MODERN SHAMANISM: what form should it take? (2023)

MODERN SHAMANISM: what form should it take? John Woodcock (2023) Page 1 of 14 Traditional Shamanism The essential method of traditional shamanism, as a healing practice, was to bring the essence of the individual human being into accord with the background reality of the sensible world she lived in. For millennia that reality was conceived as a hidden configuration of the spirit world and the senseperceptible world. The shaman was initiated into that logical configuration through both ordeal and instruction by an elder shaman. The shaman could then return and serve the community by attending to what others simply could not perceive—namely how the essence of the individual had fallen “out of sync.” with the reality she had been born into, therefore becoming ontologically ‘sick’. Shamanic healing practice brought the suffering one back into accord with that reality. For example Navaho healers had the sufferer sit in the middle of a sand painting that depicted her origin myth so that the patient could be reconnected with her spiritual roots. Practices of retrieving lost souls are similar in intention. The first essential step for the prospective shaman-as-healer lies in her undergoing the necessary initiation into her given historical reality so that she becomes a conscious embodied bearer of that reality—a rather frightening phenomenon to behold! This is why the community ‘asks’ the shaman to live at the edge of the village so that the community is not subject to a sustained view of that particular embodied presentation of the awesome reality that everyone one inhabits, but usually ignores as “background”. Embedded in these profound methodologies is the understanding that ontological illness comes about when we become, in our essence, divided from our deeper being which we share with the being of the world. Traditional societies well understood ordinary pain and suffering that comes about through collisions with the perceptible world they inhabit. This kind of suffering is relatively uncomplicated. But the ontological suffering that comes with falling out of rhythm with the particular logical structure of reality underlying and informing existence (i.e., whatever historical reality we find our selves born into) is another matter altogether, requiring the unique services of the shaman. A classic illustration of a man who fell out of essential accord with his given reality (17th C. Spain), thus appearing as an oddity, or as an ontologically sick man, is Cervantes’ Don Quixote. His squire Sancho Panza tried his quotidian best to get his master to perceive and thus appropriately inhabit the sense-perceptible world as it really is to the ‘modern’ mind of that time—no dragons, no fair maidens, just windmills and peasants. This novel tells the tale of an ontologically sick man who privately inhabited an interpenetrating “two-world” configuration in which spirit or psyche reflected itself in the sense-perceptible appearances. His squire Sancho was a healthy man in his essence. He lived in a modern world (17th C.) whose two-world configuration was very different. The sense-perceptible world was getting drained of any spiritual aspect thus appearing as sense-perceptible only—a quite different logical configuration of the two worlds. Sancho’s efforts, based on reason as they were, could not bring his master’s essence into accord with the logic of reality in the 17th C. Note well: living in accord with reality is not the same as living in conformity with norms and rules of conduct. Living in accord with reality means understanding and creatively or playfully inhabiting that reality, always assuming responsibility for one’s choices. We could profitably compare Don Quixote’s ontological sickness with a ‘healthy’ modern Dungeon & Dragon master. The D&D master is just as deeply involved in her now ontologically obsolete world of dragons and monsters, etc. but she also knows it is a game that should not ‘leak’ its logic into the real world. She also knows when to quit and return to the contemporary world and its very different ontology. Page 2 of 14 Shamans understood, through initiation, that there are not merely two separate worlds—spiritual and sense-perceptible, say—but more significantly they understood how they interpenetrate (their mutual logical configuration). Only the shaman has this unique way of perceiving reality. So, if a person lay in bed all day, depressed, refusing all responsibilities, the shaman could “perceive” that the person’s soul had withdrawn and had to be called back or retrieved. The shaman understood the secret unity of depression (sense-perceptible reality) and loss of soul (negative or spiritual reality) in the two-world system. The Logic of Reality in Our Times Shamanic wisdom can still be brought to bear in our contemporary times, but the form of this ancient wisdom must spring afresh from a thorough understanding of the logical configuration of our much more complex reality. The same rules as those for traditional shamanism still apply: first, initiation of the shaman into embodied consciousness of the reality of the times, and second, a methodology for healing ontological sickness—i.e., an individual or community’s way of being-in-the-world that may become impaired by discord with the logical structure of reality of the times. Let’s first take look at traditional shamanism at work: An Inuit community failed to catch any animals to eat and its members were starving. The shaman descended ecstatically into the earth and found the earth mother who provides the bountiful gifts of meat. He found out that she was suffering from too many lice in her hair so he slowly combed them out until she was at peace once more. He returned from his visionary flight and held a public confessional in which individuals had to come forward and confess the myriad of small acts that had transgressed the sanctity of the earth mother’s sovereignty—an affair here; a failure to observe this or that ritual there; secret power struggles, jealousies, etc. The next hunt was then successful and order returned to the community. The shaman could probably easily observe these many acts of transgression over the months but he needed to find out the inner or spiritual meaning of such acts. In visionary flight he discovered that these many small acts of indiscretion in the sense-perceptible world were also symbolically the lice in the earth mother’s hair. The community had fallen out of harmony with spiritual reality and its demands and a ritual realignment with the spiritual world was called for. The configuration of the logic of reality today in our technological civilisation is vastly more complex than the two-world configuration of the traditional shaman. We now generally recognize two aspects to the logic of our reality. We can call them respectively empirical reality and hyperreality (simulated reality). The logic of each world alone is complex enough but their mutual interpenetration defies description in language almost entirely, even with the devastating concrete effects of their interpenetration for individuals and culture, as we will see. How can we begin to articulate the complex logic of modern reality? First I will turn to hyperreality and its logic. Page 3 of 14 Hyperreality Find the real hamburger! Is it represented here? No, this is a hyperreal hamburger—an artwork of hyperreality, having no necessary representational relationship to empirical reality, as CGI and AI is also teaching us, or as you may discover with a short dip in the waters of hyperreal porn—purely on the grounds of research, of course!1 What about this hamburger? Is it a representation of an actual hamburger? No again! This an ad for McDonald’s—a contemporary hyperreal artwork as well (i.e., highly “photoshopped” to remove all blemishes). We are often fooled by clever marketing into believing that such ads are representational of what you actually buy. If so, more fool you—they are all simulated reality. Try going on a holiday on the marketing basis of the hyperreal “hype” of Paradise! The actual experience is mostly far removed from Paradise: insects, bad weather, schedule stuff-ups, scams, getting lost, moving hotel to hotel until exhaustion; food poisoning, always on the move “seeing the sights”! It’s astonishing to me that people continue supporting the tourist industry at their own expense in these ways. Page 4 of 14 How about this challenge to the traditional two-world reality? Remember Magritte’s beautiful ironic artwork, This Is Not A Pipe? What is the reference of the pronoun “this” in “this is not a pipe”? Does it refer to a proposed representation of actual pipes, signalling that such particular representations are false, meaning that the shape is all wrong; or does “this” refer instead to any such image, suggesting we must make an ontological distinction between images of pipes and actual pipes; or does the pronoun “this” refer to the sentence in which the pronoun is embedded, ironically suggesting that this linguistic construction is not to be mistaken for the actuality which lies beyond all language; or is “this” self-referential, abstract, such as a dream image that might say, “this is not the way to go”, that is, any particular choice to go this or that way is hereby negated. Thus the sentence meaning points us to a pipe in its essence, (Platonic form perhaps), not to be confused with any one particular sensible form. You may now see how our recently acquired consciousness of image and language as such could increase the complexity of our lived world to the point of numbness, bewilderment or madness. Now let’s turn to empirical reality. Empirical Reality How about you go buy an actual burger anyway. What is the ontological status of this “actual” burger? Innocently (as in naive realism) empirical? Not so! You are perceiving and buying a brandname— McDonald’s or Macca! Your taste, smell and visual systems are linguistically conditioned a priori by marketing campaigns and saturated in a deluge of media-driven hyperreal linguistic forms. In empirical reality you desire what you are conditioned to desire by hyperreality. This is one way the hyperreal is intruding into the empirical. To make matters even more logically difficult, our empirical world is intrinsically a Kantian world, to say it philosophically. The logic of this world is one of calculation and measurement, or quantification (“8oz of lean beef with calorie-free lettuce and low-fat cheese”). We simply do not innocently perceive any particular phenomenon in its unique suchness. We have a priori always-already quantified it in some fashion, thus forcing it to appear to us that way, i.e., as measured and “standing-ready”, excluding any other way of appearing. This habit of thought colours all our perceptions of the sense-perceptible world. So, for example, when we perceive the sun, we have always-already conceived a ball of hot gases millions of kilometres away about which we circle once a year. The abstract concept of the sun is given to us a priori, simply by acquiring language as a member of our technologically inspired culture. So we Page 5 of 14 “naturally” perceive the sun that way—as measured, calculated, quantified, useful. We inhabit a Kantian world—the world picture that we call empirical. By now, hopefully, we can see how complicated the logical configuration of reality is today. In fact the configuration of reality has never been so complex. There are still two worlds, as traditional cultures also knew, but the characteristics of each are vastly more complex and alien to anything traditional shamanism could know about. When we include the manner in which they interpenetrate, through what we call “medial reality” as a further consideration for the modern shamanic healer in her healing method, then the shaman is stretched beyond her limit of comprehension as are those whom she strives to serve. Positivisation of Reality But there is an even greater consideration that stretches the modern shaman and those she serves past those limits into a breaking point. Traditional shamanism could rely on one unchanging absolute— the reality of two distinguishable worlds neither of which had been positivised and whose unity was therefore a priori assured and logically stable—matter was still spiritualised and spirit was materially substantial. Established initiatory rituals could then be passed on, master to apprentice, and reliable healing practices really worked, relying as they could on this stable background logic of a unity-indifference. Members of a community, or as we saw, a community itself could be brought into accord with this logic in order to understand the reality they inhabit, and learn how to live creatively within its parameters. There is one Indian story I love illustrating this traditional initiation into the stable and enduring logic of reality of that time. A boy sat at the feet of the master and asked to be informed about the nature of reality. “Everything is god”, the master answered. “You mean, I am god?” “Why yes of course!” came the answer. Thus the student imbibed his first lesson on the logic of reality: everything is god, therefore I am god! Thus armed he strode out. Soon, he encountered a mahout riding on an elephant, occupying most of the street. “Get out of the way!” he roared, “I, god, command you!” The elephant casually tossed him aside into a broken heap. He somehow made it back to the master with a. question to the effect of “how can this be?” The master replied, “well, the elephant is god, too.” This story illustrates the logic of a stable configuration of the two-world reality that has guided shamans for millennia. Although the student was knocked about during his ordeal, the logic of the reality he was inducted into was not “harmed” in the least—“everything is god” remained the firm logical foundation to his initiation. But the “greater consideration” I mention above facing the modern shaman concerns our contemporary reality. The logic of both empirical reality and hyperreality, along with their interpenetration, is the logic of positivism. Both empirical reality and hyperreality are linguistically positivised: they are both thought as being ontologically thing-like, having no spiritual component to either reality. The logic by which they could be thought as an a priori unity, in the manner that the Indian story above demonstrates (both student and elephant as an a priori unity in spirit), has dropped out altogether. Sheer difference prevails as the logic of our reality today. This logic of difference is a fatal difficulty for our technological civilisation and maybe life on earth, let alone fatal to the healing practice of traditional shamanism. Empirical reality, as I said, is not an innocent sense-perceptible reality; it is sense-perceptible reality as informed by Kantian logic. The empirically “real” thing is mathematically Page 6 of 14 quantifiable, otherwise it does not exist for us. We empirically inhabit a world-picture as Heidegger points out, and as inhabitants of this quantified world, we can no longer logically access the life-giving waters of Being in the ways that we once could, i.e. by accessing sense-perceptible phenomena in which the life-giving waters of soul were reflected. “Sense-perceptible” once meant “always-already imbued with spirit”. This is no longer the case. The phenomena rising up in empirical reality are already quantified material objects confronting. a subject that has logically forced them to appear that way from the start, rendering the rest of their being, i.e., their spiritual suchness, inaccessible to the increasingly isolated subject. As for hyperreality, we are still in the infancy of coming to linguistic grips with this strange new alien reality but already we are suffering its devastating effects on our quotidian lives. Young people for example are experiencing excruciating psychological difficulties as they compare their actual bodies with those of simulated reality. These virtual bodies are a kind of positivised virtual perfection that we cannot possibly humanly achieve but people are dying in their attempts to match up to the “demands” of hyperreality: cosmetic surgery, weight-loss programs, gym work-outs, extreme sports—all efforts devastating to an intimate relationship with another human being. But there is more to the sheer mind-boggling complexity of our contemporary version of the “twoworlds” version of reality. I have said that both hyperreality and empirical reality are both positivised in the sense that their ontological status is described in a thing-like grammar. Empirical things and hyperreal things are materially substantial with no spiritual aspect to their being. And so their interpenetration has also become positivised or thing-like with utterly devastating effects on individuals and our culture. The interpenetration of hyperreality and empirical reality has become a senseperceptible event! Intelligibility, coherency and navigation through life are now in terminal jeopardy. The interpenetration of hyper or simulated reality and empirical reality has entered the public domain in literal acts of incredible logical violence, shattering intelligibility, linguistic coherence and any possibility of connection with another based on communal or mutual background understanding. In one of my books I describe an amazing instance of such positivised collision of realities.2 I refer to a small video on YouTube that begins this way: Somewhere in a little town of Belgium On a square where nothing really happens We placed a button And waited for someone to push it…3 The video shows the centre of the small town square with a pillar supporting a big red button. Dangling overhead is a sign: “Push To Add Drama”. A passer-by does so and a drama erupts! Ambulances, accident victims, collisions between cars and people, fights, police and gangster shoot-outs all vying with one another while the local people look on, initially stunned. Although it is easy to get absorbed in the dramatic action, it is quite instructive to also cast an eye on the locals who unknowingly watched this advertisement for a TV station (as it turned out to be). Some were clearly shocked and then frightened. Others were nonplussed, uncertain, while still others became, in effect, the audience, enjoying the drama that exploded so unexpectedly into their lives “where nothing really happens”. A purely staged simulation erupts violently into the empirical lives of ordinary people going about their business. Although no one was physically hurt, the ontological violence was extreme and very visible. Page 7 of 14 The small community fragmented. People stood around bewildered, each having her own private interpretation but, with no communal understanding of what was going on. Having no way to communicate intelligibly with her fellow citizens, each person was left to her own “idiot” responses— an ontological catastrophe… The logic of virtual reality colliding with the logic of empirical reality now portrayed as phenomena in the empirical world! Unintelligibility is the consequence. Nobody knew what to make of what was happening and still nobody knows what to make of what is happening today! A transformation “within” negative reality is now appearing phenomenally as a positive collision between things. This is happening across scale today and the breakdown in intelligibility is fragmenting our world. From a cartoon character accosting us in the street to young men playing video games in war rooms while destroying entire countries, a transformation in the logical status of negative reality is for the first time now turning “inside-out” and appearing as historical events!—truly the end of the world! Yes, transformations in the hidden background of existence have been felt and endured by humans throughout history but we had to deal only with their slow effects through incarnation into our cultural lives and the work of coming into accord with the new logical structure of reality took hundreds or thousands of years. Never before have we been exposed to the positivised “movement” of the transformation itself! Soul or spiritual processes traditionally “occurred” at the core of our innermost secret being—Keat’s Penetralium of Mystery, or John of the Cross’s “place where no one else could come”. Our once sacred centre has turned inside-out (positivised) and is now in full public view and, worse, is then trivialised, as we witness daily in the endless stream of “reality shows”, or advertisements. The dignity and intrinsic worth of our inner life is now utterly exposed to the forces of trivialisation and banality, reducing the logical status of the individual’s essence to zero or utter worthlessness. How is a shaman supposed to be initiated into this unbelievably complex configuration of realities? How is she supposed to practice her healing method of bringing ontologically unbalanced individuals into accord with a reality principle that is simply collapsing under us, loosening the very foundations of existence? Modern Shamanism A common response to these questions in modern shamanism is to carry on the healing work within worlds that are now ontologically obsolete (that is, they now have nothing to contribute to our modern catastrophe as noted above) but still function to serve any community that accepts that now obsolete logic of reality and chooses to remain within its parameters. This response of course produces a dissociation between our imagination of past shamanic worlds, their healing practices, and our actual reality today, being in a state of collapse, as I have said. But there is another way—a nearly impossible way! An individual can be initiated into embodied consciousness of our extraordinarily complex contemporary configuration of reality and also can receive appropriate spiritual instruction, just as traditional shamans did. But who would be the spiritual teacher and who would deliver the necessary ordeal to the modern initiate? The answer to these Page 8 of 14 questions is quite simple. It is the same ‘who’ essentially responsible for the shamanic initiations and ritual practices in the first place—the objective psyche or negative reality. In prior historical times the objective psyche was to be “found” as reflected in the sensual appearances of the world. Thus the elder shaman carried mana. The negative reality we call the objective psyche reflected its reality as the appearance of the elder. When the elder spoke, the objective psyche also “spoke” through her words, and brought forth power and truth, perhaps the power of truth into the proceedings. Under the determining influence of such a mana-being, the essence of the initiate transformed from being subject only to the demands of the sense-perceptible world to an uncanny being who responded also to the demands of negative reality. They were therefore called “spirit-men”. Our contemporary times are unique. The objective psyche today no longer reflects itself in the phenomenal appearances and thus is said to have disappeared, no longer being of any consequence. Yet this false claim is easily countered if one accepts that the objective psyche is the meaning-bearer of existence, as was always understood historically (under different names of course). Our plunge into nihilism is an obvious consequence of the withdrawal of the objective psyche from reflecting itself as the appearances. The almost universal theoretical conclusion that the psyche or negative reality is now a ‘nothing’ i.e., it has become our technological (positivised) empty space, is a clear mistake, and indeed a a species-terminating mistake! The objective psyche is now to be discovered as negative reality as such, no longer needing to ‘find itself ’ as reflected in sensual appearances. It is now pure Self-consciousness and yet still speaks its wisdom and power, its love and truth to us if we can gain logical access to negative reality as such. But we have fatally shut the door to any possibility of such discourse. We no longer even know where to “look” for such an encounter with the “alien” other (negative reality) since we can no longer look out to the appearances for guidance. The sense-perceptible world has fallen silent. It is no longer a case of looking outwardly for negative reality (spiritual worlds) at all. It is a case of becoming the alien other (properly understood, as we will see below). But we have fatally closed the door to any possibility of becoming that Self-consciousness, i.e., to discover and become the negative reality that we truly are and then to return to positive reality along with the silent gifts of Being. Our incorrigible insistence on the logic of the subject confronting a world of objects having no subjectivity locks us out of accessibility to these gifts of Being. The logic of the subject is a deadly refusal to accept that such a logical configuration is itself historical, and thus may transform. It is not absolute. Our stubborn dogmatic insistence also gives full rein to the exercise of the will-to-power which I have written about elsewhere.4 Transformation of the logic of the isolated substantial subject to that of empty mouthpiece (Nietzsche) is the initiatory intent of the objective psyche, understood now as living logic (logos). This transformation involves a psychological revolution that few are willing to undergo—an ordeal of transforming from one kind of essential being ( i.e., one having a substantial self) to another(i.e., being a nothing, a zero). Like all ordeals in traditional shamanism there is an experience of initiatory death! This death involves submitting to the energies of the nuclear bomb. The logic of the nuclear bomb is that of transformation of hardened matter into energy. The trapped light of intelligence bound up in our reified prosaic language is suddenly and explosively released.5 The initiator of such a transformational process is the objective psyche as such.6 But this transformation is now positivised of course so transformation in negative reality becomes violent phenomenal event in positive reality. Page 9 of 14 An Initiatory Vision Teachings that accompany such an ordeal are accessed through dreams or other ‘portals’ that can suddenly occur in sensible reality.7 Dreams that teach the supplicant about the unbearably complex structure of reality today have to appear as weirdly alien to familiar understanding. But the initiate can learn to speak the dream logic until it does become familiar. Over time the initiate’s perceptions of sensible reality broaden and deepen to include the undulations of negative reality as they move us logically out of one stable structure (the “two-worlds” of antiquity) into an as yet unheard-of new structure. At this time we only have hints of this possible future. Here is one such hint I endured from the nineties in a vision that rocked me: A man is among us, he looks quite normal, like the actor in Cocoon, except he is in fact alien. He is friendly, wants to, needs to, live amongst us and is warmly welcomed. Many therapists are excited and thrilled with the glamour of his gifts, which include space ships that could fly at dizzying speeds. I join in with this madness for a bit but lose interest and instead grow increasingly alarmed. I try to warn others, saying, “What if ?…What if…?” I decide to act; I want to burn him and race around looking for a flame thrower. Instead I kept grabbing fire extinguishers and spray him with those. They are useless. He tries to stop me and we seem to realize that there was nothing personal in this. He wants simply to live here and I could sense incredible danger to us. I say, “It’s just that our species can’t survive if you stay. We need to survive too!” Then I go back to my frantic search. He says, responding to my “What ifs?...”: “Do you mean, what if I spit on the carpet or people?” And he does so, thus at last revealing the danger. A terrible poison was in his spittle, it dissolves flesh leaving horrible forms, like a fly dissolves its meal. I get more frantic until… There is a bed of coals, so astoundingly hot that they each glow transparent red. One would simply evaporate on them. In the midst of my passion to stop the alien, a young man, a human, flings himself as a voluntary sacrifice onto the bed of coals. He is the sacrifice who will save us. I am struck with horror and agony, a religious agony that sends me to my knees as I feel his act of sacrifice. O God! O God! O God! I imagine his flesh blackening and crisping as he rolls on the coals in apparent unspeakable agony. Yet when I actually look, though I am screaming in pain and horror and awe, I can see quite objectively that he is undergoing a different process. He is moving about, but in agony, or intentionally? That is, is he avoiding the heat or is he moving to further expose himself to it? He is not screaming. Is he in pain? He then begins to glow red just like the coal itself. He becomes transparently glowing red all over, like a clay vessel does at the highest point that forms the pot. Even more astounding, he is pregnant, almost full term! Did he enter the ordeal that way or did the transforming fire engender a new life in him? By this time I cannot describe my own feelings at all. It’s too much. One cannot name a mystery such as this. Then, the name comes: He is our redeemer! It is thirty years since that vision exploded into my life and it continues to offer its teachings. The dream logic speaks of an “alien” reality that wants to incarnate into the human condition. This is not a moral process; it seems to be a necessity (“he simply wants to live here”…)! And so we humans must deal with the new way of being as best we can. The ensuing chaos is clearly spelled out initially in this initiatory vision. But then out of that chaos, a logical turn to the individual who voluntarily offers himself up to the initiatory transforming fire. This fire clearly concerns the transformation of ordinary matter into another transparent kind of refined matter. The dream names this figure as “our redeemer”. In contrast to the prior dream responses to the alien (all serving the will-to-power), the voluntary surrender of the will-to-power and submission to the dreadful refining fires of transformation can produce the kind of essential being capable of welcoming and cohabiting with, and as, the alien now embodied consciousness that intends to “live” amongst us, as us, and yet remain alien. We could think this process as Self-consciousness or negative reality “intending” to come to presence in the Page 10 of 14 phenomena, but as negative reality. For this to come to fruition something is needed from us—our essence needs to undergo the fire of transformation from the logic of a reified sense of self (the subject) to the logic of being a “nothing”, a mere mouthpiece. We have yet to language this new configuration of realities that wishes to “speak” into existence this new possible future, but there is a growing enthusiasm to put forth the necessary efforts. This vision, as a symbol, became an engine driving me forward into unchartered territory which I had to learn how to think. The image of refinement of matter (clay, flesh, prima materia) led me to the momentous discovery that from the Iron Age on (1200 BC) Western culture has been obsessed with this mystery in one form or another until our technological age where it takes the form of literally refining matter down to the atomic level in order to make it receptive to the reality of light.8 The image of the alien bursting into the human dimension led to my work on the interpenetration of dimensions as my essay THE 3 & THE 4: Emergence of the Unknown Future (2023) explores.9 And, as well, I have studied how contemporary art is portraying the collision between virtual or hyperreality and empirical reality, or the collision between negative reality and positive reality. I also learned how modern physics is seeking to work out how quantum reality crosses a threshold to become our ordinary perceptible macro-reality, each subject to their own very different logic. All these cultural efforts to respond to the collision of hyperreality with empirical reality are attempts to address what is an essentially a process of negative reality coming into existence in positive reality but maintaining its logical status as negative reality—this possible future is yet to find its language. This vision, along with many others that I have described in my books and essays all contribute to a sustained initiatory experience, as given by the objective psyche, into the breakdown of the logic of our once stable structure of a two-world reality and, as well, the emergence of a new possible future, a new logic of reality. Needless to say, I got broken down.10 If the initiate survives such an ordeal under the aegis of the objective psyche she becomes a modern shaman able to bring other individuals who are suffering ontological disturbances or “illness” into closer accord with the mind-bending flux in the logic of contemporary reality, as I describe above. In this manner the modern shaman belongs to the tradition of shamanic initiation. But the methodology of modern shamanic healing must be spring from the ground of the language of our times—i.e., the language of our technological civilisation and its incredibly complex reality as I have attempted to describe. The most accessible vehicle for such a healing practice for me lies in dream-work. One difficulty in choosing this vehicle lies in the often historical language and images that appear in dreams as the psyche draws from the past to “speak” to us moderns about possible futures. I once had a dream for example that I was a Knight Templar. My shamanic task was to bring forward this truth into accord with our contemporary world picture so that I could learn how to assist others to do the same with their own inner dream images of the past. But how? I began to study the Knights Templar but kept in mind that what I was looking for was an erotic response to the material I was reading. An erotic response from psyche indicates a futural interest, not a past, historian’s interest. That enthusiastic erotic response from psyche came when I read about the vows a 14th C. Knight Templar took: vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience! Page 11 of 14 I now had a path to enact: how could I bring these historical vows into the modern context so that I could live them, or so they could live creatively through my real actions in this modern world, in this time of foundational upheaval. I explore this emerging healing method in my book Mouthpiece. Here is an excerpt showing my method arising from work on my Knight Templar dream, as described in my book. Poverty, chastity, and obedience were three soul capacities that I had to develop in relationship to the Inner Voice—poverty, chastity, and obedience. My poverty was a feeling that any knowledge I had acquired over the years paled into insignificance when faced with the wisdom of the Voice. I was constantly surprised by the invisible connections that were made in the windswept chaos of my mind, often producing a form of beauty. I often could not help uttering poetic speech that others, at times, began to notice. Of course, when asked to “say that again,” I could only do so at the cost of the evanescent beauty. I rarely accommodated others in that way. I understood that such requests were often an attempt to seize upon, and own Beauty. Furthermore I felt a delicate chastity associated with such speech, one that could be violated easily by invasive questions or demands for more. I felt an obligation to protect such chastity perhaps in the way the Knights Templar would protect a young maiden. Obedience to the Voice carried risks at first because a certain degree of surrender and obedience to the unknown was required. I never knew what would “come out” in my speech. If there were some shadowy elements in my personality, these would be aired and would disturb the chastity of the maiden speech. Over time, with considerable inner work, this shadow element diminished and I grew more trusting of the Voice and more able to surrender in obedience to its impulse, while remaining aware of my every-day surroundings.11 Subsequent to my completion of this essay I found my way by a series of coincidences to this passage in a book by Shamdasani. I am quoting it at length. Its relevance to the enormous difficulties involved for the modern shaman are clearly spelled out: On September 2, 1960, Jung wrote to Herbert Read: “I asked myself time and again, why there are no men in our epoch, who could see at least, what I was wrestling with. I think it is not mere vanity and desire for recognition on my part, but a genuine concern for my fellow-beings. It is presumably the ancient- functional relationship of the medicine man to his tribe, the participation mystique and the essence of the physician's ethos.” Again in 1960, Jung wrote to…Eugene Rolfe: “I had to understand, that I was unable to make people see, what I am after. I am practically alone . . . I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact, that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state. Why indeed should I continue to exist?” Consequently, Fordham flew out to see Jung, and assured him that the Jungians in London “were in a strong position to rebut open misunderstandings and were striving to further recognition of his work”. To this, Jung looked at Fordham “as if I were a poor fool who did not know a thing” and dismissed him. On reflection, Fordham stated that his comments had been on a superficial level, and that had he spoken more profoundly, he would have had to tell Jung “that it was the delusion of being a world saviour that made him feel a failure—I had not the stature to do that”. However, more can be said than this. To begin with, these statements are linked with his general pessimism concerning the fate of the world. As he saw it, the ultimate value of psychology was whether it Page 12 of 14 could prove to be of any significance in this regard. It is also possible to link his admission of failure to his letter to Herbert Read, which articulates the culmination of his understanding of the relation of the primitive to the modern, the individual to the collective and the import of complex psychology for the West. For Jung, in primitive societies, the relation of the medicine man to the tribe was not simply a contingent or arbitrary social arrangement, but corresponded to an archetypal necessity. What was required was to respond to the same necessity in a modern manner—the result being complex (i.e., Jungian) psychology. For it to succeed in this task, it required the full-scale recognition of the West. No psychology has managed to achieve this. Judging by these late letters, in Jung's own estimation, complex psychology—and psychology as a whole—had failed to make sufficient social impact, and hence failed to provide adequate antidotes to the “fathers and mothers of all terrors.” To Cary Baynes, he wrote “Psychology like mine prepares for an end or even for the end. The question is only, what are we going to kill: ourselves or our still infantile psychology and its appalling unconsciousness.”12 Page 13 of 14 END NOTES 1 If you have a soul phenomenological eye which has its eye on possible futures, you will be astonished! 2 Woodcock, J. The Coming Guest and the New Art Form. Bloomington: iUniverse LLC, 2014.pp. 50. 3 https://youtu.be/fpXn3ae4zws?si=684Lx0EkCoNh9XhC 4 See my essay at: https://www.academia.edu/106934741/The_Self_Overcoming_of_the_Will_2023_ 5 See my essay at: https://www.academia.edu/73704665/NUCLEAR_DARKNESS_The_Inner_Story_2022_ See my essay at: https://www.academia.edu/36216414/ OWEN_BARFIELDS_UNANCESTRAL_VOICE_an_uncommon_understanding_2018_ 6 7 See my book Living in Uncertainty at: www.amazon.com/author/johncwoodcock See my book LightMatter: www.amazon.com/author/johncwoodcock. Also, https://www.academia.edu/64474408/ FROM_INTERPENETRATION_TO_TOUCHING_further_hints_of_the_coming_catastrophe_2021_ 8 9 https://www.academia.edu/104902736/THE_3_and_THE_4_Emergence_of_the_Unknown_Future_2023_ 10 See Poems of Making Poems of Death at: www.amazon.com/author/johncwoodcock 11 My book Mouthpiece may be found at: www.amazon.com/author/johncwoodcock 12 S. Shamdasani (2003). Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. Cambridge University Press, pp 350-2. Page 14 of 14