Cosmologies and Reconstituting Ourselves as Practitioners

Considering it's been a year since my last post, this topic seems fitting.

There are moments in our practices where it's appropriate and perhaps necessary for us to take a break: either because we deserve a well-earned rest…and/or because fundamental changes begin stirring our innards into rice pudding and we have to wait until we solidify into a new shape, much like a chrysalis.

(Common Crow Butterfly Chrysalis)

These moments generally happen when our cosmologies--that is, the stories through which we perceive and create reality--groan and creak under our burgeoning evolution. In some way, we have permanently or temporarily completed our explorations of these stories. Perhaps they are stories about good and evil, about the nature of reality, or about our place in the Universe. We face new experiences which don't reckon with our old stories, because these stories do not offer space for our expanding range of awareness. And when we have enough new experiences for critical mass, something catalyzes within, forcing us to spend time with Great Mystery until we hit the next Magnitude of Order in our path.

But why go through this? Why put ourselves through the grinder until we're reduced to metaphysical baby food? Frankly, it's dang hard to stay functional when your insides are pureed into protein shake. Why not just plow on using our well-worn machinery of perception and understanding--those trusty ironclad tools that have served us so well, and for so long?

Stagnation is not pretty. All of us have witnessed what it looks like in others: how the ever-changing, supple vitality that graces us as children turns into hardened cheese that's well beyond its expiration date. Perhaps we've seen it in our grandparents who refuse to give up old ways of thinking. Or in dogmas that do not account for the new ripples and patterns that are ever-emerging in life. Or people who hold onto jobs, relationships and insecurities for so long that their fear in losing these things outgrows their exuberance to discover new aspects of the world and of themselves. These are folks who have lost their abilities to engage with dismemberment in a good way. And without dismemberment, we cannot grow into the new selves that await us…that is, we cannot re-member the other innumerable aspects of ourselves that haven't had a chance to assume their places in our life. 

The more we recognize our multidimensionality, our multi-layeredness, our beautiful complexity, so may we better witness them in others. Not only are others honored and nourished by our accurate (and therefore loving) comprehensions, but such perceptions nourishes the perceiver as well. We eliminate the diminishment and mini-soul-losses that come from incomplete witnessing, that come from viewing people or events through too-small cosmological binoculars. More expansive recognition elicits a Win-Win which is the holy grail of shamanic living and practice. 

Why these musings of late? I've just come from another workshop from Betsy Bergstrom. It is a workshop I took 3-4 years ago on Compassionate Depossession and Curses Unraveling--but Betsy has expanded her explanations on cosmology and field theory. If it's been a few years since taking this workshop: Totally. Worth. Taking. Again. With a few years of practice under my belt, I found that I took things in more deeply. She unfolds much more information about practices we know and love. I got to witness all the different styles of practice while sitting in a powerful community field. I re-experienced what it was like to sit in the client's seat--always valuable for a practitioner. And as a fringe benefit, I received healings. 

Mulching our cosmologies (every so often) is an energetic dismemberment that allows for renewal. Our cosmologies are spiritual immune systems (more on this on a future post), so it's worth doing. When our immune systems are healthy, we use massively less energy to "defend" ourselves or to avoid situations and people. We naturally and effortlessly handle things as they come along--thereby allowing us to settle into our world in a good way.  

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.