an area 1.4 times the size of the USA has re-greened.

 

It is early days yet. CO2 is at 400ppm, while the historical norm is several thousand ppm. Temperature is also at a historic low, and that too is currently recovering, though for reasons that are less clear. It is a wonderful win-win, as human prospering spawns a wider natural prospering.

 

The purposes of what we call Evolution are mysterious. But did Mother Earth have a hand in creating humans partly to help her first children, the plants, prosper again?

 

Humans are a tropical species. We eventually die of exposure unclothed in temperatures as high as 60 F. The warming of the earth and its increasing abundance reminds us of who we once were, that we have maybe forgotten.

 

Humans are contrary, easily thrown out of alignment with the natural world. A large part of the species currently sees the good they are doing to nature as a bad thing. But that is to be expected from this species, the new-born ones who do not yet know who they are, or their part in the bigger scheme of things. Will they gain more sense over time? It is Mother's Earth's hope.