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.