Sacred Space and the Archeology of Motives

As with surgery, in shamanism we want to maintain clean workable spaces when we roll up our sleeves and get elbow deep into Soul. We want to create Sacred Space. It’s such a basic principle of most indigenous shamanic practices, and yet not something often talked about in trainings.

For many of us, we have routines—perhaps setting up our altars, honoring our spirits, maintaining power objects, smudging the room, and calling in the Spirits. But even in situations when such elaborate routine is not possible (ICUs, for instance) the one sine qua non for setting space (besides the presence of the Spirits) is our intention. Our intentions provide the “rules” or “guidelines” of the playing field in which energy runs. (The actual mechanics is provided by our cosmologies, but that’s another post.)

A practitioner is the main power object in a healing session. S/He is the power object for the Spirits. We anchor spiritual realities into the physical world. Being a power object is a capacity everyone has to varying degrees, but shamans are born (by agreement) and beaten into serviceable shape for the Spirit by initiatory experiences. They are therefore effective power objects for the Spirits.

Human beings are in a privileged position—we are Spirit but we are also players in this physical realm. While the Spirits affect us, they don't grease all the squeaky wheels of this world without our help because the human sphere of the Middle World was set up for us to learn through Free Will, Choice and Awareness. This is why, in most cases, only the living can help the dead if they haven’t crossed over after a time…because we are the ones responsible for setting the space in the human portion of the Middle World. 

A practitioner is a power object, but a power object with history. Power objects with histories are mixed bags. Some have gathered much healing power over the years, but in most shamanic cultures they often are considered dangerous enough to outsiders that they must be buried with the owner. Those who attempt to use these artifacts usually need to purge enough of the original owner’s energy from the object before they can use it.

In our case what we need to purge are our motives, and our motives are tied to the artifacts of our history and psyche: our wounds and insecurities, our needs and the world’s inability to meet them. We’re matryoshka dolls, and we can’t assume that what’s within us is a mirror to our conscious intentions. Our motives to heal and do right may carry deeper personal needs (feeling power or wanting attention) or ulterior motives (proving that I am a good person or that I’m worthy). And unless we’re aware or have mechanisms to deal with these surprise-centers in our chocolate box, they can end up messing with our space setting in small (or not-so-small) ways. Intention is tied to motive.

Consider the above issues seriously, but don’t freak. The reality is that intentionality is a skill that we all need to hone and re-hone, and we’re always going to find surprise-centers. Being a responsible practitioner doesn’t mean being perfect or “pure,” it means taking responsibility for what you know and don’t know about yourself. Meanwhile you can make an agreement with your Helpers to face and work with your hidden motives, provided that they keep them clear of the space during a shamanic session. Learning this skill can be bitter medicine, but if we’re not afraid of the passing discomfort we can come out much better practitioners.

Cosmologies and the Virtuosity of Senses

Let’s say we are fully alive to our senses and we’ve begun to experience the vibrancy of everything around us. Now what?

For most people that is enough. Their ripening senses underscore the preciousness of all things and validates their being—the oranges that deliver sunshine, the oceans that cleanse us, the earth we plant ourselves on, the trees that greet us every morning. We are precious in how we feel and appreciate these things, especially in this world where so much of Spirit goes unnoticed. Spirit finally witnessing and loving spirit. Once the pores of our sensoria open, we can finally saturate our parched selves in the juices of Spirit. 

For practitioners, this is just the first step. We’re not only nourished by Spirit, but we’re also instruments for Spirit. That means we cultivate a virtuosity in our senses so we can actively and accurately hear the messages all around us. Our awareness allows us to siphon more information from our surroundings, our clients and our Helpers—which means our actions can be more thorough and effective, in a way that benefits more of Life.

We also need to know how to handle the impressions that aren’t pleasant without freaking out. (People who have sensation-overwhelm should take the Mediumship class with Betsy Bergstrom who gives the best instruction I’ve seen on this.) We freak when we have no handle on a situation, when our cosmologies can’t deal with the information we’re being given and we therefore have no appropriate response. This is where PTSD can come in. If we’re not successful in making sense of something, it get blocked out—and before you know it, another one of our senses shuts down and gets archived into the dead zone. 

Our cosmologies are living things that need space to grow, to handle more of what we witness as our senses (and therefore spheres of knowledge) open up. Sometimes we just need to flesh out what we already understand through our experience. Other times, we need to drop our working cosmology (the machinery through which we do our shamanic work, and the landscape in which our Magical Selves operate) in order to take up a new one. This takes courage and beaucoup assistance from the Helpers…in fact, it’s usually instigated by them. But without this renewal, we get prone to what Roger Walsh calls “Truth Decay”—the dogmatisation of a living reality. 

Magical Thinking and Our 360 Senses

Ancient Egyptians believed that full humans (which may mean people who have run the gamut of initiations) have 360 senses. Mind Scrambling. My marbles roll confusedly on the floor just thinking about it. Okay, so we've got five down...more or less. Rupert Sheldrake tells us that sixth sense has been appropriated by scientists to categorize the way that animals use the magnetic, gravitational and electric fields to detect migrate, detect prey, etc. (and there has to be at least a few senses stirred in there). Sheldrake goes on to coin the term "seventh sense" to engulf all the other extra-sensory perceptions like clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy (the three that he focuses on) and describes how difficult it is for researchers to tease these three apart.

Those of us who have taken classes from Betsy Bergstrom knows that there are different types of extra-sensory perception like clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairolfaction, instant knowing, etc. If we stretch everything out to its extreme, we may come up with almost 20 senses that we know of. The implications of this are immense.

Ancient Egyptians had an understanding that we do not know a concept or thing until we knew all aspects of it. Quick calculations say that the most astoundingly psychic of us would know only about 5.5% of anything. This is where humility and the Great Mystery come in.

Do you remember when you were little and you made something, a picture perhaps, and you showed it to someone who didn't appreciate it or thought it was just clutter? If this happens on a regular basis, eventually that special something that we had (that we put into the picture) withers and goes dormant for lack of recognition, acknowledgement and feedback from the outer world. It's like it didn't exist. Eventually, we ourselves forget about it. This, my friends, is soul loss. Lack of perception can engender soul loss.

What happens when we walk the world, appreciated only for the quantifiables: money, possessions, appearances, career, etc.? What happens to all of those non-goal-oriented parts of us? What happens to the peach-lick toed, mudlicious, creamy nougat, juicy joy parts that could: feel what Christmas Morning was, sniff the change of seasons, eat the sunshine in an orange or allow the undulations of the sea run through our bodies as we stand on the beach?

This is what makes life worth living. Jobs and possessions allow us to live so we can experience the world in our own way, to feel these things and thereby become one of the tongues of God/Goddess/Allah/All-That-Is that's busily licking our own scoops from the 5-gagillion flavors of the Great Baskin-Robbins of Life.

Such people, each in their own way, contribute to the experience of the greater whole of which we are all a part. So it behooves us to help people find their destined scoop of life and regain their abilities to enjoy it--because at the deepest levels (where our commonality finally trumps our divisions) we are enriched by their experience too.

Quote from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

"Weighing of the Heart"--Book of the Dead of Sesostris

Death was not quite the same thing for Ancient Egyptians as it is for us modern folk. Their attitude towards it didn't engender fear, revulsion, existential questioning, or late-night rounds of Jack Daniels. It engendered wonder, reverence and a deep connection to the Spirit World whence we issued forth at birth and where we return at death. It brought awareness to the Ancestors who came before and the place of the long-ago time that still lives in the Duat, the place where souls travel after death and where their Gods live.

As someone who works with the dead and dying, I found the following quote from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to be moving and meaningful. This passage was written for the person who dies and thus re-enacts a ritual/transformation of his/her return to the origins. It speaks of some of the awesome beings who assist the dead. It is written from the perspective of a dead soul who stands "naked" before his/her Ancient Progenitors--death having stripped a soul of any cloak that hides the truth of who they are. And it puts the life of that soul into a greater context.

It shows what many Middle World practitioners understand: that death has aspects (some glorious and beautiful) that are understandably missed by the survivors who are in their grief.

Perhaps these words will be meaningful for you too.

I stand before the masters who witnessed
the genesis, who were the authors of their
own forms, who walked the dark, circuitous
passages of their own becoming. . . I stand
before the masters who witnessed the 
transformation of the body of a man into the
body in spirit, who were witness to
resurrection when the corpse. . . 
walked out shining. . .when he came forth
from death, a shining thing, his face white
with heat. . . I stand before the masters who
know the histories of the dead, who decide
which tales to hear again, who judge the
books of lives as either full or empty, who are
themselves authors of truth. And they are. . . 
the divine intelligences. And 
when the story is written and the end is good 
and the soul of man is perfected, with a
shout they lift him into heaven.

Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead
(Normandi Ellis Translation)

The First Ancestor

Who are the First Ancestors? We’ve already seen the downside of not tending our ancestral lines  (see previous post), but the oldest cultures hold a special status for the First Ancestors, the first Humans who lived millennium-long lives (or were immortal), maintained incredible wisdom without written language, and taught the civilizing arts to those who came after.

Nearly all old religious texts contain stories of these Ancients. They lived hundreds or thousands of years (check out the Old Testament, stories of the Egyptian Shemsu Hor, or the really old Bodhisattvas who are supposed to still living in the hills or mountains somewhere). These Ancients taught skills for humanity to live in a good way and to explore/fulfill their capacities. And they are considered divine or semi-divine.

Isn’t it interesting that the glyphs in Egyptian pyramids and Mayan temples seem to have sprung fully formed onto the walls of these awesome monuments (monuments which modern machinery would have trouble reconstructing)? Unlike most civilizations after that time, there is no evidence of writing or glyph-work that evolved from cruder to more sophisticated forms. What about the fact that pyramids were erected in these two seemingly disparate civilizations, and in both cultures these pyramids symbolize a woman lying on her back? This begs two questions: where did it all come from, and how do I get plugged in?

Gustav Klimt - Tree of Life

Anthropologists (the good ones at least) recognize that indigenous thinking is inherently different to modern thinking. While we tend to think of things linearly (that old Hegelian model of steady advancement and progress), indigenous folks think of things circularly in that everything has a cycle and everything must be renewed by ritual. 

Some rituals, especially communal ones, in indigenous societies re-enact the events of that First Time (Egyptian: “Zep Tepi”) in order to renew and replenish aspects of their current world. They align themselves with the powerful compassionate Ancients, and thereby also re-enact the creation of their world—that is, they are re-birthing themselves, making themselves anew, replenishing the world, and re-affirming their divine or semi-divine origins. It’s no wonder that these societies cooked their creation stories into the bones of their youth, for these stories give their people strength and meaning throughout their lives (see my post: Myth, Meaning, Ritual and the Daily Grind). Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly (“What Stories Do We Need?”) and many others recognized this need for the mythopoetic dimension: the dimension where the Ancients dwell...and where we practitioners work.

Michael Harner once said that: while modern society tends to look toward the newest things as the apex of culture, shamanic cultures look to the oldest. Indeed the challenge for modern practitioners is, in addition to our defined roles as bridges between Ordinary and Non-ordinary Reality, we also have to bridge between a time-and-culture long forgotten and a time-and-culture that is trying to outdo itself in being totally unlike its predecessors. 

We modern folks often turn away from our predecessors because we don’t want to incur the same mistakes as our dowdy great-aunts or our workaholic parents—so we conscientiously attempt to fashion things anew. The results are all around us—good, bad and ineffectual. But what if each of us has an Ancestor, a First Ancestor (as we all must have originated somewhere), that carries unbounded wisdom, skill, compassion and power? And if we enlist such an Ancestor, then how insurmountable are our problems really?

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for Christina Pratt’s workshop which is coming up in a month to get started in this amazing aspect of shamanic work.

Ancestral Healing (and Healing Ourselves)

Christina Pratt is holding a class on Healing the Ancestors which is something that most humans have neglected to do for millennia. Some of us practitioners have been noticing an awesomely looming backlog of owed ritual and general care-for-the-dead that we keep trying to scoop through with our proverbial teaspoons in private sessions. As a culture, we don't collectively build the kind of ritual backhoes we need to effectively help greater numbers of people because most folks don't even know how to heal their own lineages (practitioners included). We have this insidious notion that we can outrun our pasts--especially if it wasn't our own but those of family long dead and gone. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants and self-made people.

But as you get older and perhaps have the luxury to get reflective, you might realize that you're starting to manifest symptoms of an old disease that "runs in the family." Or perhaps you find yourself thinking about how you're "just like Dad," or "Mom," or "Grandma," or "Crazy Aunt Edna." Or you wonder why is it that no one in your family seems to have luck with (fill in the blank): money, love, marriage, children, friendships, career. With some or many of these patterns, perhaps you think, "I really don't want to be like that" and yet haven't made much headway in fulfilling your wish.

Psychologically excising family members doesn't usually solve the problem, you may have noticed. Doggedly reframing your life in a radically different style/class/religion/subculture may work for a while but what happens when your kids/grandkids start "reverting," or you notice that you're somehow missing a piece of your life (and not feeling the kind of happiness you'd expect from having 'escaped').

If we're to stop pouring energy into our coping mechanisms and use it more fruitfully on resolution, then more people are going to have to take responsibility for the dead in their families who have not properly crossed over and therefore have not been properly honored. Whatever is true for our ancestors, will also be true for us when our time comes unless we start educating ourselves and others on these responsibilities.

Our Ancestors can be some of our greatest spiritual allies:  tending to the souls of ourselves and family, assisting in fulfilling our destinies, helping raise the next generation, giving us answers to "unanswerable" questions, or protecting our interests in a way that benefits everyone and everything. Yet, they cannot tend or even relate to us in a good and right way unless they have first been crossed to the other side and allowed the process that helps them achieve Compassionate Spirit status. While some die well and make it to the other side, many others (in their confusion about death and its nature) do not, ending up as "hungry ghosts" who end up depleting or wreaking havoc on the living.

While this may cause many a worried brow, we don't have to fret about death. We fear that we cannot remediate a situation with the spirits of the dead. But all remediation begins with taking responsibility. For practitioners who are ready to take up this inevitable and necessary step of healing their ancestors, then this workshop is a good starting point to begin their education regarding the dead.

Altars

We all have ideas of what an altar is. A place of religious worship in a church, perhaps. Or maybe a nice cloth on a dresser with many meaningful and/or religious objects, a place we pray or wish, hope, or care for another. In any way, it's a microcosm of a much larger field of things that have impact and influence over our lives and we go to or maintain altars in order to remain in touch, in good relation, to these things.

The Egyptians also had altars. Really, really big ones. In the realm of Archaeoastronomy, which is slowly gaining acceptance even among crusty Egyptologists, there is an understanding that the Egyptian structures on the ground were reflections of stars and constellations and the attendant spiritual significances. For instance, the Great Pyramids are in the configuration--both in size, position and proportion--to Orion's Belt (see Robert Bauval's books for more information). In fact, all of the major structures can be aligned with the star formations of the sky during that time in Egyptian history. And the stars and constellations had tremendous importance in Egyptian cosmology, ritual, and even everyday life.

Altars give physical forms for forces, powers, feelings, etc. that are less effable. And if that's the case, we can think about all of the ways that we make physical the forces that influence us. When we write a letter, we anchor feelings and thoughts into words. When we paint or draw, we commit inexplicable urges/feelings/thoughts/concepts onto the canvas. When we talk to another, we manifest ourselves and/or a connection with another through our voice.

And if we're to take seriously the theme of the Ancients that Humans are Temples, then we too (in our very bodies and existence) are altars. The question, then, is not IF we are altars, but WHAT are we each altars for?

Magical Thinking

In neo-Spiritual thinking, we are awash with messages of love and light. And while they may provide temporary solace for many, only spiritually actionable thinking can actually change something of this world to better suit and reflect us. Real and persistent forces are at play in the world, and while most of us feel powerless to do anything about larger societal issues, we ALWAYS have sway over our own. And if we feel powerless over our own issues, then we return to our proverbial drawing board and see what has stopped us from recognizing the choice we have over each decision we make.

All of us (who are honest) have gone through periods where we feel small but palpable influences that seem to wear away at our sense of selves, our sense of being engaged with our destiny and the world, and the understanding that we have the power to do something about it.

Could it be that magical thinking, the childhood mechanics that we're constantly told to put away in our adult years, be the place where our power lives? Or perhaps magical thinking is simply a haven where all of our powers go after we've been called ridiculous or idealistic too often.

Note: Magical thinking is NOT the same as fantasizing. We fantasize when we feel powerless and we need some avenue of not-this-world-ness to give vent to unrealistic stories of how we're going to get our power back--such as winning some love who represents who we want to be, or becoming suddenly popular and famous and showing those bullying former classmates what is what. When we think magically, we KNOW that we are in our power and that the actions we take (even in those small and simple ways) change the world around us in non-cause-and-effect ways: you know that helping that beetle out of the watering can has somehow made the world warmer and friendlier, or that wishing upon that star made something happen. And that is what I think (for now) is at the heart of shamanism.

If you were lucky enough to have childhood moments when you felt the wonder of such things (and you're not so repressed that you've blocked them out), then you know what I mean. If you haven't had these moments, or you don't remember them, then it's probably a good time for you to get yourself over to a professional Magical Thinker and Doer, a.k.a., a shaman (or in this society, a shamanic practitioner). Because honestly, I don't think that people can have a sense of their own real power without some experience exercising their magical machinery (and I'm not talking about the domination flavor of power which is ultimately false--although it can wreak havoc nonetheless).

You practitioners, this goes for you too.

Who Are the Clients?

As I was preparing for a session today, which was arranged through a serendipitous series of moments by the Spirits, I realized that my main clients are the Spirits. I'm their mediator, their advocate, etc. And that during the honing phase of being a practitioner (which I now realize doesn't actually end), I had to get enough guts to do some of the things that they were asking me to do: "Really? That's what I have to tell them?","You want me to go WHERE for to retrieve a soul part?," "You want me to start researching WHAT?" etc.

Initially, I freely exercised my right to refuse and had plenty of excuses in my pocket that I would pull out like Get-Out-of-Jail cards. But as time went on, I realized that HAD I followed their advice from the get-go, things would have flowed a lot easier for me, for my human clients, and thusly for the world, the Universe, etc.

So, I go along with them more because I've tired myself out trying to pick up the pieces of refusing the first time.

Part of this had to do with not knowing what my role was EXACTLY as a shamanic practitioner. Obviously, the Spirits are the ones that do the work on the soul. But it's not accurate to portray me as just the chopped liver of a healing session. Nor is it accurate (or advisable) to get maniacally He-Man-like and think, "I have the Power!" and act like it's all me. On my drive to the session, I realized that what I am is more like a boat-builder. I get together the parts and make the vessels (which includes the sessions, the practitioner, the clients, the setting space, setting intention, etc.) that allow for the Spirits to do their thing, to get to their destination (which is chosen between them and the clients).

So that's where I'm at today.

14 Shamans Killed in Loreto Region in South America

By now, most of us may be aware of the kinds of forces that go into destroying the indigenous cultures. For those that don't, you can read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins--an engrossing book that looks into workings of governments, private interests and misdirected religious efforts to eradicate what isn't profitable or appreciated.

At this time, we need all of our healing capacities to be active and running in the world. Even if some don't understand the larger scope of what this means (including those that perpetrated these killings), the responsibility falls to us who are aware enough to do something about it.

On an outward level, we can write the US Ambassadors, the Peruvian Ambassadors, Amnesty International and the Peruvian government to do something to restore order. Prejudicial killings destabilize a region and prevent much needed support to the families of those villages. Shamans are the cultural repositories for indigenous cultures--knowing and relating deeply to the plants and land in a way that most of us have forgotten.

Shamans hold a direct living connection to Spirit which they hold out for all people in their community and the world at large. They continue to work in their own corners of the world to enliven a world that can progressively deaden when only material goals are valued.

"Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly...this is the interrelated structure of reality." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Myth, Meaning, Ritual and the Daily Grind

All the elaborate rituals of many of our ancestors seem so time and energy intensive that most of us today can't imagine investing so much on things that don't further our lives in material ways. But ineffable returns are still returns, and it's just we haven't developed the internal structures to appreciate how they apply to our lives.

The rituals were meant to connect us to a deeper course of life, to connect meaning to things that become otherwise tedious. Thus the actions we perform daily (like washing dishes or weeding our gardens) become outward expressions of an inner order.

Myths are master events which rouse and engage another order of our consciousness. They speak to us in ways outside of our normal experience because they are acknowledging a level of being that is too big to fit into our everyday world. The more reflective of us know that there are wilder, more heroic parts of us that ache for expression. Perhaps a sense of destiny that can't reap satisfaction from our lives as we know it.

Perhaps if we knew more of our own nature, the nature of the food that we eat, or the land that we walk on (all things that are encoded into myths), our everyday environment would take on a significances that make life more interesting. And that's because some part of ourselves (outside of our bodies and rational minds) then participate in our lives. It's how we shoe-horn more of ourselves into our world.

Common Era Shamanism

Of all the spiritual traditions, why shamanism? It's a tradition that was everywhere before there were established religions. It goes under the ossifications and operates at the living level of an individual's and a culture's personal relationship with the Sacred. And because it goes meta, it doesn't cling to forms as much as speaking to the deeper layers of being both human and Spirit.

Shamans are Technicians of the Sacred, according to the Dagara Elder Malidoma Some. This means that they are allowed behind the curtains to look at the levers and gears that run our spiritual heritage. What this means is that we get some hands-on knowledge regarding the spiritual. And while this evokes images of kids playing inside a Panzer Tank, we have to find our way to learning about the Sacred and cultivating enough largess to allow mistakes from ourselves and others.

In other words, we don't simply worship God, Allah, All-That-Is or that Highest Power by whatever name you give it. We get to know Him/Her/It/They. We start to extend a sheepish hand to touch the steadfast one that has alway been held out to us, without middlemen. And we we begin to find the meaning behind the worn spiritual maxims (such as, As Within, So Without), discovering the web of implications that these maxims spawn in this world.

It means that we're no longer children, no longer needing to take other people's spiritual word at face-value. Instead we gain experience and therefore mature in our own right, learning to see the truth for ourselves.