Shamanism
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Shamans of Today
Actually, if we "go back in history we !o know that in primitive societies "generally the function of the religious priest an! that of the psychotherapist was usually unite! in the one person of the medicine man or shaman, for primitive healing is mainly psychic. --ML von-Franz
There are "great and small", male and female shamans. There are small female shamans who assist at childbirth and who help little children, but cannot !eal with other problems.One young shaman, after some initiation experiences, asked his teacher how far one could go on becoming a "greater shaman and was told that it depends partly on the will of the gods and partly on how much he himself was willing to suffer because all progress depended on the amount of suffering which coul! be accepted, for each initiation meant another step in suffering. --von Franz
Hamans still have a cord with which they can cross to the other world, which is why they wear such a cord themselves. Thus the cord represents a connection with the collective unconscious, it is an understanding which links one with it and it has also, like all archetypal symbols, an instinctive basis. Professor Jung says that every archetype we know has an instinctive basis9 the archetype of the tower would be the instinct for self-defense an! so on, so that one can ask, That is the instinctive basis of the archetypal image of the cord think it has to to with the animal' s instinctive dependence on a certain piece of round cord, it has to do with the umbilical cord.
In mythology the cord stands for meaningful connections and the acceptance of an ethical obligation. You could say that %o! ha! put you on a leash an! that you had to follow him that would be a ethical religious obligation. The negative aspect of the cord found all over the world implies being bound or tied magically and would apply to infantile dependence; in a dream either aspect may be emphasized.--M-LvF
[The trickster] is a forerunner of the saviour . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. ~Jung, On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” CW 9i, par. 472
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.
~Carl Jung, On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” CW 9i, par. 478
Shamans of Today
Actually, if we "go back in history we !o know that in primitive societies "generally the function of the religious priest an! that of the psychotherapist was usually unite! in the one person of the medicine man or shaman, for primitive healing is mainly psychic. --ML von-Franz
There are "great and small", male and female shamans. There are small female shamans who assist at childbirth and who help little children, but cannot !eal with other problems.One young shaman, after some initiation experiences, asked his teacher how far one could go on becoming a "greater shaman and was told that it depends partly on the will of the gods and partly on how much he himself was willing to suffer because all progress depended on the amount of suffering which coul! be accepted, for each initiation meant another step in suffering. --von Franz
Hamans still have a cord with which they can cross to the other world, which is why they wear such a cord themselves. Thus the cord represents a connection with the collective unconscious, it is an understanding which links one with it and it has also, like all archetypal symbols, an instinctive basis. Professor Jung says that every archetype we know has an instinctive basis9 the archetype of the tower would be the instinct for self-defense an! so on, so that one can ask, That is the instinctive basis of the archetypal image of the cord think it has to to with the animal' s instinctive dependence on a certain piece of round cord, it has to do with the umbilical cord.
In mythology the cord stands for meaningful connections and the acceptance of an ethical obligation. You could say that %o! ha! put you on a leash an! that you had to follow him that would be a ethical religious obligation. The negative aspect of the cord found all over the world implies being bound or tied magically and would apply to infantile dependence; in a dream either aspect may be emphasized.--M-LvF
[The trickster] is a forerunner of the saviour . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. ~Jung, On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” CW 9i, par. 472
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.
~Carl Jung, On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” CW 9i, par. 478
Carl Jung on the "Trickster."
Trickster: Psychologically, descriptive of unconscious shadow tendencies of an ambivalent, mercurial nature.
[The trickster] is a forerunner of the savior . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. ["On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," CW 9i, par. 472],
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.[Ibid., par. 478.] On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure by C.G. Jung:
It is no light task for me to write about the figure of the trickster in American Indian mythology within the confined space of a commentary.
When I first came across Adolf Bandelier's classic on this subject, The Delight Makers, many years ago, I was struck by the European analogy of the carnival in the medieval Church, with its reversal of the hierarchic order, which is still continued in the carnivals held by student societies today. Something of this contradictoriness also inheres in the medieval description of the devil as simia dei (the ape of God), and in his characterization in folklore as the "simpleton" who is "fooled" or "cheated."
A curious combination of typical trickster motifs can be found in the alchemical figure of Mercurius ; for instance, his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and—last but not least—his approximation to the figure of a saviour.
These qualities make Mercurius seem like a daemonic being resurrected from primitive times, older even than the Greek Hermes. His rogueries relate him in some measure to various figures met with in folklore and universally known in fairy-tales:
Tom Thumb, Stupid Hans, or the buffoon-like Hanswurst, who is an altogether negative hero and yet manages to achieve through his stupidity what others fail to accomplish with their best efforts.
In Grimm's fairy-tale, the "Spirit Mercurius" lets himself be outwitted by a peasant lad, and then has to buy his freedom with the precious gift of healing.
Since all mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them, it is not surprising to find certain phenomena in the field of parapsychology which remind us of the trickster.
These are the phenomena connected with poltergeists, and they occur at all times and places in the ambiance of pre-adolescent children.
The malicious tricks played by the poltergeist are as well known as the low level of his intelligence and the fatuity of his "communications."
Ability to change his shape seems also to be one of his characteristics, as there are not a few reports of his appearance in animal form. Since he has on occasion described himself as a soul in hell, the motif of subjective suffering would seem not to be lacking either.
His universality is co-extensive, so to speak, with that of shamanism, to which, as we know, the whole phenomenology of spiritualism belongs.
There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured.
For this reason, his profession sometimes puts him in peril of his life.
Besides that, the shamanistic techniques in themselves often cause the medicine-man a good deal of discomfort, if not actual pain.
At all events the "making of a medicine-man" involves, in many parts of the world, so much agony of body and soul that permanent psychic injuries may result.
His "approximation to the savior" is an obvious consequence of this, in confirmation of the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering.
These mythological features extend even to the highest regions of man's spiritual development. If we consider, for example, the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the Old Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction and his self• imposed sufferings, together with the same gradual development into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization.
It is just this transformation of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster's compensatory relation to the "saint." In the early Middle Ages, this led to some strange ecclesiastical customs based on memories of the ancient saturnalia. Mostly they were celebrated on the days immediately following the birth of Christ—that is, in the New Year—with singing and dancing.
The dances were the originally harmless tripudia of the priests, lower clergy, children, and subdeacons and took place in church. An episcopus puerorum (children's bishop) was elected on Innocents' Day and dressed in pontifical robes.
Amid uproarious rejoicings he paid an official visit to the palace of the archbishop and bestowed the episcopal blessing from one of the windows. The same thing happened at the tripudium hypodiaconorum, and at the dances for other priestly grades.
By the end of the twelfth century, the subdeacons' dance had degenerated into a real festum stuttorum (fools' feast). A report from the year I1g8 says that at the Feast of the Circumcision in Notre Dame, Paris, "so many abominations and shameful deeds" were committed that the holy place was desecrated "not only by smutty jokes, but even by the shedding of blood." In vain did Pope Innocent III inveigh against the "jests and madness that make the clergy a mockery," and the "shameless frenzy of their play-acting."
Two hundred and fifty years later (March 12, 1444), a letter from the Theological Faculty of Paris to all the French bishops was still fulminating against these festivals, at which "even the priests and clerics elected an archbishop or a bishop or pope, and named him the Fools' Pope" (fatuorum papam).
"In the very midst of divine service masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised as women, lions, and mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a corner of the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out their games of dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, and ran and hopped about all over the church."
It is not surprising that this veritable witches' Sabbath was uncommonly popular, and that it required considerable time and effort to free the Church from this pagan heritage.
In certain localities even the priests seem to have adhered to the "libertas decembrica," as the Fools' Holiday was called, in spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that the older level of consciousness could let itself rip on this happy occasion with all the wildness, wantonness, and irresponsibility of paganism.
These ceremonies, which still reveal the spirit of the trickster in his original form, seem to have died out by the beginning of the sixteenth century. At any rate, the various conciliar decrees issued from 1581 to 1585 forbade only the festum puerorum and the election of an episcopus puerorum.
Finally, we must also mention in this connection the festum asinorum, which, so far as I know, was celebrated mainly in France. Although considered a harmless festival in memory of Mary's flight into Egypt, it was celebrated in a somewhat curious manner which might easily have given rise to misunderstandings.
In Beauvais, the ass procession went right into the church.5 At the conclusion of each part (Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, ete.) of the high mass that followed, the whole congregation brayed) that is, they all went "Y-a" like a donkey ("hac modulatione hinham concludebantur").
A codex dating apparently from the eleventh century says: "At the end of the mass, instead of the words 'Ite missa est,' the priest shall bray three times (ter hinhamabit), and instead of the words 'Deo gratias,' the congregation shall answer •Y•a' (hinham) three times,"
Du Cange cites a hymn from this festival:
Orientis partibus
Adventavit Asinus
Pulcher et fortissimus
Sarcinis aptissimus.
Each verse was followed by the French refrain:
Hez, Sire Asnes, car chantez
Belle bouche rechignez
Vous aurez du foin assez
Et de l'avoine a plantez.
The hymn had nine verses, the last of which was:
Amen, dicas, Asine (hie genufleetebatur)
Jam satur de gramine.
Amen, amen, itera
Aspernare vetera.
Du Cange says that the more ridiculous this rite seemed, the greater the enthusiasm with which it was celebrated. In other places the ass was decked with a golden canopy whose corners were held "by distinguished canons"; the others present had to "don suitably festive garments, as at Christmas."
Since there were certain tendencies to bring the ass into symbolic relationship with Christ, and since, from ancient times, the god of the Jews was vulgarly conceived to be an ass-a prejudice which extended to Christ himself, as is shown by the mock crucifixion scratched on the wall of the Imperial Cadet School on the Palatine 8-the danger of theriomorphism lay uncomfortably close.
Even the bishops could do nothing to stamp out this custom, until finally it had to be suppressed by the "auctoritas supremi Senatus." The suspicion of blasphemy becomes quite open in Nietzsche's "Ass Festival," which is a deliberately blasphemous parody of the mass.
These medieval customs demonstrate the role of the trickster to perfection, and, when they vanished from the precincts of the Church, they appeared again on the profane level of Italian theatricals, as those comic types who, often adorned with enormous ithyphallic emblems, entertained the far from prudish public with ribaldries in true Rabelaisian style. Callot's engravings have preserved these classical figures for posterity—the Pulcinellas, Cucorognas, Chico Sgarras, and the like.
In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in magic rites of healing, in man's religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulated guise.n He is obviously a "psychologem," an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.
That this is how the trickster figure originated can hardly be contested if we look at it from the causal and historical angle. In psychology as in biology we cannot afford to overlook or underestimate this question of origins, although the answer usually tells us nothing about the functional meaning. For this reason biology should never forget the question of purpose, for only by answering that can we get at the meaning of a phenomenon.
Even in pathology, where we are concerned with lesions which have no meaning in themselves, the exclusively causal approach proves to be inadequate, since there are a number of pathological phenomena which only give up their meaning when we inquire into their purpose. And where we are concerned with the normal phenomena of life, this question of purpose takes undisputed precedence.
When, therefore, a primitive or barbarous consciousness forms a picture of itself on a much earlier level of development and continues to do so for hundreds or even thousands of years, undeterred by the contamination of its archaic qualities with differentiated, highly developed mental products, then the causal explanation is that the older the archaic qualities are, the more conservative and pertinacious is their behaviour. One simply cannot shake off the memory-image of things as they were, and drags it along like a senseless appendage.
This explanation, which is facile enough to satisfy the rationalistic requirements of our age, would certainly not meet with the approval of the Winnebago's, the nearest possessors of the trickster cycle. For them the myth is not in any sense a remnant-it is far too amusing for that, and an object of undivided enjoyment. For them it still "functions," provided that they have not been spoiled by civilization.
For them there is no earthly reason to theorize about the meaning and purpose of myths, just as the Christmas—tree seems no problem at all to the naive European. For the thoughtful observer, however, both trickster and Christmas-tree afford reason enough for reflection. Naturally it depends very much on the mentality of the observer what he thinks about these things. Considering the crude primitivity of the trickster cycle, it would not be surprising if one saw in this myth simply the reflection of an earlier, rudimentary stage of consciousness, which is what the trickster obviously seems to be.
The only question that would need answering is whether such personified reflections exist at all in empirical psychology. As a matter of fact they do, and these experiences of split or double personality actually form the core of the earliest psycho-pathological investigations. The peculiar thing about these dissociations is that the split-off personality is not just a random one, but stands in a complementary or compensatory relationship to the ego-personality.
It is a personification of traits of character which are sometimes worse and sometimes better than those the ego-personality possesses. A collective personification like the trickster is the product of an aggregate of individuals and is welcomed by each individual as something known to him, which would not be the case if it were just an individual outgrowth.
Now if the myth were nothing but an historical remnant, one would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into the great rubbish-heap of the past, and why it continues to make its influence felt on the highest levels of civilization, even where, on account of his stupidity and grotesque scurrility, the trickster no longer plays the role of a "delight-maker." In many cultures his figure seems like an old river-bed in which the water still flows.
One can see this best of all from the fact that the trickster motif does not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just as naively and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man—whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying "accidents" which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent. He then speaks of "hoodoos" and "jinxes" or of the "mischievousness of the object."
Here the trickster is represented by counter-tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic seances and cause all those ineffably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists. I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I called it the shadow. On the civilized level, it is regarded as a personal "gaffe," "slip," "faux pas," etc., which are then chalked up as defects of the conscious personality.
We are no longer aware that in carnival customs and the like there are remnants of a collective shadow figure which prove that the personal shadow is in part descended from a numinous collective figure. This collective figure gradually breaks up under the impact of civilization, leaving traces in folklore which are difficult to recognize. But the main part of him gets personalized and is made an object of personal responsibility.
Radin's trickster cycle preserves the shadow in its pristine mythological form, and thus points back to a very much earlier stage of consciousness which existed before the birth of the myth, when the Indian was still groping about in a similar mental darkness. Only when his consciousness reached a higher level could he detach the earlier state from himself and objectify it, that is, say anything about it.
So long as his consciousness was itself trickster-like, such a confrontation could obviously not take place. It was possible only when the attainment of a newer and higher level of consciousness enabled him to look back on a lower and inferior state. It was only to be expected that a good deal of mockery and contempt should mingle with this retrospect, thus casting an even thicker pall over man's memories of the past, which were pretty unedifying anyway.
This phenomenon must have repeated itself innumerable times in the history of his mental development. The sovereign contempt with which our modern age looks back on the taste and intelligence of earlier centuries is a classic example of this, and there is an unmistakable allusion to the same phenomenon in the New Testament, where we are told in Acts 17:30 that God looked down from above the times of ignorance (or unconsciousness).
This attitude contrasts strangely with the still commoner and more striking idealization of the past, which is praised not merely as the "good old days" but as the Golden Age-and not just by uneducated and superstitious people, but by all those legions of theosophical enthusiasts who resolutely believe in the former existence and lofty civilization of Atlantis.
Anyone who belongs to a sphere of culture that seeks the perfect state somewhere in the past must feel very queerly indeed when confronted by the figure of the trickster. He is a forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.
Because of it he is deserted by his (evidently human) companions, which seems to indicate that he has fallen below their level of consciousness. He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrusts it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god.
On the other hand he is in many respects stupider than the animals, and gets into one ridiculous scrape after another. Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and un-relatedness. His imprisonment in animal unconsciousness is suggested by the episode where he gets his head caught inside the skull of an elk, and the next episode shows how he overcomes this condition by imprisoning the head of a hawk inside his own rectum.
True, he sinks back into the former condition immediately afterwards, by falling under the ice, and is outwitted time after time by the animals, but in the end he succeeds in tricking the cunning coyote, and this brings back to him his savior nature. The trickster is a primitive "cosmic" being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness.
He is no match for the animals either, because of his extraordinary clumsiness and lack of instinct. These defects are the marks of his human nature, which is not so well adapted to the environment as the animal's but, instead, has prospects of a much higher development of consciousness based on a considerable eagerness to learn, as is duly emphasized in the myth.
What the repeated telling of the myth signifies is the therapeutic anamnesis of contents which, for reasons still to be discussed, should never be forgotten for long. If they were nothing but the remnants of an inferior state it would be understandable if man turned his attention away from them, feeling that their reappearance was a nuisance. This is evidently by no means the case, since the trickster has been a source of amusement right down to civilized times, where he can still be recognized in the carnival figures of Pulcinella and the clown.
That is one important reason for his still continuing to function. But it is not the only one, and certainly not the reason why this reflection of an extremely primitive state of consciousness solidified into a mythological personage. Mere vestiges of an early state that is dying out usually lose their energy at an increasing rate, otherwise they would never disappear. The last thing we would expect is that they would have the strength to solidify into a mythological figure with its own cycle of legends—unless, of course, they received energy from outside, in this case from a higher level of consciousness or from sources in the unconscious which are not yet exhausted.
To take a legitimate parallel from the psychology of the individual, namely the appearance of an impressive shadow figure antagonistically confronting a personal consciousness: this figure does not appear merely because it still exists in the individual, but because it rests on a dynamism whose existence can only be explained in terms of his actual situation, for instance because the shadow is so disagreeable to his ego-consciousness that it has to be repressed into the unconscious.
This explanation does not quite meet the case here, because the trickster obviously represents a vanishing level of consciousness which increasingly lacks the power to take express and assert itself. Furthermore, repression would prevent it from vanishing, because repressed contents are the very ones that have the best chance of survival, as we know from experience that nothing is corrected in the unconscious.
Lastly, the story of the trickster is not in the least disagreeable to the Winnebago consciousness or incompatible with it but, on the contrary, pleasurable and therefore not conducive to repression. It looks, therefore, as if the myth were actively sustained and fostered by consciousness. This may well be so, since that is the best and most successful method of keeping the shadow figure conscious and subjecting it to conscious criticism.
Although, to begin with, this criticism has more the character of a positive evaluation, we may expect that with the progressive development of consciousness the cruder aspects of the myth will gradually fall away, even if the danger of its rapid disappearance under the stress of white civilization did not exist. We have often seen how certain customs, originally cruel or obscene, became mere vestiges in the course of time.
The process of rendering this motif harmless takes an extremely long time, as its history shows; one can still detect traces of it even at a high level of civilization. Its longevity could also be explained by the strength and vitality of the state of consciousness described in the myth, and by the secret attraction and fascination this has for the conscious mind.
Although purely causal hypotheses in the biological sphere are not as a rule very satisfactory, due weight must nevertheless be given to the fact that in the case of the trickster a higher level of consciousness has covered up a lower one, and that the latter was already in retreat. His recollection, however, is mainly due to the interest which the conscious mind brings to bear on him, the inevitable concomitant being, as we have seen, the gradual civilizing, i.e., assimilation, of a primitive daemonic figure who was originally autonomous and even capable of causing possession.
To supplement the causal approach by a final one therefore enables us to arrive at more meaningful interpretations not only in medical psychology, where we are concerned with individual fantasies originating in the unconscious, but also in the case of collective fantasies, that is myths and fairy-tales.
As Radin points out, the civilizing process begins within the framework of the trickster cycle itself, and this is a clear indication that the original state has been overcome. At any rate the marks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead of acting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trickster's behavior towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful and sensible.
The devaluation of his earlier unconsciousness is apparent even in the myth, and one wonders what has happened to his evil qualities. The naive reader may imagine that when the dark aspects disappear they are no longer there in reality. But that is not the case at all, as experience shows. 'What actually happens is that the conscious mind is then able to free itself from the fascination of evil and is no longer obliged to live it compulsively.
The darkness and the evil have not gone up in smoke, they have merely withdrawn into the unconscious owing to loss of energy, where they remain unconscious so long as all is well with the conscious. But if the conscious should find itself in a critical or doubtful situation, then it soon becomes apparent that the shadow has not dissolved into nothing but is only waiting for a favorable opportunity to reappear as a projection upon one's neighbor.
If this trick is successful, there is immediately created between them that world of primordial darkness where everything that is characteristic of the trickster can happen-even on the highest plane of civilization. The best examples of these "monkey tricks," as popular speech aptly and truthfully sums up this state of affairs in which everything goes wrong and nothing intelligent happens except by mistake at the last moment, are naturally to be found in politics.
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.
The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psyche from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the individual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation, and makes society pay for his inefficiency.
He thinks the meaning of existence would be discovered if food and clothing were delivered to him gratis on his own doorstep, or if everybody possessed an automobile. Such are the puerilities that rise up in place of an unconscious shadow and keep it unconscious. As a result of these prejudices, the individual feels totally dependent on his environment and loses all capacity for introspection. In this way his code of ethics is replaced by a knowledge of what is permitted or forbidden or ordered.
How, under these circumstances, can one expect a soldier to subject an order received from a superior to ethical scrutiny? He has not yet made the discovery that he might be capable of spontaneous ethical impulses, and of performing them-even when no one is looking.
From this point of view we can see why the myth of the trickster was preserved and developed: like many other myths, it was supposed to have a therapeutic effect. It holds the earlier low intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he shall not forget how things looked yesterday. We like to imagine that something which we do not understand does not help us in any way. But that is not always so.
Seldom does a man understand with his head alone, least of all when he is a primitive. Because of its numinosity the myth has a direct effect on the unconscious, no matter whether it is understood or not. The fact that its repeated telling has not long since become obsolete can, I believe, be explained by its usefulness. The explanation is rather difficult because two contrary tendencies are at work: the desire on the one hand to get out of the earlier condition and on the other hand not to forget it.
Apparently Radin has also felt this difficulty, for he says: "Viewed psychologically, it might be contended that the history of civilization is largely the account of the attempts of man to forget his transformation from an animal into a human being." 16 A few pages further on he says (with reference to the Golden Age): "So stubborn a refusal to forget is not an accident." And it is also no accident that we are forced to contradict ourselves as soon as we try to formulate man's paradoxical attitude to myth.
Even the most enlightened of us will set up a Christmas-tree for his children without having the least idea what this custom means, and is invariably disposed to nip any attempt at interpretation in the bud. It is really astonishing to see how many so-called superstitions are rampant nowadays in town and country alike, but if one took hold of the individual and asked him, loudly and clearly, "Do you believe in ghosts? in witches? in spells and magic?" he would deny it indignantly.
It is a hundred to one he has never heard of such things and thinks it all rubbish. But in secret he is all for it, just like a jungle-dweller. The public knows very little of these things anyway, for everyone is convinced that in our enlightened society that kind of superstition has long since been eradicated, and it is part of the general convention to act as though one had never heard of such things, not to mention believing in them.
But nothing is ever lost, not even the blood pact with the devil. Outwardly it is forgotten, but inwardly not at all. We act like the natives on the southern slopes of Mount Elgon, in East Africa, one of whom accompanied me part of the way into the bush. At a fork in the path we came upon a brand new "ghost trap," beautifully got up like a little hut, near the cave where he lived with his family. I asked him if he had made it. He denied it with all the signs of extreme agitation, asserting that only children would make such a "ju-ju." Whereupon he gave the hut a kick, and the whole thing fell to pieces.
This is exactly the reaction we can observe in Europe today. Outwardly people are more or less civilized, but inwardly they are still primitives. Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all that.
This contradiction was once brought home to me in the most drastic manner when I was watching a "Strudel" (a sort of local witch-doctor) taking the spell off a stable. The stable was situated immediately beside the Gotthard railway line, and several international expresses sped past during the ceremony. Their occupants would hardly have suspected that a primitive ritual was being performed a few yards away.
The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousness is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is also why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity. We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.
It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the "mind," even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that? We can say, if we like, that one statement comes from the psyche, is psychic and nothing but psychic, and that another comes from the mind, is "spiritual" and therefore superior to the psychic one. Both are mere assertions based on the postulates of belief.
The fact is, that this old trichotomous hierarchy of psychic contents (hylic, psychic, and pneumatic) represents the polaristic structure of the psyche, which is the only immediate object of experience. The unity of our psychic nature lies in the middle, just as the living unity of the waterfall appears in the dynamic connection between above and below.
Thus, the living effect of the myth is experienced when a higher consciousness, rejoicing in its freedom and independence, is confronted by the autonomy of a mythological figure and yet cannot flee from its fascination, but must pay tribute to the overwhelming impression. The figure works, because secretly it participates in the observer's psyche and appears as its reflection, though it is not recognized as such.
It is split off from his consciousness and consequently behaves like an autonomous personality. The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, as a mythological figure, but, in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologems, as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations.
If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior.
Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them.
Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more "scientific." But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.
Actually, it is not surprising that this should be so, since even the most rudimentary insight into the shadow sometimes causes the greatest difficulties for the modern European. But since the shadow is the figure nearest his consciousness and the least explosive one, it is also the first component of personality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious. A minatory and ridiculous figure, he stands at the very beginning of the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle of the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a "quaestio crocodilina."
If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity or other has happened and been consciously understood. Only out of disaster can the longing for the saviour arise—in other words, the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow create such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo the tangled web of fate. In the case of the individual, the problem constellated by the shadow is answered on the plane of the anima, that is, through relatedness. In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness. This gradually brings liberation from imprisonment in unconsciousness, and is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing.
As in its collective, mythological form, so also the individual shadow contains within it the seed of an enantiodromia, of a conversion into its opposite.
http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/211-On-the-Psychology-of-the-Trickster-Figure-Jung
Trickster: Psychologically, descriptive of unconscious shadow tendencies of an ambivalent, mercurial nature.
[The trickster] is a forerunner of the savior . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. ["On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," CW 9i, par. 472],
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.[Ibid., par. 478.] On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure by C.G. Jung:
It is no light task for me to write about the figure of the trickster in American Indian mythology within the confined space of a commentary.
When I first came across Adolf Bandelier's classic on this subject, The Delight Makers, many years ago, I was struck by the European analogy of the carnival in the medieval Church, with its reversal of the hierarchic order, which is still continued in the carnivals held by student societies today. Something of this contradictoriness also inheres in the medieval description of the devil as simia dei (the ape of God), and in his characterization in folklore as the "simpleton" who is "fooled" or "cheated."
A curious combination of typical trickster motifs can be found in the alchemical figure of Mercurius ; for instance, his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and—last but not least—his approximation to the figure of a saviour.
These qualities make Mercurius seem like a daemonic being resurrected from primitive times, older even than the Greek Hermes. His rogueries relate him in some measure to various figures met with in folklore and universally known in fairy-tales:
Tom Thumb, Stupid Hans, or the buffoon-like Hanswurst, who is an altogether negative hero and yet manages to achieve through his stupidity what others fail to accomplish with their best efforts.
In Grimm's fairy-tale, the "Spirit Mercurius" lets himself be outwitted by a peasant lad, and then has to buy his freedom with the precious gift of healing.
Since all mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them, it is not surprising to find certain phenomena in the field of parapsychology which remind us of the trickster.
These are the phenomena connected with poltergeists, and they occur at all times and places in the ambiance of pre-adolescent children.
The malicious tricks played by the poltergeist are as well known as the low level of his intelligence and the fatuity of his "communications."
Ability to change his shape seems also to be one of his characteristics, as there are not a few reports of his appearance in animal form. Since he has on occasion described himself as a soul in hell, the motif of subjective suffering would seem not to be lacking either.
His universality is co-extensive, so to speak, with that of shamanism, to which, as we know, the whole phenomenology of spiritualism belongs.
There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured.
For this reason, his profession sometimes puts him in peril of his life.
Besides that, the shamanistic techniques in themselves often cause the medicine-man a good deal of discomfort, if not actual pain.
At all events the "making of a medicine-man" involves, in many parts of the world, so much agony of body and soul that permanent psychic injuries may result.
His "approximation to the savior" is an obvious consequence of this, in confirmation of the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering.
These mythological features extend even to the highest regions of man's spiritual development. If we consider, for example, the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the Old Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction and his self• imposed sufferings, together with the same gradual development into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization.
It is just this transformation of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster's compensatory relation to the "saint." In the early Middle Ages, this led to some strange ecclesiastical customs based on memories of the ancient saturnalia. Mostly they were celebrated on the days immediately following the birth of Christ—that is, in the New Year—with singing and dancing.
The dances were the originally harmless tripudia of the priests, lower clergy, children, and subdeacons and took place in church. An episcopus puerorum (children's bishop) was elected on Innocents' Day and dressed in pontifical robes.
Amid uproarious rejoicings he paid an official visit to the palace of the archbishop and bestowed the episcopal blessing from one of the windows. The same thing happened at the tripudium hypodiaconorum, and at the dances for other priestly grades.
By the end of the twelfth century, the subdeacons' dance had degenerated into a real festum stuttorum (fools' feast). A report from the year I1g8 says that at the Feast of the Circumcision in Notre Dame, Paris, "so many abominations and shameful deeds" were committed that the holy place was desecrated "not only by smutty jokes, but even by the shedding of blood." In vain did Pope Innocent III inveigh against the "jests and madness that make the clergy a mockery," and the "shameless frenzy of their play-acting."
Two hundred and fifty years later (March 12, 1444), a letter from the Theological Faculty of Paris to all the French bishops was still fulminating against these festivals, at which "even the priests and clerics elected an archbishop or a bishop or pope, and named him the Fools' Pope" (fatuorum papam).
"In the very midst of divine service masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised as women, lions, and mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a corner of the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out their games of dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, and ran and hopped about all over the church."
It is not surprising that this veritable witches' Sabbath was uncommonly popular, and that it required considerable time and effort to free the Church from this pagan heritage.
In certain localities even the priests seem to have adhered to the "libertas decembrica," as the Fools' Holiday was called, in spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that the older level of consciousness could let itself rip on this happy occasion with all the wildness, wantonness, and irresponsibility of paganism.
These ceremonies, which still reveal the spirit of the trickster in his original form, seem to have died out by the beginning of the sixteenth century. At any rate, the various conciliar decrees issued from 1581 to 1585 forbade only the festum puerorum and the election of an episcopus puerorum.
Finally, we must also mention in this connection the festum asinorum, which, so far as I know, was celebrated mainly in France. Although considered a harmless festival in memory of Mary's flight into Egypt, it was celebrated in a somewhat curious manner which might easily have given rise to misunderstandings.
In Beauvais, the ass procession went right into the church.5 At the conclusion of each part (Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, ete.) of the high mass that followed, the whole congregation brayed) that is, they all went "Y-a" like a donkey ("hac modulatione hinham concludebantur").
A codex dating apparently from the eleventh century says: "At the end of the mass, instead of the words 'Ite missa est,' the priest shall bray three times (ter hinhamabit), and instead of the words 'Deo gratias,' the congregation shall answer •Y•a' (hinham) three times,"
Du Cange cites a hymn from this festival:
Orientis partibus
Adventavit Asinus
Pulcher et fortissimus
Sarcinis aptissimus.
Each verse was followed by the French refrain:
Hez, Sire Asnes, car chantez
Belle bouche rechignez
Vous aurez du foin assez
Et de l'avoine a plantez.
The hymn had nine verses, the last of which was:
Amen, dicas, Asine (hie genufleetebatur)
Jam satur de gramine.
Amen, amen, itera
Aspernare vetera.
Du Cange says that the more ridiculous this rite seemed, the greater the enthusiasm with which it was celebrated. In other places the ass was decked with a golden canopy whose corners were held "by distinguished canons"; the others present had to "don suitably festive garments, as at Christmas."
Since there were certain tendencies to bring the ass into symbolic relationship with Christ, and since, from ancient times, the god of the Jews was vulgarly conceived to be an ass-a prejudice which extended to Christ himself, as is shown by the mock crucifixion scratched on the wall of the Imperial Cadet School on the Palatine 8-the danger of theriomorphism lay uncomfortably close.
Even the bishops could do nothing to stamp out this custom, until finally it had to be suppressed by the "auctoritas supremi Senatus." The suspicion of blasphemy becomes quite open in Nietzsche's "Ass Festival," which is a deliberately blasphemous parody of the mass.
These medieval customs demonstrate the role of the trickster to perfection, and, when they vanished from the precincts of the Church, they appeared again on the profane level of Italian theatricals, as those comic types who, often adorned with enormous ithyphallic emblems, entertained the far from prudish public with ribaldries in true Rabelaisian style. Callot's engravings have preserved these classical figures for posterity—the Pulcinellas, Cucorognas, Chico Sgarras, and the like.
In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in magic rites of healing, in man's religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulated guise.n He is obviously a "psychologem," an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.
That this is how the trickster figure originated can hardly be contested if we look at it from the causal and historical angle. In psychology as in biology we cannot afford to overlook or underestimate this question of origins, although the answer usually tells us nothing about the functional meaning. For this reason biology should never forget the question of purpose, for only by answering that can we get at the meaning of a phenomenon.
Even in pathology, where we are concerned with lesions which have no meaning in themselves, the exclusively causal approach proves to be inadequate, since there are a number of pathological phenomena which only give up their meaning when we inquire into their purpose. And where we are concerned with the normal phenomena of life, this question of purpose takes undisputed precedence.
When, therefore, a primitive or barbarous consciousness forms a picture of itself on a much earlier level of development and continues to do so for hundreds or even thousands of years, undeterred by the contamination of its archaic qualities with differentiated, highly developed mental products, then the causal explanation is that the older the archaic qualities are, the more conservative and pertinacious is their behaviour. One simply cannot shake off the memory-image of things as they were, and drags it along like a senseless appendage.
This explanation, which is facile enough to satisfy the rationalistic requirements of our age, would certainly not meet with the approval of the Winnebago's, the nearest possessors of the trickster cycle. For them the myth is not in any sense a remnant-it is far too amusing for that, and an object of undivided enjoyment. For them it still "functions," provided that they have not been spoiled by civilization.
For them there is no earthly reason to theorize about the meaning and purpose of myths, just as the Christmas—tree seems no problem at all to the naive European. For the thoughtful observer, however, both trickster and Christmas-tree afford reason enough for reflection. Naturally it depends very much on the mentality of the observer what he thinks about these things. Considering the crude primitivity of the trickster cycle, it would not be surprising if one saw in this myth simply the reflection of an earlier, rudimentary stage of consciousness, which is what the trickster obviously seems to be.
The only question that would need answering is whether such personified reflections exist at all in empirical psychology. As a matter of fact they do, and these experiences of split or double personality actually form the core of the earliest psycho-pathological investigations. The peculiar thing about these dissociations is that the split-off personality is not just a random one, but stands in a complementary or compensatory relationship to the ego-personality.
It is a personification of traits of character which are sometimes worse and sometimes better than those the ego-personality possesses. A collective personification like the trickster is the product of an aggregate of individuals and is welcomed by each individual as something known to him, which would not be the case if it were just an individual outgrowth.
Now if the myth were nothing but an historical remnant, one would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into the great rubbish-heap of the past, and why it continues to make its influence felt on the highest levels of civilization, even where, on account of his stupidity and grotesque scurrility, the trickster no longer plays the role of a "delight-maker." In many cultures his figure seems like an old river-bed in which the water still flows.
One can see this best of all from the fact that the trickster motif does not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just as naively and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man—whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying "accidents" which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent. He then speaks of "hoodoos" and "jinxes" or of the "mischievousness of the object."
Here the trickster is represented by counter-tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic seances and cause all those ineffably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists. I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I called it the shadow. On the civilized level, it is regarded as a personal "gaffe," "slip," "faux pas," etc., which are then chalked up as defects of the conscious personality.
We are no longer aware that in carnival customs and the like there are remnants of a collective shadow figure which prove that the personal shadow is in part descended from a numinous collective figure. This collective figure gradually breaks up under the impact of civilization, leaving traces in folklore which are difficult to recognize. But the main part of him gets personalized and is made an object of personal responsibility.
Radin's trickster cycle preserves the shadow in its pristine mythological form, and thus points back to a very much earlier stage of consciousness which existed before the birth of the myth, when the Indian was still groping about in a similar mental darkness. Only when his consciousness reached a higher level could he detach the earlier state from himself and objectify it, that is, say anything about it.
So long as his consciousness was itself trickster-like, such a confrontation could obviously not take place. It was possible only when the attainment of a newer and higher level of consciousness enabled him to look back on a lower and inferior state. It was only to be expected that a good deal of mockery and contempt should mingle with this retrospect, thus casting an even thicker pall over man's memories of the past, which were pretty unedifying anyway.
This phenomenon must have repeated itself innumerable times in the history of his mental development. The sovereign contempt with which our modern age looks back on the taste and intelligence of earlier centuries is a classic example of this, and there is an unmistakable allusion to the same phenomenon in the New Testament, where we are told in Acts 17:30 that God looked down from above the times of ignorance (or unconsciousness).
This attitude contrasts strangely with the still commoner and more striking idealization of the past, which is praised not merely as the "good old days" but as the Golden Age-and not just by uneducated and superstitious people, but by all those legions of theosophical enthusiasts who resolutely believe in the former existence and lofty civilization of Atlantis.
Anyone who belongs to a sphere of culture that seeks the perfect state somewhere in the past must feel very queerly indeed when confronted by the figure of the trickster. He is a forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.
Because of it he is deserted by his (evidently human) companions, which seems to indicate that he has fallen below their level of consciousness. He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrusts it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god.
On the other hand he is in many respects stupider than the animals, and gets into one ridiculous scrape after another. Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and un-relatedness. His imprisonment in animal unconsciousness is suggested by the episode where he gets his head caught inside the skull of an elk, and the next episode shows how he overcomes this condition by imprisoning the head of a hawk inside his own rectum.
True, he sinks back into the former condition immediately afterwards, by falling under the ice, and is outwitted time after time by the animals, but in the end he succeeds in tricking the cunning coyote, and this brings back to him his savior nature. The trickster is a primitive "cosmic" being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness.
He is no match for the animals either, because of his extraordinary clumsiness and lack of instinct. These defects are the marks of his human nature, which is not so well adapted to the environment as the animal's but, instead, has prospects of a much higher development of consciousness based on a considerable eagerness to learn, as is duly emphasized in the myth.
What the repeated telling of the myth signifies is the therapeutic anamnesis of contents which, for reasons still to be discussed, should never be forgotten for long. If they were nothing but the remnants of an inferior state it would be understandable if man turned his attention away from them, feeling that their reappearance was a nuisance. This is evidently by no means the case, since the trickster has been a source of amusement right down to civilized times, where he can still be recognized in the carnival figures of Pulcinella and the clown.
That is one important reason for his still continuing to function. But it is not the only one, and certainly not the reason why this reflection of an extremely primitive state of consciousness solidified into a mythological personage. Mere vestiges of an early state that is dying out usually lose their energy at an increasing rate, otherwise they would never disappear. The last thing we would expect is that they would have the strength to solidify into a mythological figure with its own cycle of legends—unless, of course, they received energy from outside, in this case from a higher level of consciousness or from sources in the unconscious which are not yet exhausted.
To take a legitimate parallel from the psychology of the individual, namely the appearance of an impressive shadow figure antagonistically confronting a personal consciousness: this figure does not appear merely because it still exists in the individual, but because it rests on a dynamism whose existence can only be explained in terms of his actual situation, for instance because the shadow is so disagreeable to his ego-consciousness that it has to be repressed into the unconscious.
This explanation does not quite meet the case here, because the trickster obviously represents a vanishing level of consciousness which increasingly lacks the power to take express and assert itself. Furthermore, repression would prevent it from vanishing, because repressed contents are the very ones that have the best chance of survival, as we know from experience that nothing is corrected in the unconscious.
Lastly, the story of the trickster is not in the least disagreeable to the Winnebago consciousness or incompatible with it but, on the contrary, pleasurable and therefore not conducive to repression. It looks, therefore, as if the myth were actively sustained and fostered by consciousness. This may well be so, since that is the best and most successful method of keeping the shadow figure conscious and subjecting it to conscious criticism.
Although, to begin with, this criticism has more the character of a positive evaluation, we may expect that with the progressive development of consciousness the cruder aspects of the myth will gradually fall away, even if the danger of its rapid disappearance under the stress of white civilization did not exist. We have often seen how certain customs, originally cruel or obscene, became mere vestiges in the course of time.
The process of rendering this motif harmless takes an extremely long time, as its history shows; one can still detect traces of it even at a high level of civilization. Its longevity could also be explained by the strength and vitality of the state of consciousness described in the myth, and by the secret attraction and fascination this has for the conscious mind.
Although purely causal hypotheses in the biological sphere are not as a rule very satisfactory, due weight must nevertheless be given to the fact that in the case of the trickster a higher level of consciousness has covered up a lower one, and that the latter was already in retreat. His recollection, however, is mainly due to the interest which the conscious mind brings to bear on him, the inevitable concomitant being, as we have seen, the gradual civilizing, i.e., assimilation, of a primitive daemonic figure who was originally autonomous and even capable of causing possession.
To supplement the causal approach by a final one therefore enables us to arrive at more meaningful interpretations not only in medical psychology, where we are concerned with individual fantasies originating in the unconscious, but also in the case of collective fantasies, that is myths and fairy-tales.
As Radin points out, the civilizing process begins within the framework of the trickster cycle itself, and this is a clear indication that the original state has been overcome. At any rate the marks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead of acting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trickster's behavior towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful and sensible.
The devaluation of his earlier unconsciousness is apparent even in the myth, and one wonders what has happened to his evil qualities. The naive reader may imagine that when the dark aspects disappear they are no longer there in reality. But that is not the case at all, as experience shows. 'What actually happens is that the conscious mind is then able to free itself from the fascination of evil and is no longer obliged to live it compulsively.
The darkness and the evil have not gone up in smoke, they have merely withdrawn into the unconscious owing to loss of energy, where they remain unconscious so long as all is well with the conscious. But if the conscious should find itself in a critical or doubtful situation, then it soon becomes apparent that the shadow has not dissolved into nothing but is only waiting for a favorable opportunity to reappear as a projection upon one's neighbor.
If this trick is successful, there is immediately created between them that world of primordial darkness where everything that is characteristic of the trickster can happen-even on the highest plane of civilization. The best examples of these "monkey tricks," as popular speech aptly and truthfully sums up this state of affairs in which everything goes wrong and nothing intelligent happens except by mistake at the last moment, are naturally to be found in politics.
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.
The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psyche from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the individual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation, and makes society pay for his inefficiency.
He thinks the meaning of existence would be discovered if food and clothing were delivered to him gratis on his own doorstep, or if everybody possessed an automobile. Such are the puerilities that rise up in place of an unconscious shadow and keep it unconscious. As a result of these prejudices, the individual feels totally dependent on his environment and loses all capacity for introspection. In this way his code of ethics is replaced by a knowledge of what is permitted or forbidden or ordered.
How, under these circumstances, can one expect a soldier to subject an order received from a superior to ethical scrutiny? He has not yet made the discovery that he might be capable of spontaneous ethical impulses, and of performing them-even when no one is looking.
From this point of view we can see why the myth of the trickster was preserved and developed: like many other myths, it was supposed to have a therapeutic effect. It holds the earlier low intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he shall not forget how things looked yesterday. We like to imagine that something which we do not understand does not help us in any way. But that is not always so.
Seldom does a man understand with his head alone, least of all when he is a primitive. Because of its numinosity the myth has a direct effect on the unconscious, no matter whether it is understood or not. The fact that its repeated telling has not long since become obsolete can, I believe, be explained by its usefulness. The explanation is rather difficult because two contrary tendencies are at work: the desire on the one hand to get out of the earlier condition and on the other hand not to forget it.
Apparently Radin has also felt this difficulty, for he says: "Viewed psychologically, it might be contended that the history of civilization is largely the account of the attempts of man to forget his transformation from an animal into a human being." 16 A few pages further on he says (with reference to the Golden Age): "So stubborn a refusal to forget is not an accident." And it is also no accident that we are forced to contradict ourselves as soon as we try to formulate man's paradoxical attitude to myth.
Even the most enlightened of us will set up a Christmas-tree for his children without having the least idea what this custom means, and is invariably disposed to nip any attempt at interpretation in the bud. It is really astonishing to see how many so-called superstitions are rampant nowadays in town and country alike, but if one took hold of the individual and asked him, loudly and clearly, "Do you believe in ghosts? in witches? in spells and magic?" he would deny it indignantly.
It is a hundred to one he has never heard of such things and thinks it all rubbish. But in secret he is all for it, just like a jungle-dweller. The public knows very little of these things anyway, for everyone is convinced that in our enlightened society that kind of superstition has long since been eradicated, and it is part of the general convention to act as though one had never heard of such things, not to mention believing in them.
But nothing is ever lost, not even the blood pact with the devil. Outwardly it is forgotten, but inwardly not at all. We act like the natives on the southern slopes of Mount Elgon, in East Africa, one of whom accompanied me part of the way into the bush. At a fork in the path we came upon a brand new "ghost trap," beautifully got up like a little hut, near the cave where he lived with his family. I asked him if he had made it. He denied it with all the signs of extreme agitation, asserting that only children would make such a "ju-ju." Whereupon he gave the hut a kick, and the whole thing fell to pieces.
This is exactly the reaction we can observe in Europe today. Outwardly people are more or less civilized, but inwardly they are still primitives. Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all that.
This contradiction was once brought home to me in the most drastic manner when I was watching a "Strudel" (a sort of local witch-doctor) taking the spell off a stable. The stable was situated immediately beside the Gotthard railway line, and several international expresses sped past during the ceremony. Their occupants would hardly have suspected that a primitive ritual was being performed a few yards away.
The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousness is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is also why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity. We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.
It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the "mind," even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that? We can say, if we like, that one statement comes from the psyche, is psychic and nothing but psychic, and that another comes from the mind, is "spiritual" and therefore superior to the psychic one. Both are mere assertions based on the postulates of belief.
The fact is, that this old trichotomous hierarchy of psychic contents (hylic, psychic, and pneumatic) represents the polaristic structure of the psyche, which is the only immediate object of experience. The unity of our psychic nature lies in the middle, just as the living unity of the waterfall appears in the dynamic connection between above and below.
Thus, the living effect of the myth is experienced when a higher consciousness, rejoicing in its freedom and independence, is confronted by the autonomy of a mythological figure and yet cannot flee from its fascination, but must pay tribute to the overwhelming impression. The figure works, because secretly it participates in the observer's psyche and appears as its reflection, though it is not recognized as such.
It is split off from his consciousness and consequently behaves like an autonomous personality. The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, as a mythological figure, but, in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologems, as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations.
If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior.
Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them.
Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more "scientific." But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.
Actually, it is not surprising that this should be so, since even the most rudimentary insight into the shadow sometimes causes the greatest difficulties for the modern European. But since the shadow is the figure nearest his consciousness and the least explosive one, it is also the first component of personality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious. A minatory and ridiculous figure, he stands at the very beginning of the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle of the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a "quaestio crocodilina."
If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity or other has happened and been consciously understood. Only out of disaster can the longing for the saviour arise—in other words, the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow create such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo the tangled web of fate. In the case of the individual, the problem constellated by the shadow is answered on the plane of the anima, that is, through relatedness. In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness. This gradually brings liberation from imprisonment in unconsciousness, and is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing.
As in its collective, mythological form, so also the individual shadow contains within it the seed of an enantiodromia, of a conversion into its opposite.
http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/211-On-the-Psychology-of-the-Trickster-Figure-Jung
The principle of evil is just as autonomous and eternal as the principle of good. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.
As God is the union, - As God is the union, the reconciliation, of all the opposites, it is natural that both the good and evil principles should be in him potentially, should originate in him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.
As God is the union, - As God is the union, the reconciliation, of all the opposites, it is natural that both the good and evil principles should be in him potentially, should originate in him. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.
Author: John Broomfield
Year: 2011Category: Spirituality
We are not Alone, the Shamans tell us1
https://www.scimednet.org/content/we-are-not-alone-shamans-tell-us-part-1
Following on from Roger’s consideration of the shamanic side of Jung, John Broomfield proposes that we need to rediscover and reintegrate shamanic ways of knowing into Western culture – parallel to Iain McGilchrist’s argument that left and right hemisphere thinking has to be rebalanced in favour of wholeness and intuition.
To disregard the problems facing the Earth and to proceed with business as usual in education would be a betrayal of trust. Our students want to know how to make a difference. They need hope. And it won’t come if all we can offer is another scientific theory or technological fix. We must expand our vision to seek non-scientific alternatives. To make a difference, we must search for different understandings. Let us look to the wisdom of our ancestors. They believed that intelligence is not restricted to humans but is possessed by all creatures – plants as well as animals -- and by the Earth itself. They also believed in spirits. Human welfare was understood to depend on tapping into these wellsprings of wisdom, and all ancient societies (just like indigenous peoples today) had specialists skilled in communication with the natural world and with spirits. These people we now call shamans, and this article argues for the inclusion of shamanic practice in the educational curriculum. Shamanism gives working access to an alternative technique of acquiring knowledge. Although a pragmatic, time-tested system, it makes no claim to be science. Its strengths and limitations are different from those of the sciences and thus complement them. Being affective and subjective, shamanism offers another way of knowing.
‘Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known – and that too with limitations – and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends …. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes …. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperised.’ – Carl Jung2
Of course science will offer some valuable new directions, but at the same time we must expand our vision to seek non-scientific alternatives. To make a difference, we must search for different understandings.
I am fortunate to live in a country, New Zealand, where many of my compatriots have an understanding of past and future that is fundamentally different from the prevailing ‘Western’ view. Most in our civilisation consider it self-evident that we stand facing the future with the past behind us, but traditionally for New Zealand Maori it is the future that is behind them. They stand facing the past and their ancestors, who are a living presence in spirit. It is the vision of the ancestors that guides the present generation into the unseen future, with one clear and overriding purpose: to prosper the generations yet to be born.
Nga wa o mua ‘The days of the past to which we are coming.’ -- Maori proverb
Let us take our cue from Maori and consider the vision of our own ancestors. No matter what our ethnic background, we will discover that our ancestors (except some of the most recent) believed, like Maori, in the existence of spirits. They also stood in awe of the rich diversity of life forms, and they believed there is mutual interdependency between these forms, humans included, given that everything that exists is alive and conscious. They were of the opinion that intelligence is not restricted to humans but is possessed by all creatures – plants as well as animals -- and, for that matter, by the Earth itself. Rock, soil, stream, ocean, wind, air, sky, the stars – all are imbued with consciousness.
Recognising that the Earth and many of its creatures vastly predate humanity and are therefore possessed of much older wisdom, our forebears honoured selected landforms, trees, plants and animals as their ancestors. They understood that there is deep wisdom in the rhythms of the Earth and an infinite variety of life experience stored by our fellow creatures and by spirits. Human health and welfare were understood to depend on tapping into this wellspring of wisdom. On a planet that is everywhere alive, conscious and inspirited, humans were believed to have many wise allies for counsel and aid.
What is the relevance of this to our current concern about the fate of the Earth? If the ‘star billing’ given by us moderns to our species is unwarranted – if sapiens (wisdom) is not exclusive to homo (humanity) – then could it be that the fate of the Earth is not exclusively or even primarily in our hands? By our ancestors’ measure, we have grossly exaggerated our self-importance in the intricate web of life. Is it not conceivable that among our intelligent companions on this whirling voyage through space are some who may be capable of restoring the balance we humans have disturbed, of undoing the damage we have wrought? Possibly there are many more shoulders sharing this burden than we think.
Some of the strongest of those shoulders may be the smallest, as was demonstrated dramatically in the aftermath of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil well explosion. As millions of barrels of oil poured unchecked into the ocean from the uncapped well, there was a scramble to devise human technologies that would mitigate an environmental disaster of colossal scope. It took months before the flow was stopped, but in the meantime it was discovered that petroleum-eating bacteria had flourished in the oil plume and contained a vast amount of it. The micro-organisms had not only multiplied at an astounding rate, they also had ramped up their own internal metabolism to digest the oil efficiently. They formed a natural clean-up crew capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea plume by half every three days.3
We may take hope from the fact that this kind of help is available, but we must also start paying attention, as did our ancestors, to what our travelling companions have to say to us. Every ancient society developed communication with the natural world and with spirits, and they had specialists skilled in the techniques of that communication. These women and men were held in high regard, but they were approached with trepidation, because they were perceived to be communing with mysterious and awesome forces. In Old French they were called ‘sorcier,’ those in touch with the ‘Source.’ The Anglo-Saxons spoke of the ‘Ways of Wyrd’ known to ‘wyzards’ and ‘wytches.’
Shamanism is the term now applied to what has come to be recognised as a worldwide phenomenon, whose practice can be found as far back as we can go in human history. Given the association in the popular imagination of the term shamanism with ‘native, tribal’ cultures, it will come as a surprise to many to learn that their own ancestors practiced shamanism. We are all descendants of shamanic peoples.
Research over the past 150 years by scholars of comparative religion, pre-history and anthropology has revealed strikingly close similarities in the shamanic techniques employed in ancient cultures and in modern indigenous societies worldwide.4 The word shaman is borrowed from one of those contemporary indigenous societies, the Tungus of Siberia. We are fortunate there are native shamans still at work, despite the sustained, and in many cases brutal, efforts of colonial governments, Christian churches and medical authorities to suppress them. In the past forty years there has also been a Western revival of shamanic practice inspired by indigenous teachers and reinforced by the recognition that these ancient spiritual traditions are our shared inheritance.5
The Role of Shamans What do shamans do? They work to maintain or restore harmonious balance between humans and the rest of nature through powerful connections with spirit helpers. This requires a mastery of the techniques of journeying.
A shamanic journey is a trance state purposefully induced by a mind-altering activity such as rhythmic movement or repetitive sound, most often steady and sustained drumming. Less commonly, a psychotropic substance is ingested. In their altered state of consciousness, using disciplined techniques, individuals can experience visions of flying or entering into the Earth. On their journeys, participants ask animal or guardian spirits to appear and help in finding the answer to a question about their life or about someone else who has requested aid. Healing is the primary shamanic work. This includes healing of the Earth and its plants and animals. It also includes human healing, both the healing of dissension in groups and of physical and emotional illness in individuals. In the shamanic worldview, dis-ease is understood to result from loss of connection to the spirits of nature and consequent loss of soul – individual or collective.6 Shamanic journeys take us to places where we can recover fragments of lost soul.
Journeying is useful for a wide range of practical purposes, and the experience can be powerful, often surprising the beginner with the cogency and helpfulness of what is revealed. Here is a personal example. Buying property is tricky at the best of times, but when you have been living in America for 30 years and would like to find a place in your home country, New Zealand, it’s a major challenge. That’s how it was for me in 1991, and I needed help. I received it from a guardian spirit, an eagle. In a shamanic journey, the eagle took me flying over the Marlborough Sounds and showed me a remote property in such detail that I was able to draw a sketch map: the position of the house in relation to two garden plots; the boat shed; the jetty; the shape of the bay. My wife Jo and I brought the map with us when we came to New Zealand three years later. We found a place listed at the first real estate office we visited, and when we were taken to the land, we knew within ten minutes it was the place to which my eagle had flown me. We had no need to look at other properties.
I have another story of shamanic success in real estate. I once participated with 30 others in a shamanic journey to look for a new campus for the California Institute of Integral Studies, the small San Francisco post-graduate school of which I was then president. Many participants found themselves led by their spirit guardians to one particular city neighbourhood. Three people in the journeying group described ornamentation on the outside of a building. One went down a chimney and saw a room with a polished wooden floor and an oriental rug. Another person reported a delicious aroma of baking. Most amusingly, some in the journeying group remarked on a pervasive smell of marijuana in the area. Little wonder. Three weeks later, we found an excellent property half a block from the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets! As we were to discover, the nearest shop, just two hundred metres from our new campus, was a deli, whose baked goods would become favourites of students and faculty, and the journey details of the ornamentation on the building, the chimney, and the room with the polished wooden floor and oriental rug all proved equally accurate.
As this suggests, shamanism can be fun! Shamans are theatrical. In order to rivet the attention of participants, shamans typically wear dramatic costumes and display colourful talismans as they burn herbs and rhythmically whirl, stamp, clap and drum loudly. Almost all of the physical senses of the participants are engaged. As teachers, we should acknowledge shamans as exemplars of excellent educational practice. People learn most forcefully from forms that engage more than their intellects. They remember best what they do, rather than what they read or are told. Effective education must have a large experiential component, and shamanic practice can be a totally engaging experience.
Shamans may be playful, but they are not playing games. Their work has a serious purpose: the evocation of powerful spiritual forces. Shamanic practitioners, as a consequence, must assume responsibility for the welfare of the individuals and groups they guide. As with psychotherapy and similar practices that may bring to awareness deep subconscious memories arousing strong emotions, shamanism must be practiced with disciplined restraint and ethical integrity. Also, with humility. ‘In shamanism (as well as with other forms of healing) it is not the shaman who does the work,’ shamanic counselor Sandra Ingerman observes. ‘Shamans are just the instruments through which the power of the universe works. Therefore, asking the spirits for help and trusting that they will be there is the basis of the shaman’s responsibilities. Remember, an instrument cannot play itself.’7
Continued in part 2
Notes
Year: 2011Category: Spirituality
We are not Alone, the Shamans tell us1
https://www.scimednet.org/content/we-are-not-alone-shamans-tell-us-part-1
Following on from Roger’s consideration of the shamanic side of Jung, John Broomfield proposes that we need to rediscover and reintegrate shamanic ways of knowing into Western culture – parallel to Iain McGilchrist’s argument that left and right hemisphere thinking has to be rebalanced in favour of wholeness and intuition.
To disregard the problems facing the Earth and to proceed with business as usual in education would be a betrayal of trust. Our students want to know how to make a difference. They need hope. And it won’t come if all we can offer is another scientific theory or technological fix. We must expand our vision to seek non-scientific alternatives. To make a difference, we must search for different understandings. Let us look to the wisdom of our ancestors. They believed that intelligence is not restricted to humans but is possessed by all creatures – plants as well as animals -- and by the Earth itself. They also believed in spirits. Human welfare was understood to depend on tapping into these wellsprings of wisdom, and all ancient societies (just like indigenous peoples today) had specialists skilled in communication with the natural world and with spirits. These people we now call shamans, and this article argues for the inclusion of shamanic practice in the educational curriculum. Shamanism gives working access to an alternative technique of acquiring knowledge. Although a pragmatic, time-tested system, it makes no claim to be science. Its strengths and limitations are different from those of the sciences and thus complement them. Being affective and subjective, shamanism offers another way of knowing.
‘Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known – and that too with limitations – and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends …. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes …. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperised.’ – Carl Jung2
Of course science will offer some valuable new directions, but at the same time we must expand our vision to seek non-scientific alternatives. To make a difference, we must search for different understandings.
I am fortunate to live in a country, New Zealand, where many of my compatriots have an understanding of past and future that is fundamentally different from the prevailing ‘Western’ view. Most in our civilisation consider it self-evident that we stand facing the future with the past behind us, but traditionally for New Zealand Maori it is the future that is behind them. They stand facing the past and their ancestors, who are a living presence in spirit. It is the vision of the ancestors that guides the present generation into the unseen future, with one clear and overriding purpose: to prosper the generations yet to be born.
Nga wa o mua ‘The days of the past to which we are coming.’ -- Maori proverb
Let us take our cue from Maori and consider the vision of our own ancestors. No matter what our ethnic background, we will discover that our ancestors (except some of the most recent) believed, like Maori, in the existence of spirits. They also stood in awe of the rich diversity of life forms, and they believed there is mutual interdependency between these forms, humans included, given that everything that exists is alive and conscious. They were of the opinion that intelligence is not restricted to humans but is possessed by all creatures – plants as well as animals -- and, for that matter, by the Earth itself. Rock, soil, stream, ocean, wind, air, sky, the stars – all are imbued with consciousness.
Recognising that the Earth and many of its creatures vastly predate humanity and are therefore possessed of much older wisdom, our forebears honoured selected landforms, trees, plants and animals as their ancestors. They understood that there is deep wisdom in the rhythms of the Earth and an infinite variety of life experience stored by our fellow creatures and by spirits. Human health and welfare were understood to depend on tapping into this wellspring of wisdom. On a planet that is everywhere alive, conscious and inspirited, humans were believed to have many wise allies for counsel and aid.
What is the relevance of this to our current concern about the fate of the Earth? If the ‘star billing’ given by us moderns to our species is unwarranted – if sapiens (wisdom) is not exclusive to homo (humanity) – then could it be that the fate of the Earth is not exclusively or even primarily in our hands? By our ancestors’ measure, we have grossly exaggerated our self-importance in the intricate web of life. Is it not conceivable that among our intelligent companions on this whirling voyage through space are some who may be capable of restoring the balance we humans have disturbed, of undoing the damage we have wrought? Possibly there are many more shoulders sharing this burden than we think.
Some of the strongest of those shoulders may be the smallest, as was demonstrated dramatically in the aftermath of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil well explosion. As millions of barrels of oil poured unchecked into the ocean from the uncapped well, there was a scramble to devise human technologies that would mitigate an environmental disaster of colossal scope. It took months before the flow was stopped, but in the meantime it was discovered that petroleum-eating bacteria had flourished in the oil plume and contained a vast amount of it. The micro-organisms had not only multiplied at an astounding rate, they also had ramped up their own internal metabolism to digest the oil efficiently. They formed a natural clean-up crew capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea plume by half every three days.3
We may take hope from the fact that this kind of help is available, but we must also start paying attention, as did our ancestors, to what our travelling companions have to say to us. Every ancient society developed communication with the natural world and with spirits, and they had specialists skilled in the techniques of that communication. These women and men were held in high regard, but they were approached with trepidation, because they were perceived to be communing with mysterious and awesome forces. In Old French they were called ‘sorcier,’ those in touch with the ‘Source.’ The Anglo-Saxons spoke of the ‘Ways of Wyrd’ known to ‘wyzards’ and ‘wytches.’
Shamanism is the term now applied to what has come to be recognised as a worldwide phenomenon, whose practice can be found as far back as we can go in human history. Given the association in the popular imagination of the term shamanism with ‘native, tribal’ cultures, it will come as a surprise to many to learn that their own ancestors practiced shamanism. We are all descendants of shamanic peoples.
Research over the past 150 years by scholars of comparative religion, pre-history and anthropology has revealed strikingly close similarities in the shamanic techniques employed in ancient cultures and in modern indigenous societies worldwide.4 The word shaman is borrowed from one of those contemporary indigenous societies, the Tungus of Siberia. We are fortunate there are native shamans still at work, despite the sustained, and in many cases brutal, efforts of colonial governments, Christian churches and medical authorities to suppress them. In the past forty years there has also been a Western revival of shamanic practice inspired by indigenous teachers and reinforced by the recognition that these ancient spiritual traditions are our shared inheritance.5
The Role of Shamans What do shamans do? They work to maintain or restore harmonious balance between humans and the rest of nature through powerful connections with spirit helpers. This requires a mastery of the techniques of journeying.
A shamanic journey is a trance state purposefully induced by a mind-altering activity such as rhythmic movement or repetitive sound, most often steady and sustained drumming. Less commonly, a psychotropic substance is ingested. In their altered state of consciousness, using disciplined techniques, individuals can experience visions of flying or entering into the Earth. On their journeys, participants ask animal or guardian spirits to appear and help in finding the answer to a question about their life or about someone else who has requested aid. Healing is the primary shamanic work. This includes healing of the Earth and its plants and animals. It also includes human healing, both the healing of dissension in groups and of physical and emotional illness in individuals. In the shamanic worldview, dis-ease is understood to result from loss of connection to the spirits of nature and consequent loss of soul – individual or collective.6 Shamanic journeys take us to places where we can recover fragments of lost soul.
Journeying is useful for a wide range of practical purposes, and the experience can be powerful, often surprising the beginner with the cogency and helpfulness of what is revealed. Here is a personal example. Buying property is tricky at the best of times, but when you have been living in America for 30 years and would like to find a place in your home country, New Zealand, it’s a major challenge. That’s how it was for me in 1991, and I needed help. I received it from a guardian spirit, an eagle. In a shamanic journey, the eagle took me flying over the Marlborough Sounds and showed me a remote property in such detail that I was able to draw a sketch map: the position of the house in relation to two garden plots; the boat shed; the jetty; the shape of the bay. My wife Jo and I brought the map with us when we came to New Zealand three years later. We found a place listed at the first real estate office we visited, and when we were taken to the land, we knew within ten minutes it was the place to which my eagle had flown me. We had no need to look at other properties.
I have another story of shamanic success in real estate. I once participated with 30 others in a shamanic journey to look for a new campus for the California Institute of Integral Studies, the small San Francisco post-graduate school of which I was then president. Many participants found themselves led by their spirit guardians to one particular city neighbourhood. Three people in the journeying group described ornamentation on the outside of a building. One went down a chimney and saw a room with a polished wooden floor and an oriental rug. Another person reported a delicious aroma of baking. Most amusingly, some in the journeying group remarked on a pervasive smell of marijuana in the area. Little wonder. Three weeks later, we found an excellent property half a block from the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets! As we were to discover, the nearest shop, just two hundred metres from our new campus, was a deli, whose baked goods would become favourites of students and faculty, and the journey details of the ornamentation on the building, the chimney, and the room with the polished wooden floor and oriental rug all proved equally accurate.
As this suggests, shamanism can be fun! Shamans are theatrical. In order to rivet the attention of participants, shamans typically wear dramatic costumes and display colourful talismans as they burn herbs and rhythmically whirl, stamp, clap and drum loudly. Almost all of the physical senses of the participants are engaged. As teachers, we should acknowledge shamans as exemplars of excellent educational practice. People learn most forcefully from forms that engage more than their intellects. They remember best what they do, rather than what they read or are told. Effective education must have a large experiential component, and shamanic practice can be a totally engaging experience.
Shamans may be playful, but they are not playing games. Their work has a serious purpose: the evocation of powerful spiritual forces. Shamanic practitioners, as a consequence, must assume responsibility for the welfare of the individuals and groups they guide. As with psychotherapy and similar practices that may bring to awareness deep subconscious memories arousing strong emotions, shamanism must be practiced with disciplined restraint and ethical integrity. Also, with humility. ‘In shamanism (as well as with other forms of healing) it is not the shaman who does the work,’ shamanic counselor Sandra Ingerman observes. ‘Shamans are just the instruments through which the power of the universe works. Therefore, asking the spirits for help and trusting that they will be there is the basis of the shaman’s responsibilities. Remember, an instrument cannot play itself.’7
Continued in part 2
Notes
- This article is reprinted with permission from Social Ecology: Applying Ecological Understanding to our Lives and our Planet (eds. David Wright, Catherine Camden-Pratt & Stuart Hill, Stroud, Hawthorn Press, 2011).
- C.G. Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (ed. Aniela Jaffé, New York, Pantheon, 1961) p. 302
- Terry Hazen et al.: ‘Deep-sea Oil Plume Enriches Indigenous Oil-degrading Bacteria,’ Science (26 August 2010, online)
- Piers Vitebsky: Shamanism (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Jeremy Narby & Francis Huxley eds.: Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge (New York, Tarcher/Putnam, 2001); Ralph Metzner: The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston & London, Shambhala, 1994); Tom Cowan: Fire in the Head: Shamanism and the Celtic Spirit (San Francisco, Harper, 1993); Joseph Campbell: The Way of the Animal Powers: Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vol. 1 (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1983); Mircea Eliade: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (translated by Willard R. Trask, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972).
- Narby & Huxley, op. cit., pp. 243-305; Vitebsky, op. cit., pp. 150-153 & 168-170; Roger N. Walsh: The Spirit of Shamanism (Los Angeles, Tarcher, 1990); Michael Harner: The Way of the Shaman (San Francisco, Harper, 1980); Sandra Ingerman: Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self (San Francisco, Harper, 1991); Jeanne Achterberg: Imagery in Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine (Boston & London, Shambhala, 1987): Journal of Shamanic Practice (Olivenhain, California, twice yearly).
- I would note that although we retain the word ‘dispirited’ in modern English, it now has little of the gravity it had for our ancestors.
- Ingerman, op. cit., p. 63
Author: John BroomfieldYear: 2011Category: Spirituality Continued from part 1
Reconnecting with Nature
Effective education must have a large experiential component, I said. Given the current critical imbalance between humans and other species, nature should be a primary area of experiential education. We should balance the abstractions of our classrooms with experiences of the wholeness of living, growing wild things. Following the centuries-old practice of shamans, students and their teachers should spend time in wilderness to restore direct awareness of the intricate interconnections that sustain life. Quiet time spent away from the elaborate constructions of our cities can help us gain the stillness in which we may hear nature’s voices.
Shamanic journeying also can lead to an intimate acquaintance with Nature. In his book The Adventure of Self-Discovery, psychotherapist Stan Grof reports that in the journeys he and wife Christina direct,8 many participants experience ‘complete and realistic identification’ with animals and plants and are given extraordinary knowledge of organic processes. In this mode of consciousness, ‘it is possible to gain experiential insight into what it feels like when a cat is curious, an eagle frightened, a cobra hungry, a turtle sexually aroused, or when a shark is breathing through the gills.’ This can lead to profound new understandings. ‘Subjects have reported that they witnessed botanical processes on the sub-cellular or molecular level’ and had ‘experiences of plant consciousness.’9
Grof commented that to speak of plant consciousness might seem ‘fantastic and absurd … to a traditional scientist.’10 He was writing in the late 1980s when biology was dominated by molecular geneticists, who, at the time, were supremely confident that all biological function was programmed by DNA sequencing. In the subsequent 20 years, however, there has been a conceptual revolution in genetics and cell biology, with the recognition that cellular networks in organisms are dynamic systems responding intelligently to changing external conditions, even modifying the structure of DNA where necessary. In his 2005 book, The Biology of Belief, cell biologist Bruce Lipton writes:
‘… each cell is an intelligent being that can survive on its own …. These smart cells are imbued with intent and purpose; they actively seek environments that support their survival while simultaneously avoiding toxic or hostile ones. Like humans, single cells analyse thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. Through the analysis of this data, cells select appropriate behavioral responses to ensure their survival. Single cells are also capable of learning through these environmental experiences and are able to create cellular memories, which they pass on to their offspring.’11
On the basis of such path-breaking research, Fritjof Capra concludes: ‘The organising activity of living systems … is mental activity …. Mind … is immanent in matter at all levels of life.’12
Shared Consciousness
We have already observed that this perception of universal consciousness is the crux of the shamanic worldview. By entering the eagle’s keen eye, the bear’s great strength, the herb’s healing power or the flame’s searing heat, the shaman shows us passageways to the spirit wisdom of natural forms. Shamans are shape-shifters, teaching that the boundaries between forms are not as impermeable as they may seem. Dramatically, this ancient knowledge that ‘there is no wall between species,’ rejected for three centuries by reductionist Cartesian science, has been rediscovered in this decade by molecular biologists. Lipton again:
‘Recent advances in genome science have revealed [that] living organisms … actually integrate their cellular communities by sharing their genes. It had been thought that genes are passed on only to progeny of an individual organism through reproduction. Now scientists realise that genes are shared not only among the individual members of a species, but also among members of different species. The sharing of genetic information via gene transfer speeds up evolution since organisms can acquire ‘learned’ experiences from other organisms. Given this sharing of genes, organisms can no longer be seen as disconnected entities; there is no wall between species.’13
‘It seems that every process in the universe that one can observe objectively in the ordinary state of consciousness also has a subjective experiential counterpart’ in altered states.14 This observation by Stan Grof suggests an important reason for the inclusion of shamanic practice in the educational curriculum. Shamanism gives working access to an alternative technique of acquiring knowledge. Although a pragmatic, time-tested system, it makes no claim to be science. Its strengths and limitations are different from those of the sciences and thus complement them. Being affective and subjective, shamanism offers another way of knowing.
Science as a Construct
In this it serves as shock therapy for students who have grown up with the unexamined belief that modern science is the only true path to knowledge. They have been taught that the scientific method is of a different order from all other human systems of understanding. The claim is that science, and only science, provides a clear window on reality and has the ultimate capacity to answer every question about nature. These assertions are untenable. Modern Western civilisation’s representation of reality is limited like that of every other civilisation. The sciences are cultural constructions to help us get by in the world. ‘A scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations,’ cautions Stephen Hawking. ‘It exists only in our minds.’15 Science is a simplification of the universe, which in its unfathomable vastness is always threatening to overwhelm the limited capacity of the human organism to comprehend. ‘I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive.’ observes Martin Rees, British Astronomer Royal. ‘It could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.’16
Nonetheless, science reigns supreme and blinds most of our students, like the vast majority of us, to the diverse and richly varied paths to knowledge offered by other civilisations, contemporary and historic. ‘Today, the doors of the faerie hills remain sealed against us, for we keep the eyes of our mythic consciousness shut equally tight, refusing to allow cracks to appear in the walls of our present, desacralised world-view.’ The writer is Mara Freeman, whose field is Celtic and British folklore. ‘Few of us dare to open what W.B. Yeats called the ‘flaming door’ and explore the power that crackles on the thresholds of our reality structures. But to do so might send a revitalising current through the wasteland of our culture.’ Traditionally, Freeman says, it was shamans who had the courage and skill to throw open the ‘flaming door.’ ‘Those skilled in walking between the worlds knew how to harness the power of the threshold where the normal rules of time and space hang suspended.’17
Shamans are edge-walkers and shape-shifters, who dispel the illusion that all is fixed and orderly and controllable.
‘A stone’s throw out on either hand From the well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange; Churl and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company to-night, For we have reached the Oldest Land Wherein the powers of Darkness range.’ - Rudyard Kipling18
Shamanism is an acknowledgment of the awesome spiritual powers that shape the universe. It is an acknowledgement that mystery will remain despite all our science and scholarship.
Let us encourage our students to delight in the permanence of the unknowable and to sit in reverence and awe before the majesty of the mysterious. Let us encourage them also to hear the message of the shamans that the moving force in the universe is spirit, which makes life possible and gives it meaning. The exhilarating news the shamans bring is that we are not alone. On a planet that is everywhere alive, conscious and inspirited, humans have many wise allies for counsel and aid. We should lay to rest our exaggerated fears that we do not have the resources to keep this show going. Equally, we must learn humility. The hubris of homo sapiens in claiming superiority over all other species has been the source of severe damage. Humanity is merely one spirit form among countless billions.
The smallest indivisible reality is, to my mind, intelligent and is waiting there to be used by human spirits if we reach out and call them in. We rush too much with nervous hands and worried minds. We are impatient for results. What we need …is reinforcement of the soul by the invisible power waiting to be used …. I know there are reservoirs of spiritual strength from which we human beings thoughtlessly cut ourselves off.’ -- Henry Ford, Detroit News, 7 February 1926
John Broomfield is a teacher, writer, educational consultant and leader of cross-cultural study tours and shamanic workshops. Former Professor of History at the University of Michigan and President of the California Institute of Integral Studies, he is the author of Other Ways of Knowing: Recharting Our Future with Ageless Wisdom published by Inner Traditions. A student of sacred ecology and interspecies communication, he lives on remote land in the Marlborough Sounds, NZ, to learn directly from animals, plants and earth. His website is www.eagle-tours.co.nz and he is available at [email protected]
Notes
Reconnecting with Nature
Effective education must have a large experiential component, I said. Given the current critical imbalance between humans and other species, nature should be a primary area of experiential education. We should balance the abstractions of our classrooms with experiences of the wholeness of living, growing wild things. Following the centuries-old practice of shamans, students and their teachers should spend time in wilderness to restore direct awareness of the intricate interconnections that sustain life. Quiet time spent away from the elaborate constructions of our cities can help us gain the stillness in which we may hear nature’s voices.
Shamanic journeying also can lead to an intimate acquaintance with Nature. In his book The Adventure of Self-Discovery, psychotherapist Stan Grof reports that in the journeys he and wife Christina direct,8 many participants experience ‘complete and realistic identification’ with animals and plants and are given extraordinary knowledge of organic processes. In this mode of consciousness, ‘it is possible to gain experiential insight into what it feels like when a cat is curious, an eagle frightened, a cobra hungry, a turtle sexually aroused, or when a shark is breathing through the gills.’ This can lead to profound new understandings. ‘Subjects have reported that they witnessed botanical processes on the sub-cellular or molecular level’ and had ‘experiences of plant consciousness.’9
Grof commented that to speak of plant consciousness might seem ‘fantastic and absurd … to a traditional scientist.’10 He was writing in the late 1980s when biology was dominated by molecular geneticists, who, at the time, were supremely confident that all biological function was programmed by DNA sequencing. In the subsequent 20 years, however, there has been a conceptual revolution in genetics and cell biology, with the recognition that cellular networks in organisms are dynamic systems responding intelligently to changing external conditions, even modifying the structure of DNA where necessary. In his 2005 book, The Biology of Belief, cell biologist Bruce Lipton writes:
‘… each cell is an intelligent being that can survive on its own …. These smart cells are imbued with intent and purpose; they actively seek environments that support their survival while simultaneously avoiding toxic or hostile ones. Like humans, single cells analyse thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. Through the analysis of this data, cells select appropriate behavioral responses to ensure their survival. Single cells are also capable of learning through these environmental experiences and are able to create cellular memories, which they pass on to their offspring.’11
On the basis of such path-breaking research, Fritjof Capra concludes: ‘The organising activity of living systems … is mental activity …. Mind … is immanent in matter at all levels of life.’12
Shared Consciousness
We have already observed that this perception of universal consciousness is the crux of the shamanic worldview. By entering the eagle’s keen eye, the bear’s great strength, the herb’s healing power or the flame’s searing heat, the shaman shows us passageways to the spirit wisdom of natural forms. Shamans are shape-shifters, teaching that the boundaries between forms are not as impermeable as they may seem. Dramatically, this ancient knowledge that ‘there is no wall between species,’ rejected for three centuries by reductionist Cartesian science, has been rediscovered in this decade by molecular biologists. Lipton again:
‘Recent advances in genome science have revealed [that] living organisms … actually integrate their cellular communities by sharing their genes. It had been thought that genes are passed on only to progeny of an individual organism through reproduction. Now scientists realise that genes are shared not only among the individual members of a species, but also among members of different species. The sharing of genetic information via gene transfer speeds up evolution since organisms can acquire ‘learned’ experiences from other organisms. Given this sharing of genes, organisms can no longer be seen as disconnected entities; there is no wall between species.’13
‘It seems that every process in the universe that one can observe objectively in the ordinary state of consciousness also has a subjective experiential counterpart’ in altered states.14 This observation by Stan Grof suggests an important reason for the inclusion of shamanic practice in the educational curriculum. Shamanism gives working access to an alternative technique of acquiring knowledge. Although a pragmatic, time-tested system, it makes no claim to be science. Its strengths and limitations are different from those of the sciences and thus complement them. Being affective and subjective, shamanism offers another way of knowing.
Science as a Construct
In this it serves as shock therapy for students who have grown up with the unexamined belief that modern science is the only true path to knowledge. They have been taught that the scientific method is of a different order from all other human systems of understanding. The claim is that science, and only science, provides a clear window on reality and has the ultimate capacity to answer every question about nature. These assertions are untenable. Modern Western civilisation’s representation of reality is limited like that of every other civilisation. The sciences are cultural constructions to help us get by in the world. ‘A scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations,’ cautions Stephen Hawking. ‘It exists only in our minds.’15 Science is a simplification of the universe, which in its unfathomable vastness is always threatening to overwhelm the limited capacity of the human organism to comprehend. ‘I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive.’ observes Martin Rees, British Astronomer Royal. ‘It could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.’16
Nonetheless, science reigns supreme and blinds most of our students, like the vast majority of us, to the diverse and richly varied paths to knowledge offered by other civilisations, contemporary and historic. ‘Today, the doors of the faerie hills remain sealed against us, for we keep the eyes of our mythic consciousness shut equally tight, refusing to allow cracks to appear in the walls of our present, desacralised world-view.’ The writer is Mara Freeman, whose field is Celtic and British folklore. ‘Few of us dare to open what W.B. Yeats called the ‘flaming door’ and explore the power that crackles on the thresholds of our reality structures. But to do so might send a revitalising current through the wasteland of our culture.’ Traditionally, Freeman says, it was shamans who had the courage and skill to throw open the ‘flaming door.’ ‘Those skilled in walking between the worlds knew how to harness the power of the threshold where the normal rules of time and space hang suspended.’17
Shamans are edge-walkers and shape-shifters, who dispel the illusion that all is fixed and orderly and controllable.
‘A stone’s throw out on either hand From the well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange; Churl and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company to-night, For we have reached the Oldest Land Wherein the powers of Darkness range.’ - Rudyard Kipling18
Shamanism is an acknowledgment of the awesome spiritual powers that shape the universe. It is an acknowledgement that mystery will remain despite all our science and scholarship.
Let us encourage our students to delight in the permanence of the unknowable and to sit in reverence and awe before the majesty of the mysterious. Let us encourage them also to hear the message of the shamans that the moving force in the universe is spirit, which makes life possible and gives it meaning. The exhilarating news the shamans bring is that we are not alone. On a planet that is everywhere alive, conscious and inspirited, humans have many wise allies for counsel and aid. We should lay to rest our exaggerated fears that we do not have the resources to keep this show going. Equally, we must learn humility. The hubris of homo sapiens in claiming superiority over all other species has been the source of severe damage. Humanity is merely one spirit form among countless billions.
The smallest indivisible reality is, to my mind, intelligent and is waiting there to be used by human spirits if we reach out and call them in. We rush too much with nervous hands and worried minds. We are impatient for results. What we need …is reinforcement of the soul by the invisible power waiting to be used …. I know there are reservoirs of spiritual strength from which we human beings thoughtlessly cut ourselves off.’ -- Henry Ford, Detroit News, 7 February 1926
John Broomfield is a teacher, writer, educational consultant and leader of cross-cultural study tours and shamanic workshops. Former Professor of History at the University of Michigan and President of the California Institute of Integral Studies, he is the author of Other Ways of Knowing: Recharting Our Future with Ageless Wisdom published by Inner Traditions. A student of sacred ecology and interspecies communication, he lives on remote land in the Marlborough Sounds, NZ, to learn directly from animals, plants and earth. His website is www.eagle-tours.co.nz and he is available at [email protected]
Notes
- Building on Stan’s earlier pioneering research with psychedelics, the Grof’s have developed a technique they call holotropic breathing to induce powerful altered states.
- Stanislav Grof: The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration (Albany, SUNY, 1988) pp. 52-53 & 58-59
- Grof, op. cit., p. 59
- Bruce H. Lipton: The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles (Carlsbad CA, Hay, 2005), pp. 37-38
- Fritjof Capra: The Hidden Connections (London, Harper Collins, 2002) p. 30. See also Evelyn Fox Keller: The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard, 2000).
- Lipton, op. cit., pp. 44-45
- Grof, op. cit., p. 62
- Stephen W. Hawking: A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes (NY, Bantam, 1988) p. 139
- Telegraph.co.uk, 22 February 2010
- Mara Freeman: ‘The Flaming Door,’ Parabola, vol. 25, no. 1, February 2000, pp. 45-51
- Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition, 1885-1918 (London, Hodder & Stoughton,), pp. 575-576
It is known that the Caucasian peoples, and especially the Osset, have preserved a number of the mythological and religious traditions of the Scythians.
Now, the conceptions of the afterlife held by certain Caucasian peoples are close to those of the Iranians, particularly in regard to the deceased crossing a bridge as narrow as a hair, the myth of a Cosmic Tree whose top touches the sky and at whose root there is a miraculous spring, and so on. Then, too, diviners, seers, and necromancer-psychopomps play a certain role among the mountain Georgian tribes. The most important of these sorcerers are the messulethe; their ranks are filled for the most part from among the women and girls. Their chief office is to escort the dead to the other world, but they can also incarnate them. […] The messulethe performs her task by falling into trance.[17]
At this point, allow me to interject the comment that we see a curious parallel to the fact that the Themosphoria was celebrated “only by women.” In other words, it was very likely an archaic custom of what has been called “sacred prostitution” but the sacred prostitution was clearly derived from archaic techniques of ecstasy which we have surmised were actually disjecta membra of an ancient technology that effectively modified DNA.
Over millennia of transmission, the terminology describing this DNA factor was corrupted to refer to sexual elements. We shall also later see that what was once a “spiritual idea” was given a literal, physical meaning. The role and participation of women is indeed important, but not at all the way many occultists have interpreted it.
What is clear is that the very ancient idea of women as priestesses, or as so-called “temple prostitutes,” was merely derived from the fact of the natural role of the woman as true shaman. When women were extirpated from their role as natural psychopomp for their tribes, a host of other items had to be invented to take their place: trees, bridges (which is a word strikingly similar to “bride” and “bridle” as is used for a horse!), ladders, stairs, drums, rattles, chants, dances, and so on; and most especially ritual combat instead of unification.
We have observed the striking resemblance between the other world ideas of the Caucasians and of the Iranians. For one thing, the Cinvat bridge plays an essential role in Iranian funerary mythology; crossing it largely determines the destiny of the soul; and the crossing is a difficult ordeal, equivalent in structure, to initiatory ordeals. […]
The Cinvat bridge is at the “Center,” at the “middle of the world” and “the height of a hundred men.” […] The bridge connects earth and heaven at the “Center.” Under the Cinvat bridge is the pit of hell.
Here we find a “classic” cosmological schema of the three cosmic regions connected by a central axis (pillar, tree, bridge, etc.) The shamans travel freely among the three zones; the dead must cross a bridge on their journey to the beyond. […] The important feature of the Iranian tradition is (at least as it survived after Zarathustra’s reform) is that, at the crossing of the bridge, there is a sort of struggle between the demons, who try to cast the soul down to hell, and the tutelary spirits who resist them.
The Gathas [18] make three references to this crossing of the Cinvat bridge. In the first two passages Zarathustra, according to H.S. Nyberg’s interpretation, refers to himself as a psychopomp. Those who have been united to him in ecstasy will cross the bridge with ease.[19] […]
The bridge, then, is not only the way for the dead; it is the road of ecstatics. […] The Gathic term maga is proof that Zarathustra and his disciples induced an ecstatic experience by ritual songs intoned in chorus in a closed, consecrated space. In this sacred space (maga) communication between heaven and earth became possible. […] The sacred space became a “Center.”[…]
Shamanic ecstasy induced by hemp smoke was known in ancient Iran. […] In the Videvdat hemp is demonized. This seems to us to prove complete hostility to shamanic intoxication. […] The imagery of the Central Asian shamans would seem to have undergone the influence of Oriental, and principally Iranian, ideas. But this does not mean that the shamanic descent to the underworld derives from an exotic influence. The Oriental contribution only amplified and added color to the dramatic scenarios of punishments; it was the narratives of ecstatic journeys to the underworld that were enriched under Oriental influences; the ecstasy long preceded them. [….]
We … have found the technique of ecstasy in archaic cultures where it is impossible to suspect any influence from the ancient East. […]
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biblianazar/esp_biblianazar_14d.htm
Leonora Carrington
"Woman is by nature a shaman," says a Chukchee proverb of northeast Asia.
Many ethnic traditions say that the first shaman was female.
Drummers, dreamers, diviners. Oracles, seers, and prophets. Medicine women, healers, curanderas, and herbalists. Women who invoke spirit. Rainmakers. Ecstatic dancers, shapeshifters, sky-walkers.
Core elements of such hybrid rituals are: the structure of a circle, a ritual space and altar
of some kind, and the presence of an experienced elder or guide.
Many ethnic traditions say that the first shaman was female.
Drummers, dreamers, diviners. Oracles, seers, and prophets. Medicine women, healers, curanderas, and herbalists. Women who invoke spirit. Rainmakers. Ecstatic dancers, shapeshifters, sky-walkers.
Core elements of such hybrid rituals are: the structure of a circle, a ritual space and altar
of some kind, and the presence of an experienced elder or guide.
Shamanism focuses on our connection with nature, cosmos, and the ancestors. It is a practice involving altered states of consciousness to interact with the spirit world, channeling these transcendental energies into this world. A shaman can access and influence the world of benevolent and malevolent spirits. They typically enter into a trance state during a ritual, and practice magical flight, divination, and healing. The main characteristic of shamanism is the ecstatic trance the healer uses to communicate with spirits, rescue souls, battle with negativity or reconcile an offended nature spirit.
Shamanism embodies the concept of animism, the notion of the spiritual essence of all nature which is recognized as the core of the oldest of humanity's religious beliefs. Shamanism provided the context within which this animistic attitude and the sense of the sentience of the many entities of the world were developed, especially in the relationship to animals. Animal species and their variant qualities provided a natural metaphoric system to structure psychological development and the evolution of social organization. Within the context of shamanism, the worlds of animal species and spirits intertwined in the creation of symbolic potentials for the differentiation of self embodied in animal spirit powers and the collective identity of society embodied in totemic animals. This incorporation of the elements of nature into personal powers and social identity made shamanic ecopsychology a basic feature of human nature and culture.
--Winkelman
--Winkelman
24x36 collage, Io Miller
Lessa and Vogt define a shaman as “a ceremonial practitioner whose powers come from direct contact with the supernatural, by divine stroke, rather than from inheritance or memorized ritual,” as opposed to a priest, who uses codified and standardized ritual. They also say that shamans “are essentially mediums, for they are the mouthpieces of spirit beings”. Functionally, according to Eliade, “[t]he shaman is medicine-man, priest and psychopomp; that is to say, he cures sickness, he directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the dead to the other world”. All of these functions are accomplished by the shamanic ability of otherworldly travel out of the body and by the help of spirits. In one sense, then, the shaman is an intermediary between the world of spirits and gods and the world of human beings.
“The function of the shaman,” says Leslie Ellen Jones, “is to mediate between the mortal world and the Otherworld, and therefore, while he is not wholly of the Otherworld, he knows it better than ordinary people”.
http://www.mythicjourneys.org/passages/septoct2003/newsletterp10.html
The shaman walks between the worlds. Terri Windling says: “In the mythic tradition, both artists and shamans walk perilously close to the realm of madness; indeed, in some cases, their gifts specifically come from journeying into madness, or Faerie, or the Realm of the Gods and then back again.” Here is a sense of journeying, wondering into other realms-encountering other ways of seeing, various beings that cannot be easily categorized in our world, and an open engagement with a process that quite often can feel risky ...
Culture Leaders and Healers
“The function of the shaman,” says Leslie Ellen Jones, “is to mediate between the mortal world and the Otherworld, and therefore, while he is not wholly of the Otherworld, he knows it better than ordinary people”.
http://www.mythicjourneys.org/passages/septoct2003/newsletterp10.html
The shaman walks between the worlds. Terri Windling says: “In the mythic tradition, both artists and shamans walk perilously close to the realm of madness; indeed, in some cases, their gifts specifically come from journeying into madness, or Faerie, or the Realm of the Gods and then back again.” Here is a sense of journeying, wondering into other realms-encountering other ways of seeing, various beings that cannot be easily categorized in our world, and an open engagement with a process that quite often can feel risky ...
Culture Leaders and Healers
Arrival of the Sorcerers
hansbauerphoto.com
hansbauerphoto.com
A definition and history of the trickster figure as he appears in myth and in emotional disturbance are illustrated by examples of it in American Indian myth, alchemy, the Bible, and parapsychology. In his clearest manifestations the trickster figure is described as a faithful representation of the absolutely undifferentiated human psyche which has hardly left the animal level. In psychopathology the trickster figure is manifested in the split personality, in which a collective personification of traits which may be better or worse than the ego becomes active in the psyche. The trickster figure is represented in normal man by countertendencies in the unconscious that appear whenever a man feels himself at the mercy of apparently malicious accidents; this character component is the shadow. The myth of the trickster is explained to have been preserved and developed for its therapeutic effect: the earlier low intellectual and moral level is held before the consciousness of the more highly developed individual to remind him of the past. The trickster is defined as a parallel to the individual shadow, and the same trend toward meaning seen in the trickster figure is felt to exist for the shadow. Although the shadow appears negative, sometimes traits and associations arising from it can suggest a positive resolution to conflict. ~Carl Jung, Conscious, unconscious, and individuation. In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 275-289).
The grave of a female shaman has been found that is 60,000 years old. There are many paths or ways to reach this profoundly healing creative state of consciousness. The shaman/therapist model is one and represents a gestalt, combining the powerful consciousness altering rituals, worldviews, and visionary experiences of the shamans with the techniques, theories, and practices of depth psychologies.
Shamans have existed throughout human history as experts in magic, mysticism, healing and consciousness journeys into altered states. Psychology, based in science, knows how to manipulate and work within the ego. This combination, this gestalt of mysticism and science creates a new dimension in worldview and practice. It transcends the duality of mystical vs. scientific and provides a perspective unavailable to either one alone, one much more than the simple sum of the two.
We offer the analogy of binocular, as opposed to monocular, vision. If you close either eye, you get a relatively complete picture of what you are looking at, though it lacks depth. It may be slightly displaced depending on which eye you use, and will shift back and forth as you shift eyes. But no matter how fast you shift, if you are only using one eye, it is a two dimensional view of reality.
However, when both eyes are open, the perspective centers, and a new dimension of depth is perceived. Thus, the shaman/therapist model is not just a simple mixing, or borrowing of techniques from one to the other, but instead calls for a quantum shift in worldview, one that moves beyond either alone. Armed with this, we can undertake the creation of a profound healing, through and beyond the ego to this profound and creative state of consciousness that provides our form and the core of our being. Here, we create our healing from within. We experience first-hand that personal power (empowerment) arises from within.
The symbol is nothing more than a doorway opening into a chain of consciousness states that lead us to this creator--creative energy that can heal us. Thus, DREAMHEALING IS NOT AN INTERPRETIVE OR ANALYTICAL WAY OF UNDERSTANDING A DREAM, BUT IS AN INNER CONSCIOUSNESS JOURNEY INTO ITS HEALING HEART. In both these models the therapist is not an objective, outside observer-manipulator of the process.
Instead, the therapist is a full participant in the journey, a guide who enters into consciousness states and subjectively participates in it as s/he leads the pilgrim to the healer within. The beauty of this approach is that it empowers. There is no doubt that the healer power is always within the patient, unlike the medical model in which the healing is seen to be rendered to the patient by the surgeon, the therapist, the drug, or the new age approach (where again the healer is from the outside--a shaman, a crystal, a ritual, or the act of a god or spirit acting through a channel). The healer is found to be within, and that direct experience is empowering.
--Iona Miller, Dreamhealing
Shamans have existed throughout human history as experts in magic, mysticism, healing and consciousness journeys into altered states. Psychology, based in science, knows how to manipulate and work within the ego. This combination, this gestalt of mysticism and science creates a new dimension in worldview and practice. It transcends the duality of mystical vs. scientific and provides a perspective unavailable to either one alone, one much more than the simple sum of the two.
We offer the analogy of binocular, as opposed to monocular, vision. If you close either eye, you get a relatively complete picture of what you are looking at, though it lacks depth. It may be slightly displaced depending on which eye you use, and will shift back and forth as you shift eyes. But no matter how fast you shift, if you are only using one eye, it is a two dimensional view of reality.
However, when both eyes are open, the perspective centers, and a new dimension of depth is perceived. Thus, the shaman/therapist model is not just a simple mixing, or borrowing of techniques from one to the other, but instead calls for a quantum shift in worldview, one that moves beyond either alone. Armed with this, we can undertake the creation of a profound healing, through and beyond the ego to this profound and creative state of consciousness that provides our form and the core of our being. Here, we create our healing from within. We experience first-hand that personal power (empowerment) arises from within.
The symbol is nothing more than a doorway opening into a chain of consciousness states that lead us to this creator--creative energy that can heal us. Thus, DREAMHEALING IS NOT AN INTERPRETIVE OR ANALYTICAL WAY OF UNDERSTANDING A DREAM, BUT IS AN INNER CONSCIOUSNESS JOURNEY INTO ITS HEALING HEART. In both these models the therapist is not an objective, outside observer-manipulator of the process.
Instead, the therapist is a full participant in the journey, a guide who enters into consciousness states and subjectively participates in it as s/he leads the pilgrim to the healer within. The beauty of this approach is that it empowers. There is no doubt that the healer power is always within the patient, unlike the medical model in which the healing is seen to be rendered to the patient by the surgeon, the therapist, the drug, or the new age approach (where again the healer is from the outside--a shaman, a crystal, a ritual, or the act of a god or spirit acting through a channel). The healer is found to be within, and that direct experience is empowering.
--Iona Miller, Dreamhealing
Conserved core processes are active participants in the continual remaking of humanity in increasingly complex sociocultural settings. The ancient shamanic role is that of the seemingly most individual person who actually serves only as the mouthpiece for collective processes, through a form of meaningful possession and the practice of spontaneous healing and mobilization of placebo effect. The shaman provides a meaningful link to the ancestors and supernatural power. They operate in Prototaxic Mode - trance states.
The shaman/therapist is a hybrid of mystic and scientist. This model provides a nonlinear approach to the chaotic mysteries of the psyche. Included in this model of binocular visionary experience is the distinction between fantasy and imagination, chaos and dreamhealing, creativity and the healing process, inner vs. outer healing, perception and healing, shaman/therapist as dream guide, chakras in dream therapy, and the Medicine Wheel as a model of healing. Also included are instructions for dealing with transference for lay people or peer counselors. --Miller
The shaman/therapist is a hybrid of mystic and scientist. This model provides a nonlinear approach to the chaotic mysteries of the psyche. Included in this model of binocular visionary experience is the distinction between fantasy and imagination, chaos and dreamhealing, creativity and the healing process, inner vs. outer healing, perception and healing, shaman/therapist as dream guide, chakras in dream therapy, and the Medicine Wheel as a model of healing. Also included are instructions for dealing with transference for lay people or peer counselors. --Miller
"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is” man" in a higher sense -- he is 'collective man' -- one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind.” –C. G. Jung
All means (in painting) are sacred when they are dictated by inner necessity. All means are reprehensible when they do not spring from the fountain of inner necessity.. ..The artist must be blind to ‘recognized’ and ‘unrecognized’ form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity. -- Wassily Kandinsky
All means (in painting) are sacred when they are dictated by inner necessity. All means are reprehensible when they do not spring from the fountain of inner necessity.. ..The artist must be blind to ‘recognized’ and ‘unrecognized’ form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity. -- Wassily Kandinsky
Shamanism is the direct experience of reality. Like the shaman, the artist shares his or her inner world, powers of forecasting and healing with the community. Creativity is naturally healing. Cutting through conformity, the shaman and artist remain true to their own vision, compelled to make the journey by an inner drive.
Some talents border on the praeternatural. Inspiration is magical flight that elevates the spirit. The artist is inspired, moved, raised. The method is unique and his alone. Remedies for today's ills are offered up in storytelling, sacrifices and rituals of making and displaying, showing the new way by manifesting in the world what was carried in the heart. The story is transformative, to artist and audience. Culture cycles repeat on higher octaves.
This community service is a response to psychological, social and spiritual needs. It opens us to different states of consciousness, different ways of apprehending, being and experiencing. Our needs open us to the interpreter and trickster. It creates a connection to higher powers in ephemeral and tangible forms -- a comprehensive view of complex phenomena. Like the shaman, artists answer their deeper calling and plunge into the immersive aesthetic experience, forming connections from their gifts.
Art is not shamanic because of its subject matter, symbols or tropes, but because of its coherent resonance and transporting or transformative effect. Any art can be talismanic. Exhibition is ritual drama. The autobiographical material of one is a dream woven from self-knowledge to embody the universal.
The public is drawn by their desire to see, to be open, to witness new creation -- to remember, to be initiated, to find soul -- to transcend past, present, future. Art is the language of the soul, realizing its own purpose within us. It's an art to stun oneself.
Art creates the artist, even as it embodies itself. Works flow from the inner fountain of instinct that helps us transcend historical conditions in the act of creation. The unborn work is a force of nature. Through this process both artist and viewer may exorcize their demons or discover new ones -- even soar to celestial heights, places which have never been or yet will be. Enigmatic works can induce a transitional state -- a liminality.
The shaman is the shapeshifter, the molder of perception and the collective mind with a capacity to shock and surprise, to demonstrate freedom. He is not a shaman making art, but an artist making magic, making medicine.
The artist doesn't ask you to believe but simply to experience directly. The greatest art is a creatively lived life. Artists mirror our technology-driven society back at us while making us dream of ancient roots and unexplored territory.
Some talents border on the praeternatural. Inspiration is magical flight that elevates the spirit. The artist is inspired, moved, raised. The method is unique and his alone. Remedies for today's ills are offered up in storytelling, sacrifices and rituals of making and displaying, showing the new way by manifesting in the world what was carried in the heart. The story is transformative, to artist and audience. Culture cycles repeat on higher octaves.
This community service is a response to psychological, social and spiritual needs. It opens us to different states of consciousness, different ways of apprehending, being and experiencing. Our needs open us to the interpreter and trickster. It creates a connection to higher powers in ephemeral and tangible forms -- a comprehensive view of complex phenomena. Like the shaman, artists answer their deeper calling and plunge into the immersive aesthetic experience, forming connections from their gifts.
Art is not shamanic because of its subject matter, symbols or tropes, but because of its coherent resonance and transporting or transformative effect. Any art can be talismanic. Exhibition is ritual drama. The autobiographical material of one is a dream woven from self-knowledge to embody the universal.
The public is drawn by their desire to see, to be open, to witness new creation -- to remember, to be initiated, to find soul -- to transcend past, present, future. Art is the language of the soul, realizing its own purpose within us. It's an art to stun oneself.
Art creates the artist, even as it embodies itself. Works flow from the inner fountain of instinct that helps us transcend historical conditions in the act of creation. The unborn work is a force of nature. Through this process both artist and viewer may exorcize their demons or discover new ones -- even soar to celestial heights, places which have never been or yet will be. Enigmatic works can induce a transitional state -- a liminality.
The shaman is the shapeshifter, the molder of perception and the collective mind with a capacity to shock and surprise, to demonstrate freedom. He is not a shaman making art, but an artist making magic, making medicine.
The artist doesn't ask you to believe but simply to experience directly. The greatest art is a creatively lived life. Artists mirror our technology-driven society back at us while making us dream of ancient roots and unexplored territory.
THE SHAMAN/THERAPIST:
IMAGINATION, CREATIVITY, AND VISION
by Iona Miller, 1989
http://dreamhealing.iwarp.com/whats_new_7.html
IMAGINATION, CREATIVITY, AND VISION
by Iona Miller, 1989
http://dreamhealing.iwarp.com/whats_new_7.html
Shamanism is the medicine of the imagination. --Jeanne Achterberg, Imagery in Healing
He descends into chaos and tribulation, into the realms beyond the limits of convention and human laws where the seething magma of raw transformative energy resides in its unrefined and undiluted state. --Stephan Hoeller, THE GNOSTIC JUNG
Shamans were the first dreamworkers...if someone could imagine or dream an event, that action was considered to be, in some sense, real. --Stanley Krippner, PhD
He descends into chaos and tribulation, into the realms beyond the limits of convention and human laws where the seething magma of raw transformative energy resides in its unrefined and undiluted state. --Stephan Hoeller, THE GNOSTIC JUNG
Shamans were the first dreamworkers...if someone could imagine or dream an event, that action was considered to be, in some sense, real. --Stanley Krippner, PhD
Shamanism included the experience of many unusual states of consciousness. But there were inherent limitations within the pure shamanic model also, most notably an accent on superstition and fantasy. The pitfalls of superstition are pretty obvious and come from our belief system, but many of us don't make a distinction between fantasy and imagination. We say, "Oh, it's just your imagination," reducing it to a trivial position.
IMAGINATION IS OUR MOST POWERFUL FORCE FOR CHANGE. Unlike ego-serving daydreams, or fantasies of wish fulfillment which we make up, imagination is something that happens to us; it is an autonomous force or energy, welling up from the depths as the water of life. Fantasy is escapist and does not impact our reality; it is non-transformative. It is a self-serving circle. Imagination, on the other hand, is intimately linked to creativity, and can impact the personal self, the environmental self, and the transpersonal self.
IMAGINATION IS THE PRIMARY WAY WE EXPERIENCE SOUL. It is the only way to experience the inner world. Our creativity is expressed through multiple states of consciousness. And we open to inner consciousness through images. Imagination gives us entree into the inner world of eternity.
CREATIVITY EXPRESSED IN THIS WAY MEANS WE CAN EXPERIENCE MULTIPLE STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Imagination seems to emerge out of nowhere. The shaman/therapist acts as a guide to encourage the client to follow imagination, rather than get stuck in a loop of fantasy material.
When images flow freely they are healing. Jung called images the primary activity of consciousness, a sort of natural reflex, and yet the only reality we apprehend directly. Images lead into the realm of soul, which joins those of matter and spirit. They do not require symbolic or interpretive methods or meanings because to do so depotentiates the power of the imagination.
By sticking to the image as presented and flowing with its continually transforming nature, more is to be found. In therapy, we learn a form of love for images which consists of watchful attention or sustained attention. Through this attention or love for images we can connect with the transpersonal dimension of life which is the source of chaos, dreams, visions, myths, tales, ritual, and spiritual beliefs. There isn't much value to analyzing any image from just one point-of-view, because images have many inherent meanings which may continue to unfold over years. It just depends on how you look at them.
THE PSYCHIC IMAGE EMBODIES ITS OWN REALITY; IT IS SELF-REVELATORY. THE MEANING DWELLS WITHIN THE IMAGE LIKE CONSCIOUSNESS DWELLS IN THE BODY. Multiple meanings may carry an ambiguous quality for the rational mind, but are expressive of the dynamic complexity of life. Images pertain to imagination, while hallucinations pertain to perception.
SACRED PSYCHOLOGY is an ongoing operation with the soul's images. It means joining a greater life; dying to our current selves and being reborn in our eternal selves, finding our emergent potentials. By analogizing, rather than interpreting, we simply ask, "What is this image like?"
Analogies carry us into many meanings, amplifying, not restricting the image. Some people are ashamed of their fantasy life--that they even have fantasies at all. They have been conditioned to mistrust imagination. This is because the imaginal world opens us to the chaotic, uncontrollable, spontaneous, divine world of the soul. But when attention is focused and diffuses into the imagery that is beyond self-gratification, the power of transpersonal energies can initiate deep healing. The imagery is actually the finer basis of our material existence. So, in a sense, we are our images.
IMAGINATION IS REALITY. We orient ourselves to internal and external reality through multi-sensory images. Research has shown that ESP information is also mediated through mental imagery. Weak imagers often mis-identify targets because they misinterpret fragmentary images. The mediating vehicle for psi communication is the imagination, a psychological function we all possess.
Therefore, theoretically, ESP communication should be enhanced under conditions which promote imagery, especially in those whose cognitive style is dominated by imagery perception. For example, dream recall or creativity can be shown to relate positively to psi performance. The image may not be visual. Thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition converge in imagination. Images can be kinesthetic, olfactory, auditory, tactile, visual, etc. Imagination is a "direct expression of psychic life," according to Jung.
IF IT IS THE TASK OF THE SHAMAN TO FIND THE STRAYED SOUL AND RESTORE IT, THE SHAMAN NEED ONLY RECONNECT HIM WITH IMAGINATIVE LIFE TO SET THE HEALING IN MOTION. He is the psychopomp, or guide to the inner depths. The psychic crisis of an individual needs to seek its own unique solution within. It is a deepening process. It may be an ordeal, or more like a quest, but the investment of energy and attention is a sacrifice that must be made.
We can conceive of a psychotic in the shaman's terms as one whose soul has been stolen, lost, or seized down into the underworld. Their conscious awareness is focused in a very narrow beam revolving around delusions and fears.
They are enmeshed with the spirit and intuitive consciousness, overwhelmed by and drowning in it. How does the shaman or therapist help the person broaden the beam, to expand awareness of self to include more and more of consciousness, so that a stabilized personality can learn to experience itself as ONE WITH ALL?
The shaman/therapist uses old and new techniques like dreams, visionary work, vision quest, imagery, colors, drumming, meditations, letting go, breathing, body work, mental grasp of the physical nature of the universe, opening to nature, and standard therapies like Transactional Analysis and Gestalt.
In various ways we can give in to the pressures which we have been investing our energies in fighting. Fighting disempowers us and validates the rigidities. Letting go leads through chaos to flow.
THE MEDICINE WHEEL is the primary healing model of western shamanism. It shows the synergy of chaos and order. It has four primary stations, corresponding to the four cardinal directions. It is therefore a mythic model for the creation and a device for magical orientation and protection. Its motif lays out the phases of a healing process:
1). INITIATION corresponds with the East and means seeing the problem or the need for healing; breaking through ignorance or denial.
2). LETTING GO corresponds to the South, and means surrendering to the Higher Power, or the process. This ego-death leads directly into a period of chaos before the new vision is found.
3). NEW VISION arises within the place of dreams and creative imagination. Self esteem grows as dreamhealing presents creative solutions. It means connecting with powers without and within which are seen as ONE. It is the West.
4). ACTUALIZATION is a phase of integration and empowerment. In the North quadrant you make your dreams come true. It is a new emotional maturity. Newly-learned skills are put into fruitful practice, connecting one to self, community, and Universe, restoring balance and rectifying karma.
For Graywolf, the shamanic model was different from, but not really any better than the psychological method. Many therapists and new age healers have found this out for themselves. He didn't really find any benefit from shamanism other than a different worldview until he was about to fuse the shamanic and psychological views. THIS LED TO THE IDEA OF THE SHAMAN/THERAPIST.
Neither one on its own was comprehensive or flexible enough. But looking at reality with the eye of the scientist and the eye of the mystic simultaneously creates a sort of BINOCULAR VISION which adds depth and meaning to the vision.
The psychotherapeutic approach to healing essentially represents order. The shamanic approach represents chaos. These worldviews seem divided. Yet the true nature of reality represents the merging of chaos into order, and chaos and order, back into chaos. Both lie within each other, and there is a consequent flow between the two.
The essence of the shaman/therapist model is that it takes in both sides. Most shamanic techniques are essentially chaos-producing, including sweats, drum journeys, and other means of inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness.
For example, someone in the sweat lodge gets so hot that their normal methods of processing and input simply fail to work. They are so busy dealing with the stress on their body caused by the heat that their mind essentially turns off. And that is where the chaos comes in and changes things. The same is true for becoming lost in the throbbing drum, letting consciousness soar. A beat with disruptions is very hypnotic and promotes the temporary disequilibrium which is known to deepen trance.
Dreamhealing is the practice of the shaman/therapist, combining the process and dreamwork of psychotherapy with the traditional form of shamanic flight. The shaman is a traveller between the worlds of ordinary and nonordinary reality. The dreamtime is a sacred space which the shaman/therapist can share with others through co-consciousness.
Perception, how we perceive ourselves and the world about us is at the base of our experiences of reality. The essence of psychotherapy is the changing of perception. In fostering this change the modern psychotherapist and ancient shaman share a common mission.
No matter whether the transformation is attempted through drugs, behavior modification, or emotive talk therapies, the purpose is to change perception of reality. Each one of us creates our own reality by our perceptions. The reality is created through a filtering process, and is continually subject to modification by fantasy and imagination. Each of our individual realities undergoes constant modification.
THERE IS AN INFINITY OF REALITIES AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
These are created out of only a small portion of what we perceive, and what we perceive is but a small fraction of the input available to us through the senses. We exist among a chaos of realities, yet we also exist within and among a consensus of "reality." Another way of saying it is that this chaos of realities contains within it hidden, consensual structure. Our perceptions are attracted to certain types of order.
Yet there are myths underlying our perceptions of
1) permanence,
2) objective individualism,
3) collectivism, and
4) symbolic reality.
ONE HALF OF THE PROBLEM IS BEING ABLE TO LET GO OF THE FOCUS OF ATTENTION AND ENTER INTO THE CHAOS. THE OTHER HALF IS BEING ABLE TO SEIZE THE NEW ORDER THAT ARISES FROM IT.
It is the role of healers to help others find the doorways to the opportunities that crises can offer, as traditional guiding models break down. The guiding myth of the shaman is that "personal power arises within."
The blending of the traditional and the innovative, the mystical and scientific, the masculine and feminine elements in healing, can guide our culture towards a balanced approach to healing. One driving force is bumping up against boundaries and then going past them. There are limitations in science and shamanism, but we need not remain perplexed if we incorporate the best each system has to offer.
By recognizing our boundaries, we can move beyond them. This is equally true for the dreamhealing practitioner and for those seeking healing. Shamanism and humanistic psychology share common aspects in their worldviews. The first is the view that "WE ARE ALL ONE". The primitive belief is one of the web of life, while the other calls it holism and deep ecology.
FOR SHAMANS THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE IS THAT IT IS ALIVE. Science is validating this perspective more each day that nothing is truly separate from the whole. Wholism affirms the unity of life.
The GUIDING VISION is another premise shared in common by both camps. Jung certainly wrote extensively of his visionary experience and how it affected his life and gave him a mandate for his work. The vision quest is the native model for facilitating and honoring this experience. These visions "work" because we are not separate from the universe, nature, each other, our bodies, or hidden aspects of ourselves. This brings us to the third commonality of REVERENCE FOR NATURE.
We are not separate from the creation, and perhaps this is one reason for the profound healing power of wilderness. Maslow spoke of this awe of the nature-mystic as one of the emergent qualities of the self-actualized person. Perhaps the main distinction between shamanism and conventional psychology is the consciousness state.
Shamanism promotes co-consciousness where you are no longer separate from the person you are dealing with. The shaman goes into the underworld (subconscious) to help the person bring their lost soul or spirit back, which is the healing. That is really different than a psychologist who, in the old scientific model, maintains an objective distance.
CHAOS AND DREAMHEALING WHEN THE MIND LETS GO OF ITS RATIONAL ORDER AND ENTERS INTO UNSTRUCTURED CHAOS IT EMERGES LATER WITH A NEW STRUCTURE.
It is a quantum leap from what went before. Each journey into the unstructured chaotic consciousness leads to the seat of our muse and creativity. Therapy at its very best is a matter of changing consciousness, and so is shamanism. Though the perspective may be different, both seek to change consciousness about the states of dis-ease we experience.
Graywolf came upon the work of Paul Rapp, a researcher at the medical college of the University of Pennsylvania who experiments with chaos, at a crucial point in the development of his models. He discovered the technique in his therapy practice and refined it, but its description required a model of how and why it works.
He was searching for a language to describe what he had been observing in the consciousness journeys he was conducting, trying to discover the nature of the healing process. Rapp's research showed that problem solving led to an increase of chaotic patterns in the brain, which led to a creative chaotic renewal.
Graywolf had observed this state in his clients empirically over and over again, in the underlying order to the apparently random or chaotic flow of multi-sensory imagery that formed the core of the method. He developed his ego model to describe the states in general. (See EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING).
They reflected not only a static order of imagery, but a deeper dynamic component. Before finding the language of chaos theory, he tried relating these states to the medicine wheel, the chakra system, and other healing models. But no matter what language he used, ancient, shamanic, eastern mystical, new age, or scientific, each only seemed to capture a portion of it, as a pre-biased limited view. But upon reading about Rapp's finding, he recalled a discussion many years earlier with a client who was a mathematics professor.
On a working hike down the lower Rogue River in Southern Oregon, he described a new form of mathematics that was integrating a fractured science. In a moment of personal integration, Graywolf's memories and experience from the dream journeys came together. He saw that chaos is the underlying concept that brings it all together.
In each dream journey we encounter a state of consciousness that is a personal experience of primal chaos. These states might be different on the surface, but the underlying essence is the same. The empty drifting in the fog, that empty mindless place where there are no thoughts, emotions, or images were common reports. This is not news in depth psychology, but the reliable manner of accessing the state is new.
We have known for a long time that the secret lay within dreams, as Max Zeller points out in THE DREAM - THE VISION OF THE NIGHT. Depth psychology speaks of the unconscious. The term refers to the unknown hidden realm of the psyche about which we cannot make any direct statement. If not manifest, it looks like nothing at all, a void; the invisible, or not yet visible. But when vision and dream appear and reveal what was hidden, then void and emptiness give way to meaningfulness and to a feeling of being in touch and being connected...to those lost springs for which we all search and from which all life comes.
The unconscious lends itself to the language of chaos. The whirling, twisting motion of a molecule of water in the chaotic world of non-laminar flow through a pipe is analogous to chaos consciousness. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the vortex, tornado, or whirlpool is a surrender to chaos, an experience of no form and total confusion and disorientation. It is like the experience of committing oneself to the fire and becoming it, and as the random flickering of the flames and torrid heat, disintegrating into pure energy. It means becoming the boiling, flowing, every-changing molten magma at the core of the earth, or the root of a volcano.
These are all descriptions of the personal, subjective experience of total chaos. Always, after passing through this state, the new order which emerged of self-image, thought, emotion, and sensory perception reflected the new and less dis-eased state of being. The deeper self-image undercut or superceded the old belief system, and began to create a new order of being, a new way of perceiving self and world. The new image provides a magnetic nucleus around which to order the personality, and often the physiology. Each of these observations had a counterpart in the new science based on chaos. Order seems to be present in the chaos of mind just as chaos really seems to underlie even the most rigid and orderly intellect. The new primal image has its counterpart in the strange attractor described in this radical new model.
DREAMS THEMSELVES EMBODY THE VERY NATURE OF CHAOS. Very few will argue with the chaotic nature of dreams. As we journeyed deep into the heart of dreams, the free-association of multi-sensory images led us to the energies and consciousness states that birthed and shaped its surface symbols and plots.
The journeys were chaotic, impressionistic. The imagery jerked and changed in chaotic ways, and we encountered states of consciousness which embodied total chaos within their experience. Always a state of consciousness emerged that soothed the tortured ego or body, healed the organism in some way, providing a balanced flow from deep within the chaos. Graywolf felt sure he was touching the very essence or source of the creative energy within us.
CREATIVITY AND DREAMHEALING
The relationship between healing and creativity is implicit. It means different phenomena on different levels. This state has been linked in research with the reverie state and alpha brainwave state.
Rapp's findings showed large amounts of alpha discharge as the brain went into a chaotic pattern for problem solving. Elmer and Alyce Green, who have done original research in biofeedback, have defined creativity at various levels:
Creativity in terms of physiological processes means then PHYSICAL HEALING, physical regeneration. Creativity in emotional terms consists then of establishing, or creating ATTITUDE CHANGES through the practice of healthful emotions, that is, emotions whose neural correlates are those that establish harmony in the visceral brain, or to put it another way, emotions that establish in the visceral brain those neurological patterns whose reflection in the viscera is one that physicians approve of as stress-resistent. Creativity in the mental domain involves the emergence of a new and valid synthesis of ideas, not by deduction, but springing by "INTUITION" from unconscious sources. The entrance, or key, to all these inner processes we are beginning to believe, is a particular state of consciousness to which we have given the undifferentiated name of "reverie."
The creative process runs parallel to the healing process. In fact, healing is a special case of creativity, or creative problem-solving. Consciousness is the author of both processes. Creativity, healing, and illumination are equivalent processes operating at different levels -- mental, physical, psychic, and spiritual. The process includes a prelude ritual, an altered state, and a postlude, or emotional affect. We can draw a direct analogy between the dreamhealing process and the creative process.
We have adapted the description from Silvano Arieti's CREATIVITY: THE MAGIC SYNTHESIS, Basic, 1976. Dreamhealing begins with THE PILGRIMAGE, which expresses one's intent or commitment The creative process begins with RECEPTIVITY, which includes interest, preparation, and immersion in the subject matter.
Next in dreamhealing comes THE CONFESSION, or the identification of the problem, where you have missed the mark. Creativity also requires the ability to identify the problem, see the right questions, to use errors, to have detached devotion.
The PURIFICATION or cleansing of dreamhealing parallels the generalized SENSITIVITY TO PROBLEMS that comes during creativity, an attunement to the realization of what needs to be done.
THE OFFERING is a sign of letting go, sacrifice of the old ego form, the commitment to healing.
Creativity requires the SURRENDER OF TIME AND SELF TO THE PROCESS OF FLOW; fluency of thinking; flexibility; abandoning old ways of thought.
The heart of the quest is DREAM INCUBATION, a reverie which seeks connection with higher power. Creativity also requires INCUBATION, reverie, serendipity, spontaneity, adaptation, tolerance for ambiguity, and originality This permits uncommon responses and unconventional associations.
Healing occurs in a moment of oneness, CHAOTIC CONSCIOUSNESS. In creativity it is paralleled by the moment of ILLUMINATION, redefinition, invention, vision.
Dreamhealing requires AMPLIFICATION, or work on dreams and validation.
ELABORATION is its counterpart, the use of two or more abilities for the construction of a more complex object or theory, plus verification.
RE-ENTRY implies actualization, renewal, grounding, maturing. Creatively it means REAL-TIME APPLICATION, follow through, product, exploitation of the result. In all cases, guided or not, the creative or healing process follows approximately this model. The resources are contacted deep within and they well-up in sometimes unexpected ways from the deep Source.
INNER VS. OUTER EMPHASIS ON HEALING
The conventional outer focus on healing tends to get caught up in methods, techniques and the purely material side of healing. It causes division both in the approach to and view of the patient. Inner focus tends to lead to a collective or unifying state of consciousness.
THE SPIRIT OR EMERGENCE OF HEALING ARISES FROM WITHIN. It not only integrates the patient but also the divided methods of outer healing approaches. It unifies patient and professional. In this sense it is synergistic.
Thus, if the real healing energy or power or force comes from within, the patient can choose from tools such as surgery, imagery, and lifestyle changes to repair a damaged heart. They are not forced to choose between tools, but can use all of them harmoniously. Inside each of us, and common to us all is a force we have called PLACEBO, homeostasis, or will-to-live which is a state of consciousness.
The placebo effect lies in a crack between the known and the unknown. We know it works, but we have no clue how. In reverse, used against people, it is the basis for sympathetic magic and curses. Without it, even physicians agree healing simply cannot occur. This force comes from deep within, but can be focused and facilitated through awareness. One of the powers of dreams and dreamhealing is that they arise from non-ordinary states of consciousness, and out of the powers of the chaotic collective matrix.
The dream guide takes consciousness into this altered state and facilitates access to it for the whole being, rather than putting a bandaid on a symptom. Once we find it, we see we can reach it in many ways. These include imagination, imagery, meditation, faith in the doctor as healer, prayer, etc. Once we reach it, it affects our perception of reality from that point forward. What's New with My Subject?
PERCEPTION AND HEALING
How do we perceive the world? One obvious answer is through the five known senses. We see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. Some people seems to have other, more subtle information input systems--extrasensory systems.
Dr. Stanley Krippner cites sixteen sensory (among them kinesthsia and balance) inputs. Our internal experience of these comes through intuition and imagery. They are internal perceptions, interpretations of input which lead to other psychological processes, such as emotion or intellect. There are uncountable bits of information in any given environment, yet only a small part of those are registered through the known senses. Chaos contains too much information to process so it appears as a void or overwhelming. The senses overload.
Chaos is a form of order or structure rational mind is incapable of comprehending. Chaos is really just a definition of mind, otherwise its a natural nonlinear order. Most natural phenomena, like a river in flow, the atmosphere, or the wilderness, are essentially chaotic, an expression of chaos. The struggle of mankind over the years has been to create some structure from that chaos. But we can accept it, and flow with it also. Learning to live with chaos, we can learn to EMBRACE THE CHAOS.
E.S.P., intuitive perception, the five senses, and our belief systems act as filters of immediate phenomenal experience. These perceptions function as overlays on the direct experience of empirical reality. Putting a twist on the old cliche, we can say, "I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."
Our habitual way of seeing the world conditions our experience. Zen monks and yogis are trained to be in the "now," and thus retain that freshness and spontaneity that comes from an unconditioned perspective, the BEGINNER'S MIND. How do we perceive self? Are we caught in a conformist attitude, or open to infinite possibilities? Of course, we perceive through the sensation related to the usual five senses, but we are also driven by deep, early self images, i.e. existential images. They condition our environmental self, our personal self, even our transpersonal self.
Dreams, visions, daydreams, fantasies, and other imaginal experiences are merely other ways of perceiving the world (or universe) and self. The physical body is only a small part of our actual makeup. We are also complex fields of dynamic energy. We have an electromagnetic body that interacts intimately with other fields of energy.
We emit gases and electrons which exchange with the environment and each other. Our skin is not really a barrier, but a very permeable membrane. At the sub-atomic level, we become even finer creatures. The elements of our bodies were cooked in the crucible of some supernova. Within those elements are electrons that fluctuate at the threshold of matter and energy. Those electrons and atoms actually have relatively vast amounts of space between them, so that our seemingly solid matter actually contains a great deal of void.
In physical terms, we ultimately reduce down to not much more than a wave-front in space. And with that rarified perspective, it isn't difficult to see why the Buddhist viewpoint stresses the gross illusion of separation in corporeal life.
SHAMAN/THERAPIST AS GUIDE
The shaman and therapist facilitate subtle changes in perception to bring about healing from the deep resources within. Shamans have always used great scope in their healing efforts, even using such tools as rivers, meadows, or the tops of mountains.
That is where they take people to initiate healing or visionary experience. We tend to think small in psychology in terms of tools. The whole earth, the rivers, all of nature is a tool to be used by the shaman/therapist if she is open to that. On a wilderness excursion, a day of silence can be profoundly transformative.
Many times people won't begin talking for hours after the silence is lifted. Preparation at a retreat, like sweats and offerings can also enhance the wilderness experience. Dream incubation at the retreat opens the mythic dimension to enhance the effects of a client's experience. Taking people on therapeutic excursions also allows the guide to span a broad spectrum of the client's awareness by demonstrating a guiding ability that is both literal and metaphorical. Once again this opens the client to a less-rational mythic dimension.
The archetypal image of the GUIDE TO THE UNDERWORLD, (deep subconscious), is a very powerful symbol when activated in the psyche of an individual. Finally there is someone to show the way in the netherworld of inner life. The shaman/therapist takes the client far below the personality levels, down to the psychic origins of life. There they may experience the primordial, chemical, genetic, or sub-atomic realities which usually escape our notice. Through the process of co-consciousness the guide brings the client's soul back out into the light of day (rational consciousness) after many challenges are met and overcome.
The lost soul is found and retrieved through a healing process. The formerly "dead" personality is now enlivened in the process of psychological rebirth and resurrection. Wilderness excursions feed into the trust-building process in a way that can never be achieved in an office or clinic. Reflecting on his experience with people on the whitewater rivers, Graywolf has noticed that he doesn't have to do nearly as much to be actively therapeutic with people on the river. Just taking them there, and being there with them as Graywolf, it becomes very powerful.
The intent is a transformational voyage. A lot of the personal results depend on their own expectations and the power they tend to project on the shaman. In Graywolf's case he feels a lot of it has to do with going down the river and his consecrated relationship to it. If a person has an issue, for example, with their feminine side, they seem to dream of women while they are on the river trip. Becoming that in the dream journey, they begin changing their striving nature to a sense of flow, harmonizing more and more with the river. The river takes them to an edge of personal challenge and transmutes them automatically.
IN DREAM GUIDING, ALL THE ACTION LIES IN GOING JUST BEYOND THE BOUNDARY FROM THE KNOWN AND COMFORTABLE TOWARD THE FEAR AND CHALLENGE. Being at the edge is where we can confront our issues. The emotions which carry us to that edge become more and more intensified as the personal limits are challenged. Attitudes, values, and thoughts may be transformed in a moment of existential challenge.
Many people report they never felt more alive than at a moment of personal physical and mental challenge. The concept of THE BOUNDARY is also relevant to physics, chemistry, and engineering. The boundary is where opposites meet; it is always paradoxical in nature. The boundary layer is where all the interesting things happen in fluid flow and chemical reactions. The transition points, both ways, between chaos and order seem to be the places where important shifts and developments take place. So in the physical or mental journey, the times of entering the chaos and re-emerging into order are when you can observe the shift. In ancient times, Seneca said, "The secrets [of nature] open not promiscuously nor to every corner. They are remote of access, enshrined in the inner sanctuary."
Opening to nature is healing. Swept-up in the rapture of nature's beauty, we experience oneness with Her. This response has been described as oceanic or a peak experience, referring metaphorically to depths and heights. Natural mystic-ecstasies can happen spontaneously to anyone. They often have an uncanny or supernormal quality. They involve euphoria or bliss to an extent unknown in most usual activities. They seem important in some strange way. There is also some element of transcendence. They remain in memory longer and more vividly than ordinary events.
But not all experiences are of equal depth. Some lead directly to the loss of sense of self and time, and a reduction in mental activity. It is a form of cosmic-consciousness. In most cultures the basic elements -- fire, air, water, and earth -- are revered in some manner, or at least considered fundamental to existence; some systems contain even finer distinctions. This has resounded through history in a variety of mystic arts ranging from alchemy to astrology, to Native American shamanism.
In yoga they are known as the tatvas. Always this doctrine of the four elements symbolized a sense of wholeness with nature and self. The mystic fifth element appears as the essence, or quintessence, spirit or ether. It represents the synergetic effect of the primary four components of natural existence.
In opening to nature the self is purified, fear and shame vanish, replaced by the sense of brotherhood with all life. It is an experience of oneness with the creation. Because nature always reflects the archetype of death/rebirth, the psychological response to a profound experience in nature may be one of rebirth. This can be particularly true if there is a close brush with death. The transport may also occur witnessing a birth which can evoke a strong sense of awe and wonder at the miracle of life. In the nature-mystic experience there is always a mixture of instinctive awe and delight, a thrill usually felt most deeply in utter solitude, which fills the heart with a Presence.
It is a form of enlightenment or illumination, where the divine element is veiled by nature. The experience is characterized by a deep feeling, rather than knowing. It is a life-changing event, with many further repercussions and adjustments. One gains a new perspective as when standing on a majestic mountain, surveying the panorama. The mind calms, becoming tranquil and still, in regard for the beloved. All things seem pristine, perfect, and eternal. Conflicts are transcended or resolved in self-forgetfulness.
The world "looks different." Maslow likened it to a "visit to a personal heaven." One feels more alive, loving, accepting, blessed, and happy. A peak experience can be "grounded" by working with it in a journal and meditation, reclaiming those states for future nourishment. They are sources of sanctuary and inner fortitude, providing a foundation for further excursions into mystical dimensions. You can use them for stress management by recalling a special place and time in nature where you felt open and secure. Deep relaxation provides many benefits for health and well being.
CHAKRAS IN DREAM THERAPY
Chakras are wheels or vortices of energy in the subtle body, and have long been recognized in Ayurvedic and Chinese forms of medicine. Their physical counterparts are the nerve plexes of our anatomy. The free or impaired circulation of energy among these centers directly affects our physiognomy. The quickest way to an understanding of the human energy body is probably through the chakra system.
The colors of the rainbow have been associated with the centers in the subtle body for thousands of years. It is a symbol system with an internal coherency which works well in practice. The color system is usually visual, but may be an impressionistic perception of immersion, permutation, or pervasion. One way of moving people quickly to a non-rational place with their feelings is simply to ask them what color they are now...and what color they would like to be.
This is a very simple diagnostic almost anyone can learn. When we invite someone to visualize a feeling or symptoms, or whatever as a color, we are really inviting or guiding them to use a new and different perceptual mode to see themselves and the world. Color literally reflects differing vibrational patterns in the EM spectrum. Symbolically, color is a visual symbol of the energy body.
To 'become' the color is to tie together the normal self perceptual faculties (means) with or to perceive the state of the energy body. The same goes for the other senses -- sounds, odors, taste, sensations. Also, internal states such as emotions or thoughts or images can be similarly perceived by a different modality. ''
Chakras are vortices of energy in the human astral body. Their appearance in the dream journey shows where blocks in the energy flow and psychology are located. Chakras are not physical, but are associated with nerve plexes in the body. They create tangible effects on body and mind. They represent a continuum of evolving consciousness from the most base level to the highest degree of mystical insight and illumination.
Each chakra, when blocked, represents a different psychological issue. While the system and color correspondences presented here are not necessarily "universal," they are useful. You will notice in your own mentoring certain manifestations which hold true from session to session, and you can deduce what they mean.
In any group setting, you can deduce what people feel like fairly accurately, as well as their psychological problems and state. Asked the color question, they usually respond fairly quickly. For example, one person identified with a muddy yellow-green. Intuition suggests there is a problem in the relationship area, which manifests as confusion between power (yellow) and love (green). This person was startled at how accurately that summed up his present situation. The muddiness indicated the problem, yellow is the color of the power chakra (spleen or solar plexus), green the color of the heart center.
So, you can deduce that there might be a perceptible "block" or symptom in that area of the body between the two chakras.
RED: The root or base chakra is red. Its position is the anus or feet. It is concerned with birth, survival, instinct, stability, grounding, stillness, common sense, and attachment. Its element is earth; it is associated with the coccygeal spinal ganglion. In dreamhealing it is analogous with the primal sensory images, or sensation levels. Its issues include individuality and survival. It can indicate fear of bodily harm or extinction. Flow here means thriving, not just surviving; freedom from role-boundedness and exclusive identification with persona or social mask.. It is very common for dreamhealing clients to become the essence of red in the first few dream journeys. It is a fundamental aspect of being which needs to be worked through. Then it will not block the way to higher awareness.
ORANGE: The chakra for the sex center is orange. It is the seat of our personal sense of power, magnetism, creativity, emotions, pleasure, passion, and rejuvenation. It is the level of social or group consciousness. Therefore, the issue here is fear of alienation, or being left out; desire, procreation, attachment, envy, frustration. Polarity, change, sexuality, nurturance, movement. Its element is water; its nerve center is the genitals. In terms of the dreamhealing model, it is the level of personal mythology, belief systems, personal images. It especially concerns how we feel about the opposite sex. At this level the client may encounter the inner mate, ANIMA or ANIMUS. The inner mate can be a powerful soul guide to deeper levels. On the return side of the journey, this chakra or level is an opportunity to balance masculine and feminine energies through an inner marriage. This kind of integration promotes androgyny. Flow here means blending the opposites. Animosity is not projected, for in re-owning the opposite sex within, we become reintegrated.
YELLOW: The power chakra is yellow. The issue here is how we express our outer power. Because it is planning or analytical consciousness, it involves intention, will, movement, and doing; combination, interaction. It is fear of rejection and dissatisfaction. Its element is fire; its nerve plexus is the solar plexus. It is an energy which requires grounding; negatively it can manifest as overworking or manic activity, a constant search for stimulation and excitement. This implies the need for constant affirmation and approval from others. Negatively, this is the source of aggression and hostility that originate in unmet emotional needs. The energy that cannot flow in the next-higher center is turned back and builds to the boiling point since the heart center cannot function. In therapy you will find many people confused about the difference between strength and power, especially in relationships. Dominance and personal power are confused. The cycle of victim-victimizer feeds on itself. Alternatively, it can lead to inertia, stagnation, inability to connect, lack of self confidence, recoiling from challenge, or unwillingness to change. Hypervigilance, intimidation, estrangement, separation, isolation, invalidation, resistance, denial, lack of enthusiasm, and low self-esteem result from dysfunction here. This chakra is blocked also for those who feel disempowered. Suppressed rage may take the place of laughter and joy, humor and transformation. When we begin to assume responsibility for ourselves we reclaim that power. Self-responsibility eliminates the need for manipulating the environment to get one's needs met. It is more direct. It breaks the cycle of fear, self-criticism,, and withdrawl. It also lessens the likelihood of being manipulated by others. Flow here means freedom of choice, self-assertiveness, the ability to put oneself first when it is appropriate to do so. In some mystical systems it is known as the HARA, or empowering core. In dreamhealing it is the emotional patterns, thought patterns, and behaviors. At this level it reveals how what is inside is expressed outside and determines what comes back in, through a feedback process. Positive expressions include reorganization, coordination, momentum, efficient use of energy, will, vitality, volition, responsibility, attunement, effortlessness, discipline, engagement, purpose, confidence, courage; future-oriented, "I will do this."
GREEN: The heart chakra deals with emotional energy and is green. Its issues are empathy, intimacy, love, security, balance, equilibrium, acceptance, generosity, harmonization, freedom, integration, self actualization, compassion, affinity, relationship, unity, and healing. Its element is air; the nerve plexus surrounds the heart. When blocked, this chakra means fear of loss, even loss of integrity or that sense of wholeness, "the heart of the matter." In dreamhealing, green is a color where you may let the client linger, embracing the healing gift of the dream journey. Flow here means love: acceptance of self and others, democratic nature, reintegration, balance, integrity, restoration, brotherly love and connecting with nature; aspiration, fulfillment, intentionality, clarity, lucidity, self-realization, creativity, solutions, rebirth, emergence, inspiration, transcendence, vocation, metaphorical perception, charisma, spontaneity, autonomy, serenity, trust, synergy, relaxation, inner peace, validation, revival, insight, surrender to Higher Power, sense of the sacred, grace, self-love, expressed love, spiritual connection, cyclical time. When clients first perceive a color or become a color, ask them where they experience that in their body. There is a spontaneous, uncanny relationship to the chakras, whether they know about them or not. You can tell a lot by the purity of the colors clients report. In the prior example with the mixture of green and yellow, for example, you might explore the confusion between intimacy and power. So, a basic knowledge of color mixing can help your intuition. Also, realize that the chakras can "mix." For example, if the sex center is dominated by the emotional center, it results in false intimacy. If it is dominated by the power center, it means grandiosity, egotism, martyrdom, or a host of unhealthy co-dependent behavior. The higher chakras deal with expression, intuition, contact bliss, and transcendence. They are largely transpersonal in nature, and are the true "home" of the mystic. They cannot be open channels until the work of clearing the blocks in the ego and lower chakras is done. Here again, it is a matter of energy flow. Flow expresses the open, healthy, spiritual individual related to the personal and transpersonal world, outer and inner life. The primal energy of healing and enlightenment, KUNDALINI, flows through the open chakras. Once again we are met with the creative energy of the SERPENT POWER, which we encountered as the central healing image of the Asklepian method. When blocked, it creates physical and psychic problems. Its free flow is a healing panacea, the universal medicine. Again, like cures like. BLUE: The throat center is blue. It is intimately concerned with self-expression, allowing oneself a voice, and issues relating to things said and unsaid. Positively it is communication, connection, innovation, flexibility, creativity, purification, rhythm, resonance, rapport, transport, meaning, telepathy. It is a frequent point of symptomatic constriction in abuse victims or those with unfinished grieving. Its dysfunction means fear of change. Open it means the free flow of self-expression; the gateway to the future.
INDIGO: This is the color of the Third Eye, representing intuition, clairvoyance, imagination, vision. Blocked it means fear of spontaneous response, or doubt. Flow here means insight, memory, visualization, assimilation, comprehension, wisdom, visions, psychic awareness, meditation, consciousness expansion, metaphorical perception that is largely visual, creative imagining, perception, timelessness, synchronicity, light.
VIOLET: Violet is associated with the crown center and pure information, true imagination, knowing, wisdom and understanding. It is the ground state of being, ultimate openness, the source of consciousness itself. It is non spatial and non temporal. When blocked, it is the fear of vulnerability or chaos. Flow here means nonlocality, emptiness, unconditional acceptance, connectivity, knowing, simultaneity of time, bliss, "withinness," immaterial consciousness, and even cosmic consciousness, transcendent consciousness, or illumination, (as a discrete experience, if not as a stabilized state).
BLACK: Black is not associated with a chakra but may indicate the level of self annihilation, or be an abstraction of the future, unknown self. Too much information looks like none. Dreamhealing participants often report a "black blacker than black" which leads into yet deeper states. Encourage them toward that deepening. In dreamhealing, you do not need to accept the entire chakra model as a metaphysical reality. This version is only one form of chakra description, and a very brief one at that. We simply suggest that experience has shown that the attribution of these colors to various centers in the body has proven useful in understanding and guiding the client's journey.
The experience of "becoming a color" leads to some very profound experiences. There is rarely any resistance to becoming a color; it can quickly lead within to a very deep place. For example, one apprentice in the dreamhealing technique was merely describing the process after listening to a dreamer who had recurrent dreams in a very "yucky, muddy color."
Even though they were only discussing the use of the dreamhealing process, the dreamer spontaneously put her hands to her eyes in identification with that color. She automatically slumped down to the floor in the fetal position in a deep, natural trance. Of course, they finished the dream journey on the spot since it was the appropriate thing to do.
THE SHAMAN/THERAPIST AND TRANSFERENCE
Because dreamhealing lends itself so well to peer counseling situations, we are including some detail on the pitfalls of transference and counselor's issues for the lay person. It may save you from some sticky situations or help you out of another. Working as both scientist and mystic means that each approach provides a check and balance for the other mode of perception. Working as a mystic means working in the realm of essentially magical thinking, which carries its own pitfalls.
Certain belief systems are developed about the way things work, which may not be based in any kind of consensus reality. While this produces powerful transformational energy, it is prudent to do a reality check on one's shaman self, that it is not in fantasy-land. The first obvious danger is identifying with the archetypal power of the "healer." When the ego claims that power as its own, it gets all puffed up with grandiose ideas about itself, and falls into an inflation, commonly known as an ego-trip.
The next temptation for the personality is that others perceive you as the healer or junior guru and flock to the wise one's feet. This is the basis of the personality cult, which can rob others of their power instead of helping them seek in their own way within. This doesn't mean you can't guide or help anyone, just don't get carried away with proclaiming the truth as you see it. Don't become a "dreamhealing missionary."
Another pitfall comes from listening to the subpersonalities which claim to be channels to higher power. Only the development of discrimination will teach you how to discern the true voice of intuition within. Just because the voice comes from within, doesn't mean it is all-knowing. That is the problem in seances, etc. Just because these spirits are dead does not means they are smart! Intuition appears to emerge out of the blue, but is actually built up of your intentionally developed skills and extra-sensory perception. It is the natural synthesis of both.
Freud noticed that in the client-therapist relationship certain dynamics went on below the level of conscious awareness. He called this process the transference when the energy flowed from client to therapist, and counter-transference when it was reversed. It basically revolves around the fantasy life developed between the two during treatment. It is virtually inescapable as the client transfers positive or negative family feelings onto the therapist, and the therapist reacts to that. This is also a place that the emotional baggage of the therapist will surface with the client.
Both client and therapist may find themselves "acting out" or "acting in" during and outside of sessions. Problems that can arise include dependency, enmeshment, resistance, and sexual confusion. In dependency there is a compulsive, unhealthy reliance on the care-giver, even to the point of self-neglect. Enmeshment means a pattern of tangled thoughts and feelings between therapist and client which leads to a loss of boundaries.
Enmeshment can lead to sexual involvement, if the therapist's needs are not being met elsewhere. In resistance, the client consciously or unconsciously avoids getting into the flow of the process in order to avoid or inhibit wellness and maintain the status quo. As therapist, if you identify your issues, you do not contaminate the treatment.
In any event, you cannot take a client further than you yourself have gone. Especially in peer counseling, transference can mean the risk of relapse or regression for the therapist, and damage to the client. Though a certain amount of fantasy interchange is unavoidable, too much is self indulgent, frustrating, and opens both client and therapist to self doubt. It increases stress, liability, and even may jeopardize an agency job. Chemical dependency counselors are especially vulnerable to counter-transference when they become identified with their client's drug use patterns. It brings up conflicting feelings and thoughts about present and past experiences.
Needy recovery counselors over- and under-react to clients' feelings. This is one place to seek the help of the Higher Power or the mystical side. The therapist must embody a certain amount of integration which comes from a firm relationship with one's spirituality. Counter-transference only gets out of hand if there are non-integrated personal issues coming up. Supervisors should help identify these issues and suggest skill-building alternatives to working these issues through with the clientele. It is difficult not to trade addiction for codependence in some settings.
But it ultimately leads to increasing stress, therapist burnout, and relapse. Therapist's issues and dysfunctions are too numerous to mention. However, just a few include projection of personal experience, inadequate qualifications, lack of trust or assertiveness, conflict anxiety, boundary confusion, judgementalness, rejection anxiety, intimacy dysfunctions, moral and value biases, health problems, self-esteem or self-identity conflict, lack of confidence, self-absorption, denial, unbalanced lifestyle, and domestic dysfunctions. The point to remember is whose needs are being met in the therapeutic session, and it is a one-way street. Focus must stay on the client's needs.
There is no need to be a robot in your approach. That is an over-reactive denial of the obvious emotions that must be present for effective work. Impersonal detachment can further damage a client's self esteem.
Clinging to rigid techniques also shows a fundamental need to stay in control and lack of spontaneity, and unwillingness to pick up on the client's cues about where their process is heading. Clues to counter-transference will appear if you look for them. Some are in and others out of session work. Some which come up prior to sessions include agenda setting, apprehension, fear and dread. The therapist can act out this behavior by being late, or avoiding therapy with excessive socializing.
Acting in is accomplished through emotional absence. During the session are you judgmental, fearful, or envious of the client? Are you frustrated, angry or resentful? Do you feel inadequate or impotent, sexually distracted by the client, or distracted by thoughts unrelated to the client? Are you too sympathetic?
Does your client withhold personal feelings and information? How strong are these thoughts or feelings? Are you apathetic or really tuning into the client's communications? Do you ignore opportunities for interventions or feedback? Are you trying to protect the client from experiencing their own pain? These are ways of "acting in."
You may "act out" through too much self disclosure, seeking approval or praise, name-dropping, using technical terms, being demanding or impatient, aggressive or blaming. After the session is wrapped up do you have persistent, lingering thoughts or feelings about the client? Do you daydream or gossip about the client, or continually replay sessions. Do you seek outside contact or socialization? Do you find yourself lying or exaggerating the positive or negative changes in the client when charting the case and communicating with supervisors? If so, you had better get into your own process work and resolve the underlying issues before continuing.
If these behaviors get excessive or obsessive, the client must be immediately referred elsewhere for treatment. Physical contact should be limited to that which is therapeutically supportive, but does not have erotic overtones. Both client and therapist should behave as if in public.
Follow-up should remain on a strictly professional basis, and self disclosure limited to social pleasantries. The experienced counselor can take a few more liberties. We all have the power to self-heal in supportive, collaborative therapy. There are many ways you can help, simply by active listening, being patient and calm, yet curious and interested. Put the client and yourself at ease. Give them "breathing room," empathy and support.
Learn to recognize and respond to signs to create rapport. The signals are territorial (locomotor), behavioral (psychomotor), emotional (expressive) and verbal. This gives you an immediate impression. During the interview, help them overcome suspiciousness, but feel free to curb intrusiveness, competetiveness, or rambling. Express your intent to help, be genuine and reliable.
Try to get clarification where you are unclear. Check symptoms. Ask what they would like to have happen. Summarize for clients who are vague, but avoid leading language. Nevertheless, "steer" in the desired direction through techniques such as continuation, echoing, curbing, and transitions. Keep your language so basic it matches that of the client. Use metaphors to move past resistance and denial. Also display acceptance and confrontation.
Search for the other's stressors and suffering (both facts and associated emotions), respond with empathy and show compassion. If they don't want to talk about it, "looping" techniques help you approach the problem from a variety of angles, one of which will work.
The DSM IV lists eighteen defense mechanisms: acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing. You can handle most of them with bypassing, reassurance, distraction, confrontation, interpretation, or changing vantage point or scope.
Be very careful with interpretation as it can overwhelm the client, and you may be very wrong, or reductionistic. Rather, seek to enlighten them with insight and understanding drawn from their own organic process. Hold the sacred space that lets it emerge.
Stanley Krippner identifies fourteen mythic polarities:
creation vs. apocalypse; nurturance vs. deprivation; achievement vs. failure; completion vs. fragmentation; affirmation vs. cynicism; acceptance vs. debilitation; hope vs. despair; reconcilation vs. polarization; wisdom vs. ignorance; celebration vs. betrayal; rebirth vs. death; questing vs. passivity, and intimacy vs. separation.
Some of these will come up in the journeys. Understanding their point of view gives you insight, a cognitive appreciation of their suffering. Issues often revolve around love, redemption, identity, and acceptance. They, themselves, may have full, partial or no insight about their condition.
Consider that level of personal insight as you set therapeutic goals together. Balance the roles. Help the client clarify and express issues. Listen empathically, but set limits when indicated. Be open with your questions and body language, don't create the feeling that there must be a "correct" response.
Let the client help you understand their dilemmas, even their paradoxical aspects. Explore their goals, values, faith, and beliefs about self. Discourage black and white or all-or-nothing thinking and help the client determine intensity, duration and frequency of problem areas. Explore alternatives, Help them find their strengths through empowerment. Collaborate, inspire, and encourage.
IMAGINATION IS OUR MOST POWERFUL FORCE FOR CHANGE. Unlike ego-serving daydreams, or fantasies of wish fulfillment which we make up, imagination is something that happens to us; it is an autonomous force or energy, welling up from the depths as the water of life. Fantasy is escapist and does not impact our reality; it is non-transformative. It is a self-serving circle. Imagination, on the other hand, is intimately linked to creativity, and can impact the personal self, the environmental self, and the transpersonal self.
IMAGINATION IS THE PRIMARY WAY WE EXPERIENCE SOUL. It is the only way to experience the inner world. Our creativity is expressed through multiple states of consciousness. And we open to inner consciousness through images. Imagination gives us entree into the inner world of eternity.
CREATIVITY EXPRESSED IN THIS WAY MEANS WE CAN EXPERIENCE MULTIPLE STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Imagination seems to emerge out of nowhere. The shaman/therapist acts as a guide to encourage the client to follow imagination, rather than get stuck in a loop of fantasy material.
When images flow freely they are healing. Jung called images the primary activity of consciousness, a sort of natural reflex, and yet the only reality we apprehend directly. Images lead into the realm of soul, which joins those of matter and spirit. They do not require symbolic or interpretive methods or meanings because to do so depotentiates the power of the imagination.
By sticking to the image as presented and flowing with its continually transforming nature, more is to be found. In therapy, we learn a form of love for images which consists of watchful attention or sustained attention. Through this attention or love for images we can connect with the transpersonal dimension of life which is the source of chaos, dreams, visions, myths, tales, ritual, and spiritual beliefs. There isn't much value to analyzing any image from just one point-of-view, because images have many inherent meanings which may continue to unfold over years. It just depends on how you look at them.
THE PSYCHIC IMAGE EMBODIES ITS OWN REALITY; IT IS SELF-REVELATORY. THE MEANING DWELLS WITHIN THE IMAGE LIKE CONSCIOUSNESS DWELLS IN THE BODY. Multiple meanings may carry an ambiguous quality for the rational mind, but are expressive of the dynamic complexity of life. Images pertain to imagination, while hallucinations pertain to perception.
SACRED PSYCHOLOGY is an ongoing operation with the soul's images. It means joining a greater life; dying to our current selves and being reborn in our eternal selves, finding our emergent potentials. By analogizing, rather than interpreting, we simply ask, "What is this image like?"
Analogies carry us into many meanings, amplifying, not restricting the image. Some people are ashamed of their fantasy life--that they even have fantasies at all. They have been conditioned to mistrust imagination. This is because the imaginal world opens us to the chaotic, uncontrollable, spontaneous, divine world of the soul. But when attention is focused and diffuses into the imagery that is beyond self-gratification, the power of transpersonal energies can initiate deep healing. The imagery is actually the finer basis of our material existence. So, in a sense, we are our images.
IMAGINATION IS REALITY. We orient ourselves to internal and external reality through multi-sensory images. Research has shown that ESP information is also mediated through mental imagery. Weak imagers often mis-identify targets because they misinterpret fragmentary images. The mediating vehicle for psi communication is the imagination, a psychological function we all possess.
Therefore, theoretically, ESP communication should be enhanced under conditions which promote imagery, especially in those whose cognitive style is dominated by imagery perception. For example, dream recall or creativity can be shown to relate positively to psi performance. The image may not be visual. Thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition converge in imagination. Images can be kinesthetic, olfactory, auditory, tactile, visual, etc. Imagination is a "direct expression of psychic life," according to Jung.
IF IT IS THE TASK OF THE SHAMAN TO FIND THE STRAYED SOUL AND RESTORE IT, THE SHAMAN NEED ONLY RECONNECT HIM WITH IMAGINATIVE LIFE TO SET THE HEALING IN MOTION. He is the psychopomp, or guide to the inner depths. The psychic crisis of an individual needs to seek its own unique solution within. It is a deepening process. It may be an ordeal, or more like a quest, but the investment of energy and attention is a sacrifice that must be made.
We can conceive of a psychotic in the shaman's terms as one whose soul has been stolen, lost, or seized down into the underworld. Their conscious awareness is focused in a very narrow beam revolving around delusions and fears.
They are enmeshed with the spirit and intuitive consciousness, overwhelmed by and drowning in it. How does the shaman or therapist help the person broaden the beam, to expand awareness of self to include more and more of consciousness, so that a stabilized personality can learn to experience itself as ONE WITH ALL?
The shaman/therapist uses old and new techniques like dreams, visionary work, vision quest, imagery, colors, drumming, meditations, letting go, breathing, body work, mental grasp of the physical nature of the universe, opening to nature, and standard therapies like Transactional Analysis and Gestalt.
In various ways we can give in to the pressures which we have been investing our energies in fighting. Fighting disempowers us and validates the rigidities. Letting go leads through chaos to flow.
THE MEDICINE WHEEL is the primary healing model of western shamanism. It shows the synergy of chaos and order. It has four primary stations, corresponding to the four cardinal directions. It is therefore a mythic model for the creation and a device for magical orientation and protection. Its motif lays out the phases of a healing process:
1). INITIATION corresponds with the East and means seeing the problem or the need for healing; breaking through ignorance or denial.
2). LETTING GO corresponds to the South, and means surrendering to the Higher Power, or the process. This ego-death leads directly into a period of chaos before the new vision is found.
3). NEW VISION arises within the place of dreams and creative imagination. Self esteem grows as dreamhealing presents creative solutions. It means connecting with powers without and within which are seen as ONE. It is the West.
4). ACTUALIZATION is a phase of integration and empowerment. In the North quadrant you make your dreams come true. It is a new emotional maturity. Newly-learned skills are put into fruitful practice, connecting one to self, community, and Universe, restoring balance and rectifying karma.
For Graywolf, the shamanic model was different from, but not really any better than the psychological method. Many therapists and new age healers have found this out for themselves. He didn't really find any benefit from shamanism other than a different worldview until he was about to fuse the shamanic and psychological views. THIS LED TO THE IDEA OF THE SHAMAN/THERAPIST.
Neither one on its own was comprehensive or flexible enough. But looking at reality with the eye of the scientist and the eye of the mystic simultaneously creates a sort of BINOCULAR VISION which adds depth and meaning to the vision.
The psychotherapeutic approach to healing essentially represents order. The shamanic approach represents chaos. These worldviews seem divided. Yet the true nature of reality represents the merging of chaos into order, and chaos and order, back into chaos. Both lie within each other, and there is a consequent flow between the two.
The essence of the shaman/therapist model is that it takes in both sides. Most shamanic techniques are essentially chaos-producing, including sweats, drum journeys, and other means of inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness.
For example, someone in the sweat lodge gets so hot that their normal methods of processing and input simply fail to work. They are so busy dealing with the stress on their body caused by the heat that their mind essentially turns off. And that is where the chaos comes in and changes things. The same is true for becoming lost in the throbbing drum, letting consciousness soar. A beat with disruptions is very hypnotic and promotes the temporary disequilibrium which is known to deepen trance.
Dreamhealing is the practice of the shaman/therapist, combining the process and dreamwork of psychotherapy with the traditional form of shamanic flight. The shaman is a traveller between the worlds of ordinary and nonordinary reality. The dreamtime is a sacred space which the shaman/therapist can share with others through co-consciousness.
Perception, how we perceive ourselves and the world about us is at the base of our experiences of reality. The essence of psychotherapy is the changing of perception. In fostering this change the modern psychotherapist and ancient shaman share a common mission.
No matter whether the transformation is attempted through drugs, behavior modification, or emotive talk therapies, the purpose is to change perception of reality. Each one of us creates our own reality by our perceptions. The reality is created through a filtering process, and is continually subject to modification by fantasy and imagination. Each of our individual realities undergoes constant modification.
THERE IS AN INFINITY OF REALITIES AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
These are created out of only a small portion of what we perceive, and what we perceive is but a small fraction of the input available to us through the senses. We exist among a chaos of realities, yet we also exist within and among a consensus of "reality." Another way of saying it is that this chaos of realities contains within it hidden, consensual structure. Our perceptions are attracted to certain types of order.
Yet there are myths underlying our perceptions of
1) permanence,
2) objective individualism,
3) collectivism, and
4) symbolic reality.
ONE HALF OF THE PROBLEM IS BEING ABLE TO LET GO OF THE FOCUS OF ATTENTION AND ENTER INTO THE CHAOS. THE OTHER HALF IS BEING ABLE TO SEIZE THE NEW ORDER THAT ARISES FROM IT.
It is the role of healers to help others find the doorways to the opportunities that crises can offer, as traditional guiding models break down. The guiding myth of the shaman is that "personal power arises within."
The blending of the traditional and the innovative, the mystical and scientific, the masculine and feminine elements in healing, can guide our culture towards a balanced approach to healing. One driving force is bumping up against boundaries and then going past them. There are limitations in science and shamanism, but we need not remain perplexed if we incorporate the best each system has to offer.
By recognizing our boundaries, we can move beyond them. This is equally true for the dreamhealing practitioner and for those seeking healing. Shamanism and humanistic psychology share common aspects in their worldviews. The first is the view that "WE ARE ALL ONE". The primitive belief is one of the web of life, while the other calls it holism and deep ecology.
FOR SHAMANS THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE IS THAT IT IS ALIVE. Science is validating this perspective more each day that nothing is truly separate from the whole. Wholism affirms the unity of life.
The GUIDING VISION is another premise shared in common by both camps. Jung certainly wrote extensively of his visionary experience and how it affected his life and gave him a mandate for his work. The vision quest is the native model for facilitating and honoring this experience. These visions "work" because we are not separate from the universe, nature, each other, our bodies, or hidden aspects of ourselves. This brings us to the third commonality of REVERENCE FOR NATURE.
We are not separate from the creation, and perhaps this is one reason for the profound healing power of wilderness. Maslow spoke of this awe of the nature-mystic as one of the emergent qualities of the self-actualized person. Perhaps the main distinction between shamanism and conventional psychology is the consciousness state.
Shamanism promotes co-consciousness where you are no longer separate from the person you are dealing with. The shaman goes into the underworld (subconscious) to help the person bring their lost soul or spirit back, which is the healing. That is really different than a psychologist who, in the old scientific model, maintains an objective distance.
CHAOS AND DREAMHEALING WHEN THE MIND LETS GO OF ITS RATIONAL ORDER AND ENTERS INTO UNSTRUCTURED CHAOS IT EMERGES LATER WITH A NEW STRUCTURE.
It is a quantum leap from what went before. Each journey into the unstructured chaotic consciousness leads to the seat of our muse and creativity. Therapy at its very best is a matter of changing consciousness, and so is shamanism. Though the perspective may be different, both seek to change consciousness about the states of dis-ease we experience.
Graywolf came upon the work of Paul Rapp, a researcher at the medical college of the University of Pennsylvania who experiments with chaos, at a crucial point in the development of his models. He discovered the technique in his therapy practice and refined it, but its description required a model of how and why it works.
He was searching for a language to describe what he had been observing in the consciousness journeys he was conducting, trying to discover the nature of the healing process. Rapp's research showed that problem solving led to an increase of chaotic patterns in the brain, which led to a creative chaotic renewal.
Graywolf had observed this state in his clients empirically over and over again, in the underlying order to the apparently random or chaotic flow of multi-sensory imagery that formed the core of the method. He developed his ego model to describe the states in general. (See EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING).
They reflected not only a static order of imagery, but a deeper dynamic component. Before finding the language of chaos theory, he tried relating these states to the medicine wheel, the chakra system, and other healing models. But no matter what language he used, ancient, shamanic, eastern mystical, new age, or scientific, each only seemed to capture a portion of it, as a pre-biased limited view. But upon reading about Rapp's finding, he recalled a discussion many years earlier with a client who was a mathematics professor.
On a working hike down the lower Rogue River in Southern Oregon, he described a new form of mathematics that was integrating a fractured science. In a moment of personal integration, Graywolf's memories and experience from the dream journeys came together. He saw that chaos is the underlying concept that brings it all together.
In each dream journey we encounter a state of consciousness that is a personal experience of primal chaos. These states might be different on the surface, but the underlying essence is the same. The empty drifting in the fog, that empty mindless place where there are no thoughts, emotions, or images were common reports. This is not news in depth psychology, but the reliable manner of accessing the state is new.
We have known for a long time that the secret lay within dreams, as Max Zeller points out in THE DREAM - THE VISION OF THE NIGHT. Depth psychology speaks of the unconscious. The term refers to the unknown hidden realm of the psyche about which we cannot make any direct statement. If not manifest, it looks like nothing at all, a void; the invisible, or not yet visible. But when vision and dream appear and reveal what was hidden, then void and emptiness give way to meaningfulness and to a feeling of being in touch and being connected...to those lost springs for which we all search and from which all life comes.
The unconscious lends itself to the language of chaos. The whirling, twisting motion of a molecule of water in the chaotic world of non-laminar flow through a pipe is analogous to chaos consciousness. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the vortex, tornado, or whirlpool is a surrender to chaos, an experience of no form and total confusion and disorientation. It is like the experience of committing oneself to the fire and becoming it, and as the random flickering of the flames and torrid heat, disintegrating into pure energy. It means becoming the boiling, flowing, every-changing molten magma at the core of the earth, or the root of a volcano.
These are all descriptions of the personal, subjective experience of total chaos. Always, after passing through this state, the new order which emerged of self-image, thought, emotion, and sensory perception reflected the new and less dis-eased state of being. The deeper self-image undercut or superceded the old belief system, and began to create a new order of being, a new way of perceiving self and world. The new image provides a magnetic nucleus around which to order the personality, and often the physiology. Each of these observations had a counterpart in the new science based on chaos. Order seems to be present in the chaos of mind just as chaos really seems to underlie even the most rigid and orderly intellect. The new primal image has its counterpart in the strange attractor described in this radical new model.
DREAMS THEMSELVES EMBODY THE VERY NATURE OF CHAOS. Very few will argue with the chaotic nature of dreams. As we journeyed deep into the heart of dreams, the free-association of multi-sensory images led us to the energies and consciousness states that birthed and shaped its surface symbols and plots.
The journeys were chaotic, impressionistic. The imagery jerked and changed in chaotic ways, and we encountered states of consciousness which embodied total chaos within their experience. Always a state of consciousness emerged that soothed the tortured ego or body, healed the organism in some way, providing a balanced flow from deep within the chaos. Graywolf felt sure he was touching the very essence or source of the creative energy within us.
CREATIVITY AND DREAMHEALING
The relationship between healing and creativity is implicit. It means different phenomena on different levels. This state has been linked in research with the reverie state and alpha brainwave state.
Rapp's findings showed large amounts of alpha discharge as the brain went into a chaotic pattern for problem solving. Elmer and Alyce Green, who have done original research in biofeedback, have defined creativity at various levels:
Creativity in terms of physiological processes means then PHYSICAL HEALING, physical regeneration. Creativity in emotional terms consists then of establishing, or creating ATTITUDE CHANGES through the practice of healthful emotions, that is, emotions whose neural correlates are those that establish harmony in the visceral brain, or to put it another way, emotions that establish in the visceral brain those neurological patterns whose reflection in the viscera is one that physicians approve of as stress-resistent. Creativity in the mental domain involves the emergence of a new and valid synthesis of ideas, not by deduction, but springing by "INTUITION" from unconscious sources. The entrance, or key, to all these inner processes we are beginning to believe, is a particular state of consciousness to which we have given the undifferentiated name of "reverie."
The creative process runs parallel to the healing process. In fact, healing is a special case of creativity, or creative problem-solving. Consciousness is the author of both processes. Creativity, healing, and illumination are equivalent processes operating at different levels -- mental, physical, psychic, and spiritual. The process includes a prelude ritual, an altered state, and a postlude, or emotional affect. We can draw a direct analogy between the dreamhealing process and the creative process.
We have adapted the description from Silvano Arieti's CREATIVITY: THE MAGIC SYNTHESIS, Basic, 1976. Dreamhealing begins with THE PILGRIMAGE, which expresses one's intent or commitment The creative process begins with RECEPTIVITY, which includes interest, preparation, and immersion in the subject matter.
Next in dreamhealing comes THE CONFESSION, or the identification of the problem, where you have missed the mark. Creativity also requires the ability to identify the problem, see the right questions, to use errors, to have detached devotion.
The PURIFICATION or cleansing of dreamhealing parallels the generalized SENSITIVITY TO PROBLEMS that comes during creativity, an attunement to the realization of what needs to be done.
THE OFFERING is a sign of letting go, sacrifice of the old ego form, the commitment to healing.
Creativity requires the SURRENDER OF TIME AND SELF TO THE PROCESS OF FLOW; fluency of thinking; flexibility; abandoning old ways of thought.
The heart of the quest is DREAM INCUBATION, a reverie which seeks connection with higher power. Creativity also requires INCUBATION, reverie, serendipity, spontaneity, adaptation, tolerance for ambiguity, and originality This permits uncommon responses and unconventional associations.
Healing occurs in a moment of oneness, CHAOTIC CONSCIOUSNESS. In creativity it is paralleled by the moment of ILLUMINATION, redefinition, invention, vision.
Dreamhealing requires AMPLIFICATION, or work on dreams and validation.
ELABORATION is its counterpart, the use of two or more abilities for the construction of a more complex object or theory, plus verification.
RE-ENTRY implies actualization, renewal, grounding, maturing. Creatively it means REAL-TIME APPLICATION, follow through, product, exploitation of the result. In all cases, guided or not, the creative or healing process follows approximately this model. The resources are contacted deep within and they well-up in sometimes unexpected ways from the deep Source.
INNER VS. OUTER EMPHASIS ON HEALING
The conventional outer focus on healing tends to get caught up in methods, techniques and the purely material side of healing. It causes division both in the approach to and view of the patient. Inner focus tends to lead to a collective or unifying state of consciousness.
THE SPIRIT OR EMERGENCE OF HEALING ARISES FROM WITHIN. It not only integrates the patient but also the divided methods of outer healing approaches. It unifies patient and professional. In this sense it is synergistic.
Thus, if the real healing energy or power or force comes from within, the patient can choose from tools such as surgery, imagery, and lifestyle changes to repair a damaged heart. They are not forced to choose between tools, but can use all of them harmoniously. Inside each of us, and common to us all is a force we have called PLACEBO, homeostasis, or will-to-live which is a state of consciousness.
The placebo effect lies in a crack between the known and the unknown. We know it works, but we have no clue how. In reverse, used against people, it is the basis for sympathetic magic and curses. Without it, even physicians agree healing simply cannot occur. This force comes from deep within, but can be focused and facilitated through awareness. One of the powers of dreams and dreamhealing is that they arise from non-ordinary states of consciousness, and out of the powers of the chaotic collective matrix.
The dream guide takes consciousness into this altered state and facilitates access to it for the whole being, rather than putting a bandaid on a symptom. Once we find it, we see we can reach it in many ways. These include imagination, imagery, meditation, faith in the doctor as healer, prayer, etc. Once we reach it, it affects our perception of reality from that point forward. What's New with My Subject?
PERCEPTION AND HEALING
How do we perceive the world? One obvious answer is through the five known senses. We see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. Some people seems to have other, more subtle information input systems--extrasensory systems.
Dr. Stanley Krippner cites sixteen sensory (among them kinesthsia and balance) inputs. Our internal experience of these comes through intuition and imagery. They are internal perceptions, interpretations of input which lead to other psychological processes, such as emotion or intellect. There are uncountable bits of information in any given environment, yet only a small part of those are registered through the known senses. Chaos contains too much information to process so it appears as a void or overwhelming. The senses overload.
Chaos is a form of order or structure rational mind is incapable of comprehending. Chaos is really just a definition of mind, otherwise its a natural nonlinear order. Most natural phenomena, like a river in flow, the atmosphere, or the wilderness, are essentially chaotic, an expression of chaos. The struggle of mankind over the years has been to create some structure from that chaos. But we can accept it, and flow with it also. Learning to live with chaos, we can learn to EMBRACE THE CHAOS.
E.S.P., intuitive perception, the five senses, and our belief systems act as filters of immediate phenomenal experience. These perceptions function as overlays on the direct experience of empirical reality. Putting a twist on the old cliche, we can say, "I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."
Our habitual way of seeing the world conditions our experience. Zen monks and yogis are trained to be in the "now," and thus retain that freshness and spontaneity that comes from an unconditioned perspective, the BEGINNER'S MIND. How do we perceive self? Are we caught in a conformist attitude, or open to infinite possibilities? Of course, we perceive through the sensation related to the usual five senses, but we are also driven by deep, early self images, i.e. existential images. They condition our environmental self, our personal self, even our transpersonal self.
Dreams, visions, daydreams, fantasies, and other imaginal experiences are merely other ways of perceiving the world (or universe) and self. The physical body is only a small part of our actual makeup. We are also complex fields of dynamic energy. We have an electromagnetic body that interacts intimately with other fields of energy.
We emit gases and electrons which exchange with the environment and each other. Our skin is not really a barrier, but a very permeable membrane. At the sub-atomic level, we become even finer creatures. The elements of our bodies were cooked in the crucible of some supernova. Within those elements are electrons that fluctuate at the threshold of matter and energy. Those electrons and atoms actually have relatively vast amounts of space between them, so that our seemingly solid matter actually contains a great deal of void.
In physical terms, we ultimately reduce down to not much more than a wave-front in space. And with that rarified perspective, it isn't difficult to see why the Buddhist viewpoint stresses the gross illusion of separation in corporeal life.
SHAMAN/THERAPIST AS GUIDE
The shaman and therapist facilitate subtle changes in perception to bring about healing from the deep resources within. Shamans have always used great scope in their healing efforts, even using such tools as rivers, meadows, or the tops of mountains.
That is where they take people to initiate healing or visionary experience. We tend to think small in psychology in terms of tools. The whole earth, the rivers, all of nature is a tool to be used by the shaman/therapist if she is open to that. On a wilderness excursion, a day of silence can be profoundly transformative.
Many times people won't begin talking for hours after the silence is lifted. Preparation at a retreat, like sweats and offerings can also enhance the wilderness experience. Dream incubation at the retreat opens the mythic dimension to enhance the effects of a client's experience. Taking people on therapeutic excursions also allows the guide to span a broad spectrum of the client's awareness by demonstrating a guiding ability that is both literal and metaphorical. Once again this opens the client to a less-rational mythic dimension.
The archetypal image of the GUIDE TO THE UNDERWORLD, (deep subconscious), is a very powerful symbol when activated in the psyche of an individual. Finally there is someone to show the way in the netherworld of inner life. The shaman/therapist takes the client far below the personality levels, down to the psychic origins of life. There they may experience the primordial, chemical, genetic, or sub-atomic realities which usually escape our notice. Through the process of co-consciousness the guide brings the client's soul back out into the light of day (rational consciousness) after many challenges are met and overcome.
The lost soul is found and retrieved through a healing process. The formerly "dead" personality is now enlivened in the process of psychological rebirth and resurrection. Wilderness excursions feed into the trust-building process in a way that can never be achieved in an office or clinic. Reflecting on his experience with people on the whitewater rivers, Graywolf has noticed that he doesn't have to do nearly as much to be actively therapeutic with people on the river. Just taking them there, and being there with them as Graywolf, it becomes very powerful.
The intent is a transformational voyage. A lot of the personal results depend on their own expectations and the power they tend to project on the shaman. In Graywolf's case he feels a lot of it has to do with going down the river and his consecrated relationship to it. If a person has an issue, for example, with their feminine side, they seem to dream of women while they are on the river trip. Becoming that in the dream journey, they begin changing their striving nature to a sense of flow, harmonizing more and more with the river. The river takes them to an edge of personal challenge and transmutes them automatically.
IN DREAM GUIDING, ALL THE ACTION LIES IN GOING JUST BEYOND THE BOUNDARY FROM THE KNOWN AND COMFORTABLE TOWARD THE FEAR AND CHALLENGE. Being at the edge is where we can confront our issues. The emotions which carry us to that edge become more and more intensified as the personal limits are challenged. Attitudes, values, and thoughts may be transformed in a moment of existential challenge.
Many people report they never felt more alive than at a moment of personal physical and mental challenge. The concept of THE BOUNDARY is also relevant to physics, chemistry, and engineering. The boundary is where opposites meet; it is always paradoxical in nature. The boundary layer is where all the interesting things happen in fluid flow and chemical reactions. The transition points, both ways, between chaos and order seem to be the places where important shifts and developments take place. So in the physical or mental journey, the times of entering the chaos and re-emerging into order are when you can observe the shift. In ancient times, Seneca said, "The secrets [of nature] open not promiscuously nor to every corner. They are remote of access, enshrined in the inner sanctuary."
Opening to nature is healing. Swept-up in the rapture of nature's beauty, we experience oneness with Her. This response has been described as oceanic or a peak experience, referring metaphorically to depths and heights. Natural mystic-ecstasies can happen spontaneously to anyone. They often have an uncanny or supernormal quality. They involve euphoria or bliss to an extent unknown in most usual activities. They seem important in some strange way. There is also some element of transcendence. They remain in memory longer and more vividly than ordinary events.
But not all experiences are of equal depth. Some lead directly to the loss of sense of self and time, and a reduction in mental activity. It is a form of cosmic-consciousness. In most cultures the basic elements -- fire, air, water, and earth -- are revered in some manner, or at least considered fundamental to existence; some systems contain even finer distinctions. This has resounded through history in a variety of mystic arts ranging from alchemy to astrology, to Native American shamanism.
In yoga they are known as the tatvas. Always this doctrine of the four elements symbolized a sense of wholeness with nature and self. The mystic fifth element appears as the essence, or quintessence, spirit or ether. It represents the synergetic effect of the primary four components of natural existence.
In opening to nature the self is purified, fear and shame vanish, replaced by the sense of brotherhood with all life. It is an experience of oneness with the creation. Because nature always reflects the archetype of death/rebirth, the psychological response to a profound experience in nature may be one of rebirth. This can be particularly true if there is a close brush with death. The transport may also occur witnessing a birth which can evoke a strong sense of awe and wonder at the miracle of life. In the nature-mystic experience there is always a mixture of instinctive awe and delight, a thrill usually felt most deeply in utter solitude, which fills the heart with a Presence.
It is a form of enlightenment or illumination, where the divine element is veiled by nature. The experience is characterized by a deep feeling, rather than knowing. It is a life-changing event, with many further repercussions and adjustments. One gains a new perspective as when standing on a majestic mountain, surveying the panorama. The mind calms, becoming tranquil and still, in regard for the beloved. All things seem pristine, perfect, and eternal. Conflicts are transcended or resolved in self-forgetfulness.
The world "looks different." Maslow likened it to a "visit to a personal heaven." One feels more alive, loving, accepting, blessed, and happy. A peak experience can be "grounded" by working with it in a journal and meditation, reclaiming those states for future nourishment. They are sources of sanctuary and inner fortitude, providing a foundation for further excursions into mystical dimensions. You can use them for stress management by recalling a special place and time in nature where you felt open and secure. Deep relaxation provides many benefits for health and well being.
CHAKRAS IN DREAM THERAPY
Chakras are wheels or vortices of energy in the subtle body, and have long been recognized in Ayurvedic and Chinese forms of medicine. Their physical counterparts are the nerve plexes of our anatomy. The free or impaired circulation of energy among these centers directly affects our physiognomy. The quickest way to an understanding of the human energy body is probably through the chakra system.
The colors of the rainbow have been associated with the centers in the subtle body for thousands of years. It is a symbol system with an internal coherency which works well in practice. The color system is usually visual, but may be an impressionistic perception of immersion, permutation, or pervasion. One way of moving people quickly to a non-rational place with their feelings is simply to ask them what color they are now...and what color they would like to be.
This is a very simple diagnostic almost anyone can learn. When we invite someone to visualize a feeling or symptoms, or whatever as a color, we are really inviting or guiding them to use a new and different perceptual mode to see themselves and the world. Color literally reflects differing vibrational patterns in the EM spectrum. Symbolically, color is a visual symbol of the energy body.
To 'become' the color is to tie together the normal self perceptual faculties (means) with or to perceive the state of the energy body. The same goes for the other senses -- sounds, odors, taste, sensations. Also, internal states such as emotions or thoughts or images can be similarly perceived by a different modality. ''
Chakras are vortices of energy in the human astral body. Their appearance in the dream journey shows where blocks in the energy flow and psychology are located. Chakras are not physical, but are associated with nerve plexes in the body. They create tangible effects on body and mind. They represent a continuum of evolving consciousness from the most base level to the highest degree of mystical insight and illumination.
Each chakra, when blocked, represents a different psychological issue. While the system and color correspondences presented here are not necessarily "universal," they are useful. You will notice in your own mentoring certain manifestations which hold true from session to session, and you can deduce what they mean.
In any group setting, you can deduce what people feel like fairly accurately, as well as their psychological problems and state. Asked the color question, they usually respond fairly quickly. For example, one person identified with a muddy yellow-green. Intuition suggests there is a problem in the relationship area, which manifests as confusion between power (yellow) and love (green). This person was startled at how accurately that summed up his present situation. The muddiness indicated the problem, yellow is the color of the power chakra (spleen or solar plexus), green the color of the heart center.
So, you can deduce that there might be a perceptible "block" or symptom in that area of the body between the two chakras.
RED: The root or base chakra is red. Its position is the anus or feet. It is concerned with birth, survival, instinct, stability, grounding, stillness, common sense, and attachment. Its element is earth; it is associated with the coccygeal spinal ganglion. In dreamhealing it is analogous with the primal sensory images, or sensation levels. Its issues include individuality and survival. It can indicate fear of bodily harm or extinction. Flow here means thriving, not just surviving; freedom from role-boundedness and exclusive identification with persona or social mask.. It is very common for dreamhealing clients to become the essence of red in the first few dream journeys. It is a fundamental aspect of being which needs to be worked through. Then it will not block the way to higher awareness.
ORANGE: The chakra for the sex center is orange. It is the seat of our personal sense of power, magnetism, creativity, emotions, pleasure, passion, and rejuvenation. It is the level of social or group consciousness. Therefore, the issue here is fear of alienation, or being left out; desire, procreation, attachment, envy, frustration. Polarity, change, sexuality, nurturance, movement. Its element is water; its nerve center is the genitals. In terms of the dreamhealing model, it is the level of personal mythology, belief systems, personal images. It especially concerns how we feel about the opposite sex. At this level the client may encounter the inner mate, ANIMA or ANIMUS. The inner mate can be a powerful soul guide to deeper levels. On the return side of the journey, this chakra or level is an opportunity to balance masculine and feminine energies through an inner marriage. This kind of integration promotes androgyny. Flow here means blending the opposites. Animosity is not projected, for in re-owning the opposite sex within, we become reintegrated.
YELLOW: The power chakra is yellow. The issue here is how we express our outer power. Because it is planning or analytical consciousness, it involves intention, will, movement, and doing; combination, interaction. It is fear of rejection and dissatisfaction. Its element is fire; its nerve plexus is the solar plexus. It is an energy which requires grounding; negatively it can manifest as overworking or manic activity, a constant search for stimulation and excitement. This implies the need for constant affirmation and approval from others. Negatively, this is the source of aggression and hostility that originate in unmet emotional needs. The energy that cannot flow in the next-higher center is turned back and builds to the boiling point since the heart center cannot function. In therapy you will find many people confused about the difference between strength and power, especially in relationships. Dominance and personal power are confused. The cycle of victim-victimizer feeds on itself. Alternatively, it can lead to inertia, stagnation, inability to connect, lack of self confidence, recoiling from challenge, or unwillingness to change. Hypervigilance, intimidation, estrangement, separation, isolation, invalidation, resistance, denial, lack of enthusiasm, and low self-esteem result from dysfunction here. This chakra is blocked also for those who feel disempowered. Suppressed rage may take the place of laughter and joy, humor and transformation. When we begin to assume responsibility for ourselves we reclaim that power. Self-responsibility eliminates the need for manipulating the environment to get one's needs met. It is more direct. It breaks the cycle of fear, self-criticism,, and withdrawl. It also lessens the likelihood of being manipulated by others. Flow here means freedom of choice, self-assertiveness, the ability to put oneself first when it is appropriate to do so. In some mystical systems it is known as the HARA, or empowering core. In dreamhealing it is the emotional patterns, thought patterns, and behaviors. At this level it reveals how what is inside is expressed outside and determines what comes back in, through a feedback process. Positive expressions include reorganization, coordination, momentum, efficient use of energy, will, vitality, volition, responsibility, attunement, effortlessness, discipline, engagement, purpose, confidence, courage; future-oriented, "I will do this."
GREEN: The heart chakra deals with emotional energy and is green. Its issues are empathy, intimacy, love, security, balance, equilibrium, acceptance, generosity, harmonization, freedom, integration, self actualization, compassion, affinity, relationship, unity, and healing. Its element is air; the nerve plexus surrounds the heart. When blocked, this chakra means fear of loss, even loss of integrity or that sense of wholeness, "the heart of the matter." In dreamhealing, green is a color where you may let the client linger, embracing the healing gift of the dream journey. Flow here means love: acceptance of self and others, democratic nature, reintegration, balance, integrity, restoration, brotherly love and connecting with nature; aspiration, fulfillment, intentionality, clarity, lucidity, self-realization, creativity, solutions, rebirth, emergence, inspiration, transcendence, vocation, metaphorical perception, charisma, spontaneity, autonomy, serenity, trust, synergy, relaxation, inner peace, validation, revival, insight, surrender to Higher Power, sense of the sacred, grace, self-love, expressed love, spiritual connection, cyclical time. When clients first perceive a color or become a color, ask them where they experience that in their body. There is a spontaneous, uncanny relationship to the chakras, whether they know about them or not. You can tell a lot by the purity of the colors clients report. In the prior example with the mixture of green and yellow, for example, you might explore the confusion between intimacy and power. So, a basic knowledge of color mixing can help your intuition. Also, realize that the chakras can "mix." For example, if the sex center is dominated by the emotional center, it results in false intimacy. If it is dominated by the power center, it means grandiosity, egotism, martyrdom, or a host of unhealthy co-dependent behavior. The higher chakras deal with expression, intuition, contact bliss, and transcendence. They are largely transpersonal in nature, and are the true "home" of the mystic. They cannot be open channels until the work of clearing the blocks in the ego and lower chakras is done. Here again, it is a matter of energy flow. Flow expresses the open, healthy, spiritual individual related to the personal and transpersonal world, outer and inner life. The primal energy of healing and enlightenment, KUNDALINI, flows through the open chakras. Once again we are met with the creative energy of the SERPENT POWER, which we encountered as the central healing image of the Asklepian method. When blocked, it creates physical and psychic problems. Its free flow is a healing panacea, the universal medicine. Again, like cures like. BLUE: The throat center is blue. It is intimately concerned with self-expression, allowing oneself a voice, and issues relating to things said and unsaid. Positively it is communication, connection, innovation, flexibility, creativity, purification, rhythm, resonance, rapport, transport, meaning, telepathy. It is a frequent point of symptomatic constriction in abuse victims or those with unfinished grieving. Its dysfunction means fear of change. Open it means the free flow of self-expression; the gateway to the future.
INDIGO: This is the color of the Third Eye, representing intuition, clairvoyance, imagination, vision. Blocked it means fear of spontaneous response, or doubt. Flow here means insight, memory, visualization, assimilation, comprehension, wisdom, visions, psychic awareness, meditation, consciousness expansion, metaphorical perception that is largely visual, creative imagining, perception, timelessness, synchronicity, light.
VIOLET: Violet is associated with the crown center and pure information, true imagination, knowing, wisdom and understanding. It is the ground state of being, ultimate openness, the source of consciousness itself. It is non spatial and non temporal. When blocked, it is the fear of vulnerability or chaos. Flow here means nonlocality, emptiness, unconditional acceptance, connectivity, knowing, simultaneity of time, bliss, "withinness," immaterial consciousness, and even cosmic consciousness, transcendent consciousness, or illumination, (as a discrete experience, if not as a stabilized state).
BLACK: Black is not associated with a chakra but may indicate the level of self annihilation, or be an abstraction of the future, unknown self. Too much information looks like none. Dreamhealing participants often report a "black blacker than black" which leads into yet deeper states. Encourage them toward that deepening. In dreamhealing, you do not need to accept the entire chakra model as a metaphysical reality. This version is only one form of chakra description, and a very brief one at that. We simply suggest that experience has shown that the attribution of these colors to various centers in the body has proven useful in understanding and guiding the client's journey.
The experience of "becoming a color" leads to some very profound experiences. There is rarely any resistance to becoming a color; it can quickly lead within to a very deep place. For example, one apprentice in the dreamhealing technique was merely describing the process after listening to a dreamer who had recurrent dreams in a very "yucky, muddy color."
Even though they were only discussing the use of the dreamhealing process, the dreamer spontaneously put her hands to her eyes in identification with that color. She automatically slumped down to the floor in the fetal position in a deep, natural trance. Of course, they finished the dream journey on the spot since it was the appropriate thing to do.
THE SHAMAN/THERAPIST AND TRANSFERENCE
Because dreamhealing lends itself so well to peer counseling situations, we are including some detail on the pitfalls of transference and counselor's issues for the lay person. It may save you from some sticky situations or help you out of another. Working as both scientist and mystic means that each approach provides a check and balance for the other mode of perception. Working as a mystic means working in the realm of essentially magical thinking, which carries its own pitfalls.
Certain belief systems are developed about the way things work, which may not be based in any kind of consensus reality. While this produces powerful transformational energy, it is prudent to do a reality check on one's shaman self, that it is not in fantasy-land. The first obvious danger is identifying with the archetypal power of the "healer." When the ego claims that power as its own, it gets all puffed up with grandiose ideas about itself, and falls into an inflation, commonly known as an ego-trip.
The next temptation for the personality is that others perceive you as the healer or junior guru and flock to the wise one's feet. This is the basis of the personality cult, which can rob others of their power instead of helping them seek in their own way within. This doesn't mean you can't guide or help anyone, just don't get carried away with proclaiming the truth as you see it. Don't become a "dreamhealing missionary."
Another pitfall comes from listening to the subpersonalities which claim to be channels to higher power. Only the development of discrimination will teach you how to discern the true voice of intuition within. Just because the voice comes from within, doesn't mean it is all-knowing. That is the problem in seances, etc. Just because these spirits are dead does not means they are smart! Intuition appears to emerge out of the blue, but is actually built up of your intentionally developed skills and extra-sensory perception. It is the natural synthesis of both.
Freud noticed that in the client-therapist relationship certain dynamics went on below the level of conscious awareness. He called this process the transference when the energy flowed from client to therapist, and counter-transference when it was reversed. It basically revolves around the fantasy life developed between the two during treatment. It is virtually inescapable as the client transfers positive or negative family feelings onto the therapist, and the therapist reacts to that. This is also a place that the emotional baggage of the therapist will surface with the client.
Both client and therapist may find themselves "acting out" or "acting in" during and outside of sessions. Problems that can arise include dependency, enmeshment, resistance, and sexual confusion. In dependency there is a compulsive, unhealthy reliance on the care-giver, even to the point of self-neglect. Enmeshment means a pattern of tangled thoughts and feelings between therapist and client which leads to a loss of boundaries.
Enmeshment can lead to sexual involvement, if the therapist's needs are not being met elsewhere. In resistance, the client consciously or unconsciously avoids getting into the flow of the process in order to avoid or inhibit wellness and maintain the status quo. As therapist, if you identify your issues, you do not contaminate the treatment.
In any event, you cannot take a client further than you yourself have gone. Especially in peer counseling, transference can mean the risk of relapse or regression for the therapist, and damage to the client. Though a certain amount of fantasy interchange is unavoidable, too much is self indulgent, frustrating, and opens both client and therapist to self doubt. It increases stress, liability, and even may jeopardize an agency job. Chemical dependency counselors are especially vulnerable to counter-transference when they become identified with their client's drug use patterns. It brings up conflicting feelings and thoughts about present and past experiences.
Needy recovery counselors over- and under-react to clients' feelings. This is one place to seek the help of the Higher Power or the mystical side. The therapist must embody a certain amount of integration which comes from a firm relationship with one's spirituality. Counter-transference only gets out of hand if there are non-integrated personal issues coming up. Supervisors should help identify these issues and suggest skill-building alternatives to working these issues through with the clientele. It is difficult not to trade addiction for codependence in some settings.
But it ultimately leads to increasing stress, therapist burnout, and relapse. Therapist's issues and dysfunctions are too numerous to mention. However, just a few include projection of personal experience, inadequate qualifications, lack of trust or assertiveness, conflict anxiety, boundary confusion, judgementalness, rejection anxiety, intimacy dysfunctions, moral and value biases, health problems, self-esteem or self-identity conflict, lack of confidence, self-absorption, denial, unbalanced lifestyle, and domestic dysfunctions. The point to remember is whose needs are being met in the therapeutic session, and it is a one-way street. Focus must stay on the client's needs.
There is no need to be a robot in your approach. That is an over-reactive denial of the obvious emotions that must be present for effective work. Impersonal detachment can further damage a client's self esteem.
Clinging to rigid techniques also shows a fundamental need to stay in control and lack of spontaneity, and unwillingness to pick up on the client's cues about where their process is heading. Clues to counter-transference will appear if you look for them. Some are in and others out of session work. Some which come up prior to sessions include agenda setting, apprehension, fear and dread. The therapist can act out this behavior by being late, or avoiding therapy with excessive socializing.
Acting in is accomplished through emotional absence. During the session are you judgmental, fearful, or envious of the client? Are you frustrated, angry or resentful? Do you feel inadequate or impotent, sexually distracted by the client, or distracted by thoughts unrelated to the client? Are you too sympathetic?
Does your client withhold personal feelings and information? How strong are these thoughts or feelings? Are you apathetic or really tuning into the client's communications? Do you ignore opportunities for interventions or feedback? Are you trying to protect the client from experiencing their own pain? These are ways of "acting in."
You may "act out" through too much self disclosure, seeking approval or praise, name-dropping, using technical terms, being demanding or impatient, aggressive or blaming. After the session is wrapped up do you have persistent, lingering thoughts or feelings about the client? Do you daydream or gossip about the client, or continually replay sessions. Do you seek outside contact or socialization? Do you find yourself lying or exaggerating the positive or negative changes in the client when charting the case and communicating with supervisors? If so, you had better get into your own process work and resolve the underlying issues before continuing.
If these behaviors get excessive or obsessive, the client must be immediately referred elsewhere for treatment. Physical contact should be limited to that which is therapeutically supportive, but does not have erotic overtones. Both client and therapist should behave as if in public.
Follow-up should remain on a strictly professional basis, and self disclosure limited to social pleasantries. The experienced counselor can take a few more liberties. We all have the power to self-heal in supportive, collaborative therapy. There are many ways you can help, simply by active listening, being patient and calm, yet curious and interested. Put the client and yourself at ease. Give them "breathing room," empathy and support.
Learn to recognize and respond to signs to create rapport. The signals are territorial (locomotor), behavioral (psychomotor), emotional (expressive) and verbal. This gives you an immediate impression. During the interview, help them overcome suspiciousness, but feel free to curb intrusiveness, competetiveness, or rambling. Express your intent to help, be genuine and reliable.
Try to get clarification where you are unclear. Check symptoms. Ask what they would like to have happen. Summarize for clients who are vague, but avoid leading language. Nevertheless, "steer" in the desired direction through techniques such as continuation, echoing, curbing, and transitions. Keep your language so basic it matches that of the client. Use metaphors to move past resistance and denial. Also display acceptance and confrontation.
Search for the other's stressors and suffering (both facts and associated emotions), respond with empathy and show compassion. If they don't want to talk about it, "looping" techniques help you approach the problem from a variety of angles, one of which will work.
The DSM IV lists eighteen defense mechanisms: acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing. You can handle most of them with bypassing, reassurance, distraction, confrontation, interpretation, or changing vantage point or scope.
Be very careful with interpretation as it can overwhelm the client, and you may be very wrong, or reductionistic. Rather, seek to enlighten them with insight and understanding drawn from their own organic process. Hold the sacred space that lets it emerge.
Stanley Krippner identifies fourteen mythic polarities:
creation vs. apocalypse; nurturance vs. deprivation; achievement vs. failure; completion vs. fragmentation; affirmation vs. cynicism; acceptance vs. debilitation; hope vs. despair; reconcilation vs. polarization; wisdom vs. ignorance; celebration vs. betrayal; rebirth vs. death; questing vs. passivity, and intimacy vs. separation.
Some of these will come up in the journeys. Understanding their point of view gives you insight, a cognitive appreciation of their suffering. Issues often revolve around love, redemption, identity, and acceptance. They, themselves, may have full, partial or no insight about their condition.
Consider that level of personal insight as you set therapeutic goals together. Balance the roles. Help the client clarify and express issues. Listen empathically, but set limits when indicated. Be open with your questions and body language, don't create the feeling that there must be a "correct" response.
Let the client help you understand their dilemmas, even their paradoxical aspects. Explore their goals, values, faith, and beliefs about self. Discourage black and white or all-or-nothing thinking and help the client determine intensity, duration and frequency of problem areas. Explore alternatives, Help them find their strengths through empowerment. Collaborate, inspire, and encourage.
The Medicine Wheel
by Graywolf Swinney, ©2001 Asklepia Foundation
Old Ezekial saw a wheel a-rolling way in the middle of the air.
A wheel within a wheel a-rolling, way in the middle of the air.
And the big wheel ran by faith, and the wheel ran by the grace of God,
Old Ezekial saw a wheel a-rolling, way in the middle of the air.
The four directions of healing is one model or organization that can be used to describe the steps in healing processes in general. It does not drive the processes, but is a means of organizing four key steps or stages in healing, and most specifically relates to natural or spiritual healing. It directly applies to the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP) and derives from the medicine circle, or wheel used by aboriginal tribes throughout the world but, most particularly the Americas.
The particular version of the wheel described in this article comes from Central America as described by shaman Don Edwardo who was studied and his work chronicled by Dr. Alberto Villaldo, a well known psychological anthropologist, (author of Healing States with Stanley Krippner). We have added our own notions about the way that the wheel relates to the more contemporary healing processes and specifically the CRP.
All healing processes involve passing through each of the four directions of the wheel, and each direction represents a principle that applies to life in general, as well as healing. Each of the four directions has a guide or totem that represents this principle. Each of the four directions also represents a cardinal compass point. In native American teachings, it is stated that one constantly travels around this circle and in so doing attains harmony and balance, and comes full circle. This may indeed be the purpose of any or all diseases, to provide an evolutionary opportunity for an individual organism to evolve.
I derived this model in a brief flurry of panic under the following circumstances: I had been invited to address an early breakfast meeting of a large group of healers of all persuasions. The talk was to be on Shamanism, and in particular to discuss the contents of medicine bag, how they had come to me and how I used them. That morning when I went to get into my car, it had been burglarized and my medicine bag had been stolen. I was due to talk in about ten minutes and now had no topic, or at the very least had lost my props. The following model is what I presented. It seemed that by just speaking and listening to what I said, the following notions came forth. This event is chronicled in my article The Empty Medicine Bag.
The East
The first of the four directions is the East. It is where the sun rises and comes back into our sight and awareness each day. It is the direction that brings light into the world so that we can see what is about us. It represents the beginning of each day when we re-awaken to the seeing and sensing of the outer world. The teacher or totem of the east is the Eagle and the lesson it brings to us is that of the "eagle's eye." The eagle can spot a tiny mouse in a field from great heights and swoop down to feed on it. It is this acuity of vision that represents the lesson of the east. The healing principles involved are about seeing or sensing.
The first step in healing is to see or sense that we have a disease, the nature of it, and that healing is needed. For us personally, this is the stage when we become aware of the symptoms either directly or though our dreams. We must sense or see that we do indeed have a disease and understand its nature. The symptoms alert us to a condition that needs attention. Indeed in all forms of healing we must identify what it is that needs to be changed, physical, mental, or spiritual. In medical practice this is the stage at which the diagnosis is made. Only by making a valid diagnosis can the physician provide treatment according to medical criteria or protocol.
In psychological healing we must realize that we have a condition that needs to be resolved. The joke about "How many psychologists are needed to change a light bulb?" is germane here. The answer is "Only one, but the bulb has to want to be changed." Spiritual malaise is often much more difficult to identify. We often only realize it through our physical or mental symptoms. The first step when one goes to an allopathic doctor is for the doctor to diagnose the illness. It is only after knowing what the illness is, that the doctor can undertake a treatment.
Added to this, the comment made by Sir William Ostler is applicable, "It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease, than what sort of a disease a patient has." One needs to see the patient as a full person rather than as only a disease. In this much more holistic and humanistic approach, one still needs to see or sense the nature of the condition and come to know the nature of the one with the condition before treatment can be administered. With respect to the CRP, this stage of the East involves identifying the nature of the problem in its many manifestations. This is done in partnership with the patient.
For example a client shows up suffering from great discomfort of being in confined spaces. The psychologist might get more specific information but has probably already formed a tentative diagnosis of claustrophobia. He would probably ask questions to confirm the diagnosis and perhaps explore the etiology of the condition. The mentor, however, would further pursue the matter by asking about how the condition may present physically or spiritually as well. In this he might also discover that the patient has fibromyalgia and in further questioning may find that the person also feels restricted in their marriage and occupation. They may be feeling the limitations of their religion or lack of it.
Thus the fundamental nature of the illness is seen to be a factor much broader than merely a psychological disorder, and to manifest in many aspects of the patient's life. It weaves a thread throughout the tapestry of their experience of life. It is this sense of being restricted that is more fundamental to the disease, and that manifests as many other symptoms. This is to be discovered and revealed in the phase of the East.
During treatment the mentor and the mentored may revisit the east many times as the layers of the disease reveal themselves. Dreams have within them the ability to help us to sense or diagnose that there is a problem long before it manifests as an actual disease. This has been a recognized characteristic of dreams since the dawn of human presence on the planet. In the CRP journey process, the journey itself often addresses this stage of healing. What might identify such a journey is an apparent lack of resolution, and being left without completion.
However, both the mentor and the mentored have had a fuller experience of the disease or discomfort and may find that the information presented by the unconscious during the journey gives a fuller and more multi-dimensional experience of the issue, and provides information about its etiology. One client, for example, bolted out of a journey and was unwilling to resume the process. He had encountered a deep blackness that scared him. This was consistent with one of his diagnoses, paranoia. On re-entry, he stated that the blackness had triggered thoughts of a Black Widow spider. His mother had considered herself as such and had even signed notes to her family as the "Black Widow."
He had been over controlled and the life taken out of him by this woman. The journey was in and of itself complete in that it revealed this heretofore unknown data at a very visceral level and demonstrated its effect on the patient. This image of the female as a black widow had adversely shaped his attitudes and perceptions of relationships with women his whole life, and proved to be necessary to his future work and evolution. In other senses, all CRP journeys may incorporate this as one component of the process.
We can not begin to heal until we know that healing is needed and understand the nature of the crisis. This is the lesson of the east. For example, when one encounters the experience of the Primal Existential Sensory Image, this is a profound insight into the dynamics or nature of the self and the disease's dynamics. In that most journeys reach the level of experiencing the primal existential sensory image, they reveal the primal sensory pattern of the disease. This is the last stage in which the ego is involved and leads to the next step of the healing process, and entering into the transpersonal. This happens in the South.
The South
The medicine wheel is based on the circle of the sun. When the sun is seen to be in a given direction, in this case the south, it is characterized by what happens there in the southern sky. When this is the case, it is the time of winter. It is cold, not much happens outside and most of our activities take place in the shelter of our buildings or lodges.
What leads or brings into the south or winter is the fall or autumn, when the trees let go of their leaves and cold takes its grip on the earth. Echoing this natural pattern the CRP is almost entirely a process of letting go and becoming; of entering into the cold or blackness of the void. In the cold, things become still; they do not grow. Indeed, even the very motion of the atoms ad molecules is slowed down. Things become brittle and shatter easily, losing their form as they break or dissolve into the chaos of many scattered pieces.
The guide of the south is the Snake. The snake grows by shedding its old brittle skin. Once new, soft and flexible, it protected and defined the snake. The skin, eventually, however, becomes old and brittle and confining. The snake becomes confined by this old skin and cannot grow inside it but must shed it to develop a new larger and more flexible skin.
So too the diseases we incorporate were once solutions to problems we faced, and these solutions protected and defined us. As times evolve and our lives change, these old solutions become brittle and confining to us, so we must shed them. The problem is that we often become attached to the old skin, and are unwilling to let it go, so the next stage of healing is to be willing to let the disease go. It is not always easy to do.
Many who seek psychological help have the agenda of wanting the therapist to magically change those who they consider to be their problem. For example, the paranoia of the client about the Black Widow nature of women was very protective for him. It also defined who he was around women. He had developed his body strength and muscle through rigorous daily workouts with weights, however his obsession with this had created a stiff and inflexible body, which was contributing to fibromyalgia or arthritic like muscle pains. He was strong but brittle, and could not flow.
Moreover, he kept asking and plotting how to get his current girlfriend(s)) to change. The skin he had developed to help him survive with his mother, who was likely insane, was now no longer serving him, and in fact was the basis of his physical and mental afflictions. As a child he had come to believe that only by being very strong and tough could he survive his mother. The idea of giving up that protective skin was terrifying to him and he fought to hang on to it. He was as a snake, not wanting or willing to lose its skin and become vulnerable and sensitive. His evolution was stuck. The task of the south is to let go of the disease, as the snake sheds its skin. This exposes our sensitive inner being to the world, and makes us vulnerable.
Many failures in healing stem from this stage. Often the patient will discontinue or stop treatment if it looks about to succeed. For example, an other mentoree suffered from multiple sclerosis. It had manifested in response to a prayer in a particularly abusive relationship and eventually got her out of it. This disease, however, now identified her and largely defined her relationship with her new husband. It allowed her leisure, space and safety which had been lacking in both her family of origin and her first marriage.
When the MS appeared to be going into remission, this threatened her relationship with her new husband, which was based in her illness and his need to have someone ill in his life, and also threatened her identity. These factors caused her to discontinue her healing work on it, at least with me. Letting go of the disease takes us away from what has grown to be familiar and casts us into the chaotic maelstrom of the unknown. Yet it is a necessary step. It is in this chaos and vulnerability that the old forms dissolve or die so that we can be reborn.
We must let go into chaotic consciousness and trust or have faith in our organism's ability to heal or self regulate. ("The big wheel rang by faith..."). In my own recent brush with death I recall as I was being wheeled into emergency surgery, letting go and putting my faith into the process I was experiencing. I am convinced that this was very crucial to my surviving the ordeal. In the journey process, this going into a death experience is integral to the process. Otherwise we are only putting a superficial patina down to cover the disease.
The old must die in order for a true rebirth to occur. The energy of the illness must pass into the cold of winter and death to be shattered and transformed into the renewed life and energy that emerges with spring. This is the lesson of the south and carries us around the wheel into the west.
The West
When the sun travels into the western sky, it brings the night. During the night we are still inside our lodges and it is in this time that we find release in the little death of sleep. In this little death we encounter our dreams. Night is the time of darkness, and in the darkness our senses are enhanced. This too is in the nature of dreams, this enhanced sensitivity and also the ability to see or imagine what is yet to become, to dream.
The totems of the west are the black bear, the wolf, the panther, creatures of the evening and night who are familiar with finding their way through the darkened landscape, in this case the selfscape. They do so through their enhanced senses. Dreams too, through their enhanced sensitivity, guide us through the darkness, but dreams also provide us with occasional glimpses of the future, tell us what is to be. It is in the west that the new image of who we are to become emerges from within us. This is the next stage of healing. After shedding the old skin, entering the chaos of loss of self to become unbound Self, ("And the little wheel turned by the grace of God...").
We must find within this realm of spirit, the image of our new self. It is a case of creating the seed image that will grow to become what we may be, that will provide the new image that will shape us, and let us experience what we may become. It takes place in REM and we have hypothesized elsewhere ("Remembering REM," and HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING), that REM may indeed be the consciousness in which we restructure both physiological and mental dynamics into healthy process.
In the CRP, this is experienced as the emergence from the chaotic consciousness or the unbound Self of a new sense of self. In the CRP, the old image, the primal image dissolves into chaos and from this emerges a new and different sense of self; it is a creative, self-organizing process. The organism begins to take on this new image but it is formed in the chaos and creativity of our REM or dream consciousness.
This is the lesson of the west. It is the gift of REM. It is the newly born self, a gift from the Self. When we experience, embrace and indeed become this new sense of self, it provides the blue print for the eventual presentation of new behaviors and body structures. This takes place in the completion of the circuit around the wheel, to the direction of the North.
The North
As the sun moves into the northern sky, it brings with it the warmth and rebirthing of spring. When the sun reaches the northern sky it becomes the time of summer, the time when the seeds planed become mature, and the fruits and seeds ripen to feed and sustain us. These are the healing principles of the journey into the North. Once we have experienced the birth and inner presence of the new sense or image of self, we must let it grow and mature, much as the fruits and seeds need to mature in the summer heat or become useful to us in our lives.
The totem of the North is the Owl, and Owl guides us "through the valley of the shadow of death." Indeed each healing journey is the death of something within us, a mental problem, a cancer or an ulcer, or millions of viruses, to allow our continued evolution. In this way the north and the owl see us throughout the entire circuit around the medicine wheel. In the CRP this follows after the inner journey and represents the bringing out of the new self image.
It begins during the re-entry process as the mentor and mentored dialogue about the journey and how to allow this new image of self to express in daily life. It continues on for months or years after the journey, providing new insights into the healing and revealing new skills expressed in behavior, attitudes and perceptions of life. In deed it is the emergence of a new wisdom about the self.
This wisdom is another characteristic that we have imparted to the owl, the image of the wise old owl. This coming to wisdom brings us to a new enlightenment about the self and allows us to see ourselves in a new light which in its turn brings us back to the East, and the next healing journey around the medicine wheel. In this way the the wheel is seen to be wheels rotating within wheels, spirals of evolution bringing us to every increasing maturity, health and wisdom. May the circles be unbroken and lead one into the next.
by Graywolf Swinney, ©2001 Asklepia Foundation
Old Ezekial saw a wheel a-rolling way in the middle of the air.
A wheel within a wheel a-rolling, way in the middle of the air.
And the big wheel ran by faith, and the wheel ran by the grace of God,
Old Ezekial saw a wheel a-rolling, way in the middle of the air.
The four directions of healing is one model or organization that can be used to describe the steps in healing processes in general. It does not drive the processes, but is a means of organizing four key steps or stages in healing, and most specifically relates to natural or spiritual healing. It directly applies to the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP) and derives from the medicine circle, or wheel used by aboriginal tribes throughout the world but, most particularly the Americas.
The particular version of the wheel described in this article comes from Central America as described by shaman Don Edwardo who was studied and his work chronicled by Dr. Alberto Villaldo, a well known psychological anthropologist, (author of Healing States with Stanley Krippner). We have added our own notions about the way that the wheel relates to the more contemporary healing processes and specifically the CRP.
All healing processes involve passing through each of the four directions of the wheel, and each direction represents a principle that applies to life in general, as well as healing. Each of the four directions has a guide or totem that represents this principle. Each of the four directions also represents a cardinal compass point. In native American teachings, it is stated that one constantly travels around this circle and in so doing attains harmony and balance, and comes full circle. This may indeed be the purpose of any or all diseases, to provide an evolutionary opportunity for an individual organism to evolve.
I derived this model in a brief flurry of panic under the following circumstances: I had been invited to address an early breakfast meeting of a large group of healers of all persuasions. The talk was to be on Shamanism, and in particular to discuss the contents of medicine bag, how they had come to me and how I used them. That morning when I went to get into my car, it had been burglarized and my medicine bag had been stolen. I was due to talk in about ten minutes and now had no topic, or at the very least had lost my props. The following model is what I presented. It seemed that by just speaking and listening to what I said, the following notions came forth. This event is chronicled in my article The Empty Medicine Bag.
The East
The first of the four directions is the East. It is where the sun rises and comes back into our sight and awareness each day. It is the direction that brings light into the world so that we can see what is about us. It represents the beginning of each day when we re-awaken to the seeing and sensing of the outer world. The teacher or totem of the east is the Eagle and the lesson it brings to us is that of the "eagle's eye." The eagle can spot a tiny mouse in a field from great heights and swoop down to feed on it. It is this acuity of vision that represents the lesson of the east. The healing principles involved are about seeing or sensing.
The first step in healing is to see or sense that we have a disease, the nature of it, and that healing is needed. For us personally, this is the stage when we become aware of the symptoms either directly or though our dreams. We must sense or see that we do indeed have a disease and understand its nature. The symptoms alert us to a condition that needs attention. Indeed in all forms of healing we must identify what it is that needs to be changed, physical, mental, or spiritual. In medical practice this is the stage at which the diagnosis is made. Only by making a valid diagnosis can the physician provide treatment according to medical criteria or protocol.
In psychological healing we must realize that we have a condition that needs to be resolved. The joke about "How many psychologists are needed to change a light bulb?" is germane here. The answer is "Only one, but the bulb has to want to be changed." Spiritual malaise is often much more difficult to identify. We often only realize it through our physical or mental symptoms. The first step when one goes to an allopathic doctor is for the doctor to diagnose the illness. It is only after knowing what the illness is, that the doctor can undertake a treatment.
Added to this, the comment made by Sir William Ostler is applicable, "It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease, than what sort of a disease a patient has." One needs to see the patient as a full person rather than as only a disease. In this much more holistic and humanistic approach, one still needs to see or sense the nature of the condition and come to know the nature of the one with the condition before treatment can be administered. With respect to the CRP, this stage of the East involves identifying the nature of the problem in its many manifestations. This is done in partnership with the patient.
For example a client shows up suffering from great discomfort of being in confined spaces. The psychologist might get more specific information but has probably already formed a tentative diagnosis of claustrophobia. He would probably ask questions to confirm the diagnosis and perhaps explore the etiology of the condition. The mentor, however, would further pursue the matter by asking about how the condition may present physically or spiritually as well. In this he might also discover that the patient has fibromyalgia and in further questioning may find that the person also feels restricted in their marriage and occupation. They may be feeling the limitations of their religion or lack of it.
Thus the fundamental nature of the illness is seen to be a factor much broader than merely a psychological disorder, and to manifest in many aspects of the patient's life. It weaves a thread throughout the tapestry of their experience of life. It is this sense of being restricted that is more fundamental to the disease, and that manifests as many other symptoms. This is to be discovered and revealed in the phase of the East.
During treatment the mentor and the mentored may revisit the east many times as the layers of the disease reveal themselves. Dreams have within them the ability to help us to sense or diagnose that there is a problem long before it manifests as an actual disease. This has been a recognized characteristic of dreams since the dawn of human presence on the planet. In the CRP journey process, the journey itself often addresses this stage of healing. What might identify such a journey is an apparent lack of resolution, and being left without completion.
However, both the mentor and the mentored have had a fuller experience of the disease or discomfort and may find that the information presented by the unconscious during the journey gives a fuller and more multi-dimensional experience of the issue, and provides information about its etiology. One client, for example, bolted out of a journey and was unwilling to resume the process. He had encountered a deep blackness that scared him. This was consistent with one of his diagnoses, paranoia. On re-entry, he stated that the blackness had triggered thoughts of a Black Widow spider. His mother had considered herself as such and had even signed notes to her family as the "Black Widow."
He had been over controlled and the life taken out of him by this woman. The journey was in and of itself complete in that it revealed this heretofore unknown data at a very visceral level and demonstrated its effect on the patient. This image of the female as a black widow had adversely shaped his attitudes and perceptions of relationships with women his whole life, and proved to be necessary to his future work and evolution. In other senses, all CRP journeys may incorporate this as one component of the process.
We can not begin to heal until we know that healing is needed and understand the nature of the crisis. This is the lesson of the east. For example, when one encounters the experience of the Primal Existential Sensory Image, this is a profound insight into the dynamics or nature of the self and the disease's dynamics. In that most journeys reach the level of experiencing the primal existential sensory image, they reveal the primal sensory pattern of the disease. This is the last stage in which the ego is involved and leads to the next step of the healing process, and entering into the transpersonal. This happens in the South.
The South
The medicine wheel is based on the circle of the sun. When the sun is seen to be in a given direction, in this case the south, it is characterized by what happens there in the southern sky. When this is the case, it is the time of winter. It is cold, not much happens outside and most of our activities take place in the shelter of our buildings or lodges.
What leads or brings into the south or winter is the fall or autumn, when the trees let go of their leaves and cold takes its grip on the earth. Echoing this natural pattern the CRP is almost entirely a process of letting go and becoming; of entering into the cold or blackness of the void. In the cold, things become still; they do not grow. Indeed, even the very motion of the atoms ad molecules is slowed down. Things become brittle and shatter easily, losing their form as they break or dissolve into the chaos of many scattered pieces.
The guide of the south is the Snake. The snake grows by shedding its old brittle skin. Once new, soft and flexible, it protected and defined the snake. The skin, eventually, however, becomes old and brittle and confining. The snake becomes confined by this old skin and cannot grow inside it but must shed it to develop a new larger and more flexible skin.
So too the diseases we incorporate were once solutions to problems we faced, and these solutions protected and defined us. As times evolve and our lives change, these old solutions become brittle and confining to us, so we must shed them. The problem is that we often become attached to the old skin, and are unwilling to let it go, so the next stage of healing is to be willing to let the disease go. It is not always easy to do.
Many who seek psychological help have the agenda of wanting the therapist to magically change those who they consider to be their problem. For example, the paranoia of the client about the Black Widow nature of women was very protective for him. It also defined who he was around women. He had developed his body strength and muscle through rigorous daily workouts with weights, however his obsession with this had created a stiff and inflexible body, which was contributing to fibromyalgia or arthritic like muscle pains. He was strong but brittle, and could not flow.
Moreover, he kept asking and plotting how to get his current girlfriend(s)) to change. The skin he had developed to help him survive with his mother, who was likely insane, was now no longer serving him, and in fact was the basis of his physical and mental afflictions. As a child he had come to believe that only by being very strong and tough could he survive his mother. The idea of giving up that protective skin was terrifying to him and he fought to hang on to it. He was as a snake, not wanting or willing to lose its skin and become vulnerable and sensitive. His evolution was stuck. The task of the south is to let go of the disease, as the snake sheds its skin. This exposes our sensitive inner being to the world, and makes us vulnerable.
Many failures in healing stem from this stage. Often the patient will discontinue or stop treatment if it looks about to succeed. For example, an other mentoree suffered from multiple sclerosis. It had manifested in response to a prayer in a particularly abusive relationship and eventually got her out of it. This disease, however, now identified her and largely defined her relationship with her new husband. It allowed her leisure, space and safety which had been lacking in both her family of origin and her first marriage.
When the MS appeared to be going into remission, this threatened her relationship with her new husband, which was based in her illness and his need to have someone ill in his life, and also threatened her identity. These factors caused her to discontinue her healing work on it, at least with me. Letting go of the disease takes us away from what has grown to be familiar and casts us into the chaotic maelstrom of the unknown. Yet it is a necessary step. It is in this chaos and vulnerability that the old forms dissolve or die so that we can be reborn.
We must let go into chaotic consciousness and trust or have faith in our organism's ability to heal or self regulate. ("The big wheel rang by faith..."). In my own recent brush with death I recall as I was being wheeled into emergency surgery, letting go and putting my faith into the process I was experiencing. I am convinced that this was very crucial to my surviving the ordeal. In the journey process, this going into a death experience is integral to the process. Otherwise we are only putting a superficial patina down to cover the disease.
The old must die in order for a true rebirth to occur. The energy of the illness must pass into the cold of winter and death to be shattered and transformed into the renewed life and energy that emerges with spring. This is the lesson of the south and carries us around the wheel into the west.
The West
When the sun travels into the western sky, it brings the night. During the night we are still inside our lodges and it is in this time that we find release in the little death of sleep. In this little death we encounter our dreams. Night is the time of darkness, and in the darkness our senses are enhanced. This too is in the nature of dreams, this enhanced sensitivity and also the ability to see or imagine what is yet to become, to dream.
The totems of the west are the black bear, the wolf, the panther, creatures of the evening and night who are familiar with finding their way through the darkened landscape, in this case the selfscape. They do so through their enhanced senses. Dreams too, through their enhanced sensitivity, guide us through the darkness, but dreams also provide us with occasional glimpses of the future, tell us what is to be. It is in the west that the new image of who we are to become emerges from within us. This is the next stage of healing. After shedding the old skin, entering the chaos of loss of self to become unbound Self, ("And the little wheel turned by the grace of God...").
We must find within this realm of spirit, the image of our new self. It is a case of creating the seed image that will grow to become what we may be, that will provide the new image that will shape us, and let us experience what we may become. It takes place in REM and we have hypothesized elsewhere ("Remembering REM," and HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING), that REM may indeed be the consciousness in which we restructure both physiological and mental dynamics into healthy process.
In the CRP, this is experienced as the emergence from the chaotic consciousness or the unbound Self of a new sense of self. In the CRP, the old image, the primal image dissolves into chaos and from this emerges a new and different sense of self; it is a creative, self-organizing process. The organism begins to take on this new image but it is formed in the chaos and creativity of our REM or dream consciousness.
This is the lesson of the west. It is the gift of REM. It is the newly born self, a gift from the Self. When we experience, embrace and indeed become this new sense of self, it provides the blue print for the eventual presentation of new behaviors and body structures. This takes place in the completion of the circuit around the wheel, to the direction of the North.
The North
As the sun moves into the northern sky, it brings with it the warmth and rebirthing of spring. When the sun reaches the northern sky it becomes the time of summer, the time when the seeds planed become mature, and the fruits and seeds ripen to feed and sustain us. These are the healing principles of the journey into the North. Once we have experienced the birth and inner presence of the new sense or image of self, we must let it grow and mature, much as the fruits and seeds need to mature in the summer heat or become useful to us in our lives.
The totem of the North is the Owl, and Owl guides us "through the valley of the shadow of death." Indeed each healing journey is the death of something within us, a mental problem, a cancer or an ulcer, or millions of viruses, to allow our continued evolution. In this way the north and the owl see us throughout the entire circuit around the medicine wheel. In the CRP this follows after the inner journey and represents the bringing out of the new self image.
It begins during the re-entry process as the mentor and mentored dialogue about the journey and how to allow this new image of self to express in daily life. It continues on for months or years after the journey, providing new insights into the healing and revealing new skills expressed in behavior, attitudes and perceptions of life. In deed it is the emergence of a new wisdom about the self.
This wisdom is another characteristic that we have imparted to the owl, the image of the wise old owl. This coming to wisdom brings us to a new enlightenment about the self and allows us to see ourselves in a new light which in its turn brings us back to the East, and the next healing journey around the medicine wheel. In this way the the wheel is seen to be wheels rotating within wheels, spirals of evolution bringing us to every increasing maturity, health and wisdom. May the circles be unbroken and lead one into the next.
THE ART OF DRUMMING
Graywolf Swinney, ©2001 1986, Asklepia Foundation
Introduction
Drumming is a very powerful tool that can alter the consciousness of individuals or large groups. For example, consider the profound impact on our culture of the rock beats of the fifties, sixties and seventies.
Drumming has roused and marched soldiers into battle, and yet can soothe the angry mob. Shamans have long used the beat of the drum to alter consciousness, and to induce healing or evolutionary visions. In fact, to the shaman the drum is a horse or a canoe that carries us on the trails or in the rivers of consciousness into other realms or dimensions of reality.
It is the oldest form of music that our ancient ancestors discovered, presumably when one of them noticed the hypnotic and pleasing effect of rhythmically beating a hollow log with a stick. Our species has been vastly enriched by the rhythms and vibrations initiated on that long ago day. Not limited to our species, new born animals of all species are soothed by the repetitive rhythms of the beating of their mothers' hearts.
It is suggested that new puppies be put into their beds with a ticking clock to help them adjust to their new home. In fact, it may arguably be our first awareness of the sense of hearing, one that we experience in the womb as we entrain ourselves to the beating of our mother's heart. The rhythms of the beating drum can take us back to those early beginnings of our sentience, back to the womb like consciousness patterns that underlie our being and sense of self and world. In fact, reality itself, at the most basic level, is nothing more than the cosmic rhythm of energy waves arising from the plenum. It is a complexity of rhythmic waves interacting to create the interference patterns that underlie our illusion of reality. In our explorations of shamanic practices and techniques, drumming became one of our preferred activities.
The issue of the success of drumming to effect conscious change is not in question, but the answers to questions about how to drum, and what beats and patterns of rhythm can induce what states of consciousness and with what effects are of considerable interest. Intuitively we realize that, for example, slow beating calms and slows us down and rapid, lively beating can enliven us and call us to action, but god is in the details. This essay will explore these questions and offer directions suggested to us in our explorations of healing process and the beating of the skin. We will begin by exploring some of the techniques, will include explanations or theories of how and why we think they work, and conclude with examples of how we have used drumming in altering or restructuring consciousness.
The Beat Goes On
We can begin with the most important notion for the mentor of the CRP. The most beneficial drumming is, as with the journeys in the Consciousness Restructuring Process, a shared or co-conscious process. This means that rather than imposing some rhythm on the listener, the rhythms are largely determined from a shared consciOusness state; one shared by the drummer and the listener(s). This is even possible with large groups as will be illustrated later. This is critical to the process and is what makes the CRP mentor's drumming different from, for example the ore traditional shamanic drumming, such as the Harner method.
The CRP is largely driven by the mentored one, so too is the drumming. The following argument is presented: With the CRP process, the mentored is, in reality, considered to the only one who can create the consciousness dynamics that will most benefit him. It is arrogant to think otherwise, that one outside and aware of only what is evident can determine with the same precision what the organism needs.
They are the only ones who know precisely what is needed for his healing or transformation, and this knowing or wisdom comes not from mental or intellectual process but comes rather from a deeper transpersonal self, or what might be considered the spirit, soul, or our inner divinity. In the shared state of co-consciousness, the mentor also senses this inner pulse and it is what controls her hand as it caresses the skin of the drum to create the rhythms of transformation. This is truly an art form, and can be viewed in much the same way as sculptors or other artists describe their muse. "The image is in the medium and I merely release it." So with the CRP drumming, "the rhythm is in the listener(s) and I merely help them express it."
It is this "spirit" view which firmly aligns the mentor with shamanic realms of healing. Common to all shamans throughout the world is the fundamental healing philosophy, the notion that illness or sickness is the result of the soul being stolen or lost, and that healing is accomplished through the recovery and return of the soul or spirit. (I prefer the term spirit in this context as it is more free of religious connotations). It is our notion that spirit cannot really ever be lost or destroyed, but that it can be unavailable or tied up and buried in our disease dynamics. These take the form of diseased, fixed and repetitive neural firing dynamics that displace or bury the more complex dynamics of creativity.
These theta repetitive cyclical neural dynamics trap the mentored in this vortex of their disease. We do consider that the unbound or free consciousness flow is the essence of our spirit, the source of our creativity and is the seat of the divine within us. It also manifests as a process of health and free evolution, which are indeed the same thing. The resolution to this situation of frozen, trapped, or bound consciousness is to free or transform the bound energy into a complex, creative and free flowing consciousness dynamics that fund evolution and help create the processes of health.
As noted earlier, this comes primarily from within the mentored. It is also the embodiment of the admonition to "march to the beat of your own drum!" and is the crux of our individuality and creativity. It is also core to CRP Drumming and the drum is indeed one of the vehicles through which this may be attained..
First a few words about co-consciousness:
The process of co-consciousness is felt by the mentor as a deep inner sensation, or it just may be that he notices what his hands are doing as he beats the drum for the most part giving up intellectual control. It is not a state that can be attained through effort or by means of will or planning, but rather is entered through a personal process of emptying the mind and relaxing into it. It is a state of flow rather than effort. Its sense when it is operating is one of profound rightness. It is the state that one notices when synchronistic events are occurring, or when one is "in the groove."
If the intellectual ego or desire is present, these senses may be mimicked, but once it has been experienced, the mimicry cannot be mistaken for the real dynamics and experiences of co-consciousness. There are some characteristics that seem to be present in the beating and rhythms of co-consciousness drumming. For one thing the rhythm is not regular, but has dysrhythms or chaotic and unexpected disruptions in the rhythms. The beating may be rapid or fast at one point, but slow or complex in the subsequent beats. They may vary in loudness and contain extra loud, or missing beats where one is expected. In other words there is built in complexity or chaos in the rhythms.
It is known in the field of hypnotherapy that such disruption to the rhythm of the trance induction deepen the trance. There is an explanation for this as follows. We have speculated from our research into brainwaves and CRP theory that this occurs when the brain is in its most complex firing patterns and when the waves have built within them the most complexity.
The frequency is most varied and unpredictable within the limits of the defined brain wave pattern when old patterns of neural activity are dissolved and new neural circuitry is formed. This state of complexity is also associated with creativity and in particular is a characteristic of REM activity. Awake REM activity is associated with spiritual visionary and other mindbody sensory phenomena. The visions come from the imaginal process rather than a fantasy process. Fantasy is characterized by an expected or predictable cause/effect type imagery flow.
Imaginal process is unpredictable with bifurcations or unexpected twists of the flow of the imagery and other senses. It is indicative of chaotic consciousness (unbound or free-flowing consciousness) and the imagery is more like a reiterating fractal than a story line in its nature.
We usually introduce a drum journey with the suggestion or notion that those who will be journeying should begin by contemplating the symptoms that reveal their disease to them. Then, as the drumming starts, to let go of that and any expectations and to just notice what comes to them. It may be discomfort, or an image, or body sensations that are experienced during the drumming. They are invited to not question this or try to guess what it may indicate to them, but instead to allow it to flow and explore where this doorway takes them.
The journey is then shared with the mentor following the drumming, who uses the symbols to initiate a CRP journey in the same fashion as he would dream images. It is important that the mentor realize that the images are formed, as are dream images and stories, by the deep consciousness patterns and dynamics that shape the mentored, both physically and mentally.
In this way the completion of the drumming is just the first step in a CRP journey, just as the dream provides the opening or doorway for a dream journey. This too sets the CRP drummer apart from more traditional views which require the shaman or to give meaning or interpret the symbols or story encountered. Rather the mentor uses the imagery to explore the deep consciousness structures that gave rise to the symbols. This is done as outlined in the body of literature explaining the process.
And the Beat Goes On...
However we have also found that sometimes the drum journey, and what is experienced during it, seems to induce the healing experience. People come back from the journey reporting that they feel better, more free, less stressed than when they started it. There are several factors involved with this. This is not unlike dreams, some of which seem complete in that the healing is experienced in the dream and doesn't require any further exploration. We have found, however, that exploring further may broaden or deepen the healing experience. We can also consider another effect that drumming may have to help explain other forms of drum healing.
As noted, drumming creates sound waves, vibration of the environment in which the drumming occurs. Everything in the immediate area will also vibrate with the rhythms of the drumming. This includes the flesh, mind and bodies of the listeners. It has been postulated that every illness has its own vibrational frequency. I am not sure that I agree that it is a single frequency, rather I expect it has its own complex interference pattern from the interaction of several frequencies and waves.
Some set frequency is involved with the structure of the disease. One of the theories of drum healing journeys is that one can produce with the drum frequencies and harmonics which set up resonance with the structure of the disease. The notion is that this resonance over energizes the illness structure and cause it to dissemble or literally shake it self apart. We don't need to look far to see examples of this in other areas.
Lately it has been demonstrated that the purring of cats makes their bones so strong and resilient. The effects of purring or rhythmic resonance have been proposed as treatment for osteoporosis. It is said that the great opera star Mario Lanza could shatter a glass by singing a note that was of the same frequency as the glass. Another example is that when marching soldiers across a bridge, soldiers are generally told to break cadence and not march in step.
It is well documented that a bridge which happens to have resonance with the frequency of the cadence of the march will begin sympathetic vibrations and may eventually collapse. This is a well known phenomena to engineers who must take this into account when designing bridges, tall buildings, towers and other similar structures. So it seems reasonable to assume that by creating a drum beat's frequencies and overtones to resonate with the particular frequencies of the disease structure, they will over-energize the structure and cause it to shake itself and vibrate in resonance. As with the glass or the bridges, so too will the holographic structure of the disease disintegrate or collapse.
Whether the disease is the mass of a cancer, or a particular neural or nervous system firing frequency, by matching or resonating with it, this effect could change the hologram of the disease, thereby transforming the disease itself. If the drumming is happening in the co-consciousness state it creates a feedback effect much like a microphone in front of a speaker magnifies the frequency coming from the speaker to produce a feedback squeal, which left to continue could increase and blow the speakers. This is another argument that reinforces the notion of co-consciousness drumming.
POUNDING HEALING RHYTHMS IN MY BRAIN
Following are some accounts of healing drumming and the reported effects. One woman who had a rectal cancer and was participating in one of my groups reported her experience of a drum journey. She was in considerable pain from the tumor, but had so far refused to take any pain medication of any type for relief. The drumming was offered to the group as a demonstration.
Following the drumming she reported that the pain in her tumor had considerably lessened. She reported that the pain in her tumor had considerably lessened. She reported that going into and during the journey she had felt the beat of the drum seeming to resonate in her uterus (which was in close proximity) and her her tumor. There were times when the sensations in the area bordered on pain, but for the most part she said that she actually felt sexually stimulated.
When the drumming had stopped, she reported feeling more free of pain than she had for months. And this effect lasted for several hours. Since she was then residing at the retreat, drum journeys became a regular part of her pain control, and she reported that they most often seemed to help her with the pain. Several years ago, another woman came for a weekend retreat following a visit to her doctor during which he had informed her that she had uterine cancer and would require immediate surgery.
While on retreat she wanted to work on the cancer using alternative healing. She was relatively young and wanted to have children and surgery would have taken that option from her. During a sweat we did one evening, I had felt a strong intuition to drum and did so, holding the drum about six inches over the tumor. She reported feeling "something moving or shifting down there."
Along with other work and a dream journey that had been stimulated by the drumming, she worked on the tumor throughout her two day stay. When she left I did not hear from her again, but a couple of years later I met her mother at a presentation I was giving. She came up and identified herself. When asked about her daughter, she reported that she was now living in Alaska.
When she had returned to the doctor during the week following her retreat, the tumor had apparently disappeared and the doctor apologizing to her claiming to her claimed it must have been misdiagnosed, or that perhaps he had been looking at another patient's test results. Was it the drumming or had she indeed been misdiagnosed? I certainly don't know.
LA DE DA DE DI
Another drum journeyer reports the following: "I really like the Drum Journeys. It's the way I feel or sense the experience which I find significant. I don't recall stories or visions from my several drum journeys, except in the sense of feeling you are the drum. Sensing, my body being the drum; hollowed out; stretched; vibrating and resonating. In some ways it reminds me of the feelings I get when intoning the Chakras.
The drum's song has many tones and rhythms. Where some of the tones and rhythms resonate in my throat, others rumble through my belly. Or deep tones vibrate in the base of my spine. Graywolf creates overtones when he drums, so at times the sensations split and become dissonant.
Then, the intensity may begin to harmonize, say in my forehead and heart. Then there is the breath - rhythm for rhythm, coming in and out of focus and syncopation, with the internal and the external drum. And I am ready; there is an anticipation for the drum to stop. Final beats signalling the end and bringing me back.
Graywolf Swinney, ©2001 1986, Asklepia Foundation
Introduction
Drumming is a very powerful tool that can alter the consciousness of individuals or large groups. For example, consider the profound impact on our culture of the rock beats of the fifties, sixties and seventies.
Drumming has roused and marched soldiers into battle, and yet can soothe the angry mob. Shamans have long used the beat of the drum to alter consciousness, and to induce healing or evolutionary visions. In fact, to the shaman the drum is a horse or a canoe that carries us on the trails or in the rivers of consciousness into other realms or dimensions of reality.
It is the oldest form of music that our ancient ancestors discovered, presumably when one of them noticed the hypnotic and pleasing effect of rhythmically beating a hollow log with a stick. Our species has been vastly enriched by the rhythms and vibrations initiated on that long ago day. Not limited to our species, new born animals of all species are soothed by the repetitive rhythms of the beating of their mothers' hearts.
It is suggested that new puppies be put into their beds with a ticking clock to help them adjust to their new home. In fact, it may arguably be our first awareness of the sense of hearing, one that we experience in the womb as we entrain ourselves to the beating of our mother's heart. The rhythms of the beating drum can take us back to those early beginnings of our sentience, back to the womb like consciousness patterns that underlie our being and sense of self and world. In fact, reality itself, at the most basic level, is nothing more than the cosmic rhythm of energy waves arising from the plenum. It is a complexity of rhythmic waves interacting to create the interference patterns that underlie our illusion of reality. In our explorations of shamanic practices and techniques, drumming became one of our preferred activities.
The issue of the success of drumming to effect conscious change is not in question, but the answers to questions about how to drum, and what beats and patterns of rhythm can induce what states of consciousness and with what effects are of considerable interest. Intuitively we realize that, for example, slow beating calms and slows us down and rapid, lively beating can enliven us and call us to action, but god is in the details. This essay will explore these questions and offer directions suggested to us in our explorations of healing process and the beating of the skin. We will begin by exploring some of the techniques, will include explanations or theories of how and why we think they work, and conclude with examples of how we have used drumming in altering or restructuring consciousness.
The Beat Goes On
We can begin with the most important notion for the mentor of the CRP. The most beneficial drumming is, as with the journeys in the Consciousness Restructuring Process, a shared or co-conscious process. This means that rather than imposing some rhythm on the listener, the rhythms are largely determined from a shared consciOusness state; one shared by the drummer and the listener(s). This is even possible with large groups as will be illustrated later. This is critical to the process and is what makes the CRP mentor's drumming different from, for example the ore traditional shamanic drumming, such as the Harner method.
The CRP is largely driven by the mentored one, so too is the drumming. The following argument is presented: With the CRP process, the mentored is, in reality, considered to the only one who can create the consciousness dynamics that will most benefit him. It is arrogant to think otherwise, that one outside and aware of only what is evident can determine with the same precision what the organism needs.
They are the only ones who know precisely what is needed for his healing or transformation, and this knowing or wisdom comes not from mental or intellectual process but comes rather from a deeper transpersonal self, or what might be considered the spirit, soul, or our inner divinity. In the shared state of co-consciousness, the mentor also senses this inner pulse and it is what controls her hand as it caresses the skin of the drum to create the rhythms of transformation. This is truly an art form, and can be viewed in much the same way as sculptors or other artists describe their muse. "The image is in the medium and I merely release it." So with the CRP drumming, "the rhythm is in the listener(s) and I merely help them express it."
It is this "spirit" view which firmly aligns the mentor with shamanic realms of healing. Common to all shamans throughout the world is the fundamental healing philosophy, the notion that illness or sickness is the result of the soul being stolen or lost, and that healing is accomplished through the recovery and return of the soul or spirit. (I prefer the term spirit in this context as it is more free of religious connotations). It is our notion that spirit cannot really ever be lost or destroyed, but that it can be unavailable or tied up and buried in our disease dynamics. These take the form of diseased, fixed and repetitive neural firing dynamics that displace or bury the more complex dynamics of creativity.
These theta repetitive cyclical neural dynamics trap the mentored in this vortex of their disease. We do consider that the unbound or free consciousness flow is the essence of our spirit, the source of our creativity and is the seat of the divine within us. It also manifests as a process of health and free evolution, which are indeed the same thing. The resolution to this situation of frozen, trapped, or bound consciousness is to free or transform the bound energy into a complex, creative and free flowing consciousness dynamics that fund evolution and help create the processes of health.
As noted earlier, this comes primarily from within the mentored. It is also the embodiment of the admonition to "march to the beat of your own drum!" and is the crux of our individuality and creativity. It is also core to CRP Drumming and the drum is indeed one of the vehicles through which this may be attained..
First a few words about co-consciousness:
The process of co-consciousness is felt by the mentor as a deep inner sensation, or it just may be that he notices what his hands are doing as he beats the drum for the most part giving up intellectual control. It is not a state that can be attained through effort or by means of will or planning, but rather is entered through a personal process of emptying the mind and relaxing into it. It is a state of flow rather than effort. Its sense when it is operating is one of profound rightness. It is the state that one notices when synchronistic events are occurring, or when one is "in the groove."
If the intellectual ego or desire is present, these senses may be mimicked, but once it has been experienced, the mimicry cannot be mistaken for the real dynamics and experiences of co-consciousness. There are some characteristics that seem to be present in the beating and rhythms of co-consciousness drumming. For one thing the rhythm is not regular, but has dysrhythms or chaotic and unexpected disruptions in the rhythms. The beating may be rapid or fast at one point, but slow or complex in the subsequent beats. They may vary in loudness and contain extra loud, or missing beats where one is expected. In other words there is built in complexity or chaos in the rhythms.
It is known in the field of hypnotherapy that such disruption to the rhythm of the trance induction deepen the trance. There is an explanation for this as follows. We have speculated from our research into brainwaves and CRP theory that this occurs when the brain is in its most complex firing patterns and when the waves have built within them the most complexity.
The frequency is most varied and unpredictable within the limits of the defined brain wave pattern when old patterns of neural activity are dissolved and new neural circuitry is formed. This state of complexity is also associated with creativity and in particular is a characteristic of REM activity. Awake REM activity is associated with spiritual visionary and other mindbody sensory phenomena. The visions come from the imaginal process rather than a fantasy process. Fantasy is characterized by an expected or predictable cause/effect type imagery flow.
Imaginal process is unpredictable with bifurcations or unexpected twists of the flow of the imagery and other senses. It is indicative of chaotic consciousness (unbound or free-flowing consciousness) and the imagery is more like a reiterating fractal than a story line in its nature.
We usually introduce a drum journey with the suggestion or notion that those who will be journeying should begin by contemplating the symptoms that reveal their disease to them. Then, as the drumming starts, to let go of that and any expectations and to just notice what comes to them. It may be discomfort, or an image, or body sensations that are experienced during the drumming. They are invited to not question this or try to guess what it may indicate to them, but instead to allow it to flow and explore where this doorway takes them.
The journey is then shared with the mentor following the drumming, who uses the symbols to initiate a CRP journey in the same fashion as he would dream images. It is important that the mentor realize that the images are formed, as are dream images and stories, by the deep consciousness patterns and dynamics that shape the mentored, both physically and mentally.
In this way the completion of the drumming is just the first step in a CRP journey, just as the dream provides the opening or doorway for a dream journey. This too sets the CRP drummer apart from more traditional views which require the shaman or to give meaning or interpret the symbols or story encountered. Rather the mentor uses the imagery to explore the deep consciousness structures that gave rise to the symbols. This is done as outlined in the body of literature explaining the process.
And the Beat Goes On...
However we have also found that sometimes the drum journey, and what is experienced during it, seems to induce the healing experience. People come back from the journey reporting that they feel better, more free, less stressed than when they started it. There are several factors involved with this. This is not unlike dreams, some of which seem complete in that the healing is experienced in the dream and doesn't require any further exploration. We have found, however, that exploring further may broaden or deepen the healing experience. We can also consider another effect that drumming may have to help explain other forms of drum healing.
As noted, drumming creates sound waves, vibration of the environment in which the drumming occurs. Everything in the immediate area will also vibrate with the rhythms of the drumming. This includes the flesh, mind and bodies of the listeners. It has been postulated that every illness has its own vibrational frequency. I am not sure that I agree that it is a single frequency, rather I expect it has its own complex interference pattern from the interaction of several frequencies and waves.
Some set frequency is involved with the structure of the disease. One of the theories of drum healing journeys is that one can produce with the drum frequencies and harmonics which set up resonance with the structure of the disease. The notion is that this resonance over energizes the illness structure and cause it to dissemble or literally shake it self apart. We don't need to look far to see examples of this in other areas.
Lately it has been demonstrated that the purring of cats makes their bones so strong and resilient. The effects of purring or rhythmic resonance have been proposed as treatment for osteoporosis. It is said that the great opera star Mario Lanza could shatter a glass by singing a note that was of the same frequency as the glass. Another example is that when marching soldiers across a bridge, soldiers are generally told to break cadence and not march in step.
It is well documented that a bridge which happens to have resonance with the frequency of the cadence of the march will begin sympathetic vibrations and may eventually collapse. This is a well known phenomena to engineers who must take this into account when designing bridges, tall buildings, towers and other similar structures. So it seems reasonable to assume that by creating a drum beat's frequencies and overtones to resonate with the particular frequencies of the disease structure, they will over-energize the structure and cause it to shake itself and vibrate in resonance. As with the glass or the bridges, so too will the holographic structure of the disease disintegrate or collapse.
Whether the disease is the mass of a cancer, or a particular neural or nervous system firing frequency, by matching or resonating with it, this effect could change the hologram of the disease, thereby transforming the disease itself. If the drumming is happening in the co-consciousness state it creates a feedback effect much like a microphone in front of a speaker magnifies the frequency coming from the speaker to produce a feedback squeal, which left to continue could increase and blow the speakers. This is another argument that reinforces the notion of co-consciousness drumming.
POUNDING HEALING RHYTHMS IN MY BRAIN
Following are some accounts of healing drumming and the reported effects. One woman who had a rectal cancer and was participating in one of my groups reported her experience of a drum journey. She was in considerable pain from the tumor, but had so far refused to take any pain medication of any type for relief. The drumming was offered to the group as a demonstration.
Following the drumming she reported that the pain in her tumor had considerably lessened. She reported that the pain in her tumor had considerably lessened. She reported that going into and during the journey she had felt the beat of the drum seeming to resonate in her uterus (which was in close proximity) and her her tumor. There were times when the sensations in the area bordered on pain, but for the most part she said that she actually felt sexually stimulated.
When the drumming had stopped, she reported feeling more free of pain than she had for months. And this effect lasted for several hours. Since she was then residing at the retreat, drum journeys became a regular part of her pain control, and she reported that they most often seemed to help her with the pain. Several years ago, another woman came for a weekend retreat following a visit to her doctor during which he had informed her that she had uterine cancer and would require immediate surgery.
While on retreat she wanted to work on the cancer using alternative healing. She was relatively young and wanted to have children and surgery would have taken that option from her. During a sweat we did one evening, I had felt a strong intuition to drum and did so, holding the drum about six inches over the tumor. She reported feeling "something moving or shifting down there."
Along with other work and a dream journey that had been stimulated by the drumming, she worked on the tumor throughout her two day stay. When she left I did not hear from her again, but a couple of years later I met her mother at a presentation I was giving. She came up and identified herself. When asked about her daughter, she reported that she was now living in Alaska.
When she had returned to the doctor during the week following her retreat, the tumor had apparently disappeared and the doctor apologizing to her claiming to her claimed it must have been misdiagnosed, or that perhaps he had been looking at another patient's test results. Was it the drumming or had she indeed been misdiagnosed? I certainly don't know.
LA DE DA DE DI
Another drum journeyer reports the following: "I really like the Drum Journeys. It's the way I feel or sense the experience which I find significant. I don't recall stories or visions from my several drum journeys, except in the sense of feeling you are the drum. Sensing, my body being the drum; hollowed out; stretched; vibrating and resonating. In some ways it reminds me of the feelings I get when intoning the Chakras.
The drum's song has many tones and rhythms. Where some of the tones and rhythms resonate in my throat, others rumble through my belly. Or deep tones vibrate in the base of my spine. Graywolf creates overtones when he drums, so at times the sensations split and become dissonant.
Then, the intensity may begin to harmonize, say in my forehead and heart. Then there is the breath - rhythm for rhythm, coming in and out of focus and syncopation, with the internal and the external drum. And I am ready; there is an anticipation for the drum to stop. Final beats signalling the end and bringing me back.
"... The most impressive thing is a wall covered with
hands ... remnants of humanity prior to any known civilization. I like remain there in front, alone, in silence, broken only by the sound of drops falling from the stalactites .. " --Teilhard de Chardin
picture: Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands) is a cave located in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz, 163 km south of the town of Perito Moreno, within the borders of the National Park Perito Moreno (Patagonia)
hands ... remnants of humanity prior to any known civilization. I like remain there in front, alone, in silence, broken only by the sound of drops falling from the stalactites .. " --Teilhard de Chardin
picture: Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands) is a cave located in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz, 163 km south of the town of Perito Moreno, within the borders of the National Park Perito Moreno (Patagonia)
Trickster:
Psychologically, descriptive of unconscious shadow tendencies of an ambivalent, mercurial nature.
[The trickster] is a forerunner of the savior . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.["On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," CW 9i, par. 472],
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.[Ibid., par. 478.]
On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure by C.G. Jung:
It is no light task for me to write about the figure of the trickster in American Indian mythology within the confined space of a commentary. When I first came across Adolf Bandelier's classic on this subject, The Delight Makers, many years ago, I was struck by the European analogy of the carnival in the medieval Church, with its reversal of the hierarchic order, which is still continued in the carnivals held by student societies today. Something of this contradictoriness also inheres in the medieval description of the devil as simia dei (the ape of God), and in his characterization in folklore as the "simpleton" who is "fooled" or "cheated." A curious combination of typical trickster motifs can be found in the alchemical figure of Mercurius; for instance, his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and—last but not least—his approximation to the figure of a saviour. These qualities make Mercurius seem like a daemonic being resurrected from primitive times, older even than the Greek Hermes. His rogueries relate him in some measure to various figures met with in folklore and universally known in fairy-tales: Tom Thumb, Stupid Hans, or the buffoon-like Hanswurst, who is an altogether negative hero and yet manages to achieve through his stupidity what others fail to accomplish with their best efforts. In Grimm's fairy-tale, the "Spirit Mercurius" lets himself be outwitted by a peasant lad, and then has to buy his freedom with the precious gift of healing.
Since all mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them, it is not surprising to find certain phenomena in the field of parapsychology which remind us of the trickster. These are the phenomena connected with poltergeists, and they occur at all times and places in the ambiance of pre-adolescent children. The malicious tricks played by the poltergeist are as well known as the low level of his intelligence and the fatuity of his "communications."
Ability to change his shape seems also to be one of his characteristics, as there are not a few reports of his appearance in animal form. Since he has on occasion described himself as a soul in hell, the motif of subjective suffering would seem not to be lacking either. His universality is co-extensive, so to speak, with that of shamanism, to which, as we know, the whole phenomenology of spiritualism belongs. There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured. For this reason, his profession sometimes puts him in peril of his life.
Besides that, the shamanistic techniques in themselves often cause the medicine-man a good deal of discomfort, if not actual pain. At all events the "making of a medicine-man" involves, in many parts of the world, so much agony of body and soul that permanent psychic injuries may result. His "approximation to the saviour" is an obvious consequence of this, in confirmation of the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering.
These mythological features extend even to the highest regions of man's spiritual development. If we consider, for example, the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the Old Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction and his self• imposed sufferings, together with the same gradual development into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization.
It is just this transformation of thl:' meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster's compensatory relation to the "saint." In the early Middle Ages, this led to some strange ecclesiastical customs based on memories of the ancient saturnalia. Mostly they were celebrated on the days immediately following the birth of Christ—that is, in the New Year—with singing and dancing. The dances were the originally harmless tripudia of the priests, lower clergy, children, and subdeacons and took place in church. An episcopus puerorum (children's bishop) was elected on Innocents' Day and dressed in pontifical robes. Amid uproarious rejoicings he paid an official visit to the palace of the archbishop and bestowed the episcopal blessing from one of the windows. The same thing happened at the tripudium hypodiaconorum, and at the dances for other priestly grades.
By the end of the twelfth century, the subdeacons' dance had degenerated into a real festum stuttorum (fools' feast). A report from the year I1g8 says that at the Feast of the Circumcision in Notre Dame, Paris, "so many abominations and shameful deeds" were committed that the holy place was desecrated "not only by smutty jokes, but even by the shedding of blood." In vain did Pope Innocent III inveigh against the "jests and madness that make the clergy a mockery," and the "shameless frenzy of their play-acting."
Two hundred and fifty years later (March 12, 1444), a letter from the Theological Faculty of Paris to all the French bishops was still fulminating against these festivals, at which "even the priests and clerics elected an archbishop OT a bishop or pope, and named him the Fools' Pope" (fatuorum papam). "In the very midst of divine service masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised as women, lions, and mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a corner of the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out their games of dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, and ran and hopped about all over the church."
It is not surprising that this veritable witches' sabbath was uncommonly popular, and that it required considerable time and effort to free the Church from this pagan heritage.
In certain localities even the priests seem to have adhered to the "libertas decembrica," as the Fools' Holiday was called, in spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that the older level of consciousness could let itself rip on this happy occasion with all the wildness, wantonness, and irresponsibility of paganism.
These ceremonies, which still reveal the spirit of the trickster in his original form, seem to have died out by the beginning of the sixteenth century. At any rate, the various conciliar decrees issued from 1581 to 1585 forbade only the festum puerorum and the election of an episcopus puerorum.
Finally, we must also mention in this connection the festum asinorum, which, so far as I know, was celebrated mainly in France. Although considered a harmless festival in memory of Mary's flight into Egypt, it was celebrated in a somewhat curious manner which might easily have given rise to misunderstandings.
In Beauvais, the ass procession went right into the church.5 At the conclusion of each part (Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, ete.) of the high mass that followed, the whole congregation brayed) that is, they all went "Y-a" like a donkey ("hac modulatione hinham concludebantur"). A codex dating apparently from the eleventh century says: "At the end of the mass, instead of the words 'Ite missa est,' the priest shall bray three times (ter hinhamabit), and instead of the words 'Deo gratias,' the congregation shall answer •Y•a' (hinham) three times,"
Du Cange cites a hymn from this festival:
Orientis partibus
Adventavit Asinus
Pulcher et fortissimus
Sarcinis aptissimus.
Each verse was followed by the French refrain:
Hez, Sire Asnes, car chantez
Belle bouche rechignez
Vous aurez du foin assez
Et de l'avoine a plantez.
The hymn had nine verses, the last of which was:
Amen, dicas, Asine (hie genufleetebatur)
Jam satur de gramine.
Amen, amen, itera
Aspernare vetera.
Du Cange says that the more ridiculous this rite seemed, the greater the enthusiasm with which it was celebrated. In other places the ass was decked with a golden canopy whose corners were held "by distinguished canons"; the others present had to "don suitably festive garments, as at Christmas." Since there were certain tendencies to bring the ass into symbolic relationship with Christ, and since, from ancient times, the god of the Jews was vulgarly conceived to be an ass-a prejudice which extended to Christ himself, as is shown by the mock crucifixion scratched on the wall of the Imperial Cadet School on the Palatine 8-the danger of theriomorphism lay uncomfortably close.
Even the bishops could do nothing to stamp out this custom, until finally it had to be suppressed by the "auctoritas supremi Senatus." The suspicion of blasphemy becomes quite open in Nietzsche's "Ass Festival," which is a deliberately blasphemous parody of the mass.9
These medieval customs demonstrate the role of the trickster to perfection, and, when they vanished from the precincts of the Church, they appeared again on the profane level of Italian theatricals, as those comic types who, often adorned with enormous ithyphallic emblems, entertained the far from prudish public with ribaldries in true Rabelaisian style. Callot's engravings have preserved these classical figures for posterity—the Pulcinellas, Cucorognas, Chico Sgarras, and the like.
In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in magic rites of healing, in man's religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulated guise.n He is obviously a "psychologem," an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.
That this is how the trickster figure originated can hardly be contested if we look at it from the causal and historical angle. In psychology as in biology we cannot afford to overlook or underestimate this question of origins, although the answer usually tells us nothing about the functional meaning. For this reason biology should never forget the question of purpose, for only by answering that can we get at the meaning of a phenomenon.
Even in pathology, where we are concerned with lesions which have no meaning in themselves, the exclusively causal approach proves to be inadequate, since there are a number of pathological phenomena which only give up their meaning when we inquire into their purpose. And where we are concerned with the normal phenomena of life, this question of purpose takes undisputed precedence.
When, therefore, a primitive or barbarous consciousness forms a picture of itself on a much earlier level of development and continues to do so for hundreds or even thousands of years, undeterred by the contamination of its archaic qualities with differentiated, highly developed mental products, then the causal explanation is that the older the archaic qualities are, the more conservative and pertinacious is their behaviour. One simply cannot shake off the memory-image of things as they were, and drags it along like a senseless appendage.
This explanation, which is facile enough to satisfy the rationalistic requirements of our age, would certainly not meet with the approval of the Winnebago's, the nearest possessors of the trickster cycle. For them the myth is not in any sense a remnant-it is far too amusing for that, and an object of undivided enjoyment. For them it still "functions," provided that they have not been spoiled by civilization.
For them there is no earthly reason to theorize about the meaning and purpose of myths, just as the Christmas—tree seems no problem at all to the naive European. For the thoughtful observer, however, both trickster and Christmas-tree afford reason enough for reflection. Naturally it depends very much on the mentality of the observer what he thinks about these things. Considering the crude primitivity of the trickster cycle, it would not be surprising if one saw in this myth simply the reflection of an earlier, rudimentary stage of consciousness, which is what the trickster obviously seems to be.
The only question that would need answering is whether such personified reflections exist at all in empirical psychology. As a matter of fact they do, and these experiences of split or double personality actually form the core of the earliest psycho-pathological investigations. The peculiar thing about these dissociations is that the split-off personality is not just a random one, but stands in a complementary or compensatory relationship to the ego-personality.
It is a personification of traits of character which are sometimes worse and sometimes better than those the ego-personality possesses. A collective personification like the trickster is the product of an aggregate of individuals and is welcomed by each individual as something known to him, which would not be the case if it were just an individual outgrowth.
Now if the myth were nothing but an historical remnant, one would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into the great rubbish-heap of the past, and why it continues to make its influence felt on the highest levels of civilization, even where, on account of his stupidity and grotesque scurrility, the trickster no longer plays the role of a "delight-maker." In many cultures his figure seems like an old river-bed in which the water still flows.
One can see this best of all from the fact that the trickster motif does not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just as naively and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man—whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying "accidents" which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent. He then speaks of "hoodoos" and "jinxes" or of the "mischievousness of the object."
Here the trickster is represented by counter-tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic seances and cause all those ineffably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists. I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I called it the shadow. On the civilized level, it is regarded as a personal "gaffe," "slip," "faux pas," etc., which are then chalked up as defects of the conscious personality.
We are no longer aware that in carnival customs and the like there are remnants of a collective shadow figure which prove that the personal shadow is in part descended from a numinous collective figure. This collective figure gradually breaks up under the impact of civilization, leaving traces in folklore which are difficult to recognize. But the main part of him gets personalized and is made an object of personal responsibility.
Radin's trickster cycle preserves the shadow in its pristine mythological form, and thus points back to a very much earlier stage of consciousness which existed before the birth of the myth, when the Indian was still groping about in a similar mental darkness. Only when his consciousness reached a higher level could he detach the earlier state from himself and objectify it, that is, say anything about it.
So long as his consciousness was itself trickster-like, such a confrontation could obviously not take place. It was possible only when the attainment of a newer and higher level of consciousness enabled him to look back on a lower and inferior state. It was only to be expected that a good deal of mockery and contempt should mingle with this retrospect, thus casting an even thicker pall over man's memories of the past, which were pretty unedifying anyway.
This phenomenon must have repeated itself innumerable times in the history of his mental development. The sovereign contempt with which our modern age looks back on the taste and intelligence of earlier centuries is a classic example of this, and there is an unmistakable allusion to the same phenomenon in the New Testament, where we are told in Acts 17:30 that God looked down from above the times of ignorance (or unconsciousness).
This attitude contrasts strangely with the still commoner and more striking idealization of the past, which is praised not merely as the "good old days" but as the Golden Age-and not just by uneducated and superstitious people, but by all those legions of theosophical enthusiasts who resolutely believe in the former existence and lofty civilization of Atlantis.
Anyone who belongs to a sphere of culture that seeks the perfect state somewhere in the past must feel very queerly indeed when confronted by the figure of the trickster. He is a forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.
Because of it he is deserted by his (evidently human) companions, which seems to indicate that he has fallen below their level of consciousness. He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrusts it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god.
On the other hand he is in many respects stupider than the animals, and gets into one ridiculous scrape after another. Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and un-relatedness. His imprisonment in animal unconsciousness is suggested by the episode where he gets his head caught inside the skull of an elk, and the next episode shows how he overcomes this condition by imprisoning the head of a hawk inside his own rectum.
True, he sinks back into the former condition immediately afterwards, by falling under the ice, and is outwitted time after time by the animals, but in the end he succeeds in tricking the cunning coyote, and this brings back to him his savior nature. The trickster is a primitive "cosmic" being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness.
He is no match for the animals either, because of his extraordinary clumsiness and lack of instinct. These defects are the marks of his human nature, which is not so well adapted to the environment as the animal's but, instead, has prospects of a much higher development of consciousness based on a considerable eagerness to learn, as is duly emphasized in the myth.
What the repeated telling of the myth signifies is the therapeutic anamnesis of contents which, for reasons still to be discussed, should never be forgotten for long. If they were nothing but the remnants of an inferior state it would be understandable if man turned his attention away from them, feeling that their reappearance was a nuisance. This is evidently by no means the case, since the trickster has been a source of amusement right down to civilized times, where he can still be recognized in the carnival figures of Pulcinella and the clown.
That is one important reason for his still continuing to function. But it is not the only one, and certainly not the reason why this reflection of an extremely primitive state of consciousness solidified into a mythological personage. Mere vestiges of an early state that is dying out usually lose their energy at an increasing rate, otherwise they would never disappear. The last thing we would expect is that they would have the strength to solidify into a mythological figure with its own cycle of legends—unless, of course, they received energy from outside, in this case from a higher level of consciousness or from sources in the unconscious which are not yet exhausted.
To take a legitimate parallel from the psychology of the individual, namely the appearance of an impressive shadow figure antagonistically confronting a personal consciousness: this figure does not appear merely because it still exists in the individual, but because it rests on a dynamism whose existence can only be explained in terms of his actual situation, for instance because the shadow is so disagreeable to his ego-consciousness that it has to be repressed into the unconscious.
This explanation does not quite meet the case here, because the trickster obviously represents a vanishing level of consciousness which increasingly lacks the power to take express and assert itself. Furthermore, repression would prevent it from vanishing, because repressed contents are the very ones that have the best chance of survival, as we know from experience that nothing is corrected in the unconscious.
Lastly, the story of the trickster is not in the least disagreeable to the Winnebago consciousness or incompatible with it but, on the contrary, pleasurable and therefore not conducive to repression. It looks, therefore, as if the myth were actively sustained and fostered by consciousness. This may well be so, since that is the best and most successful method of keeping the shadow figure conscious and subjecting it to conscious criticism.
Although, to begin with, this criticism has more the character of a positive evaluation, we may expect that with the progressive development of consciousness the cruder aspects of the myth will gradually fall away, even if the danger of its rapid disappearance under the stress of white civilization did not exist. We have often seen how certain customs, originally cruel or obscene, became mere vestiges in the course of time.
The process of rendering this motif harmless takes an extremely long time, as its history shows; one can still detect traces of it even at a high level of civilization. Its longevity could also be explained by the strength and vitality of the state of consciousness described in the myth, and by the secret attraction and fascination this has for the conscious mind.
Although purely causal hypotheses in the biological sphere are not as a rule very satisfactory, due weight must nevertheless be given to the fact that in the case of the trickster a higher level of consciousness has covered up a lower one, and that the latter was already in retreat. His recollection, however, is mainly due to the interest which the conscious mind brings to bear on him, the inevitable concomitant being, as we have seen, the gradual civilizing, i.e., assimilation, of a primitive daemonic figure who was originally autonomous and even capable of causing possession.
To supplement the causal approach by a final one therefore enables us to arrive at more meaningful interpretations not only in medical psychology, where we are concerned with individual fantasies originating in the unconscious, but also in the case of collective fantasies, that is myths and fairy-tales.
As Radin points out, the civilizing process begins within the framework of the trickster cycle itself, and this is a clear indication that the original state has been overcome. At any rate the marks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead of acting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trickster's behavior towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful and sensible.
The devaluation of his earlier unconsciousness is apparent even in the myth, and one wonders what has happened to his evil qualities. The naive reader may imagine that when the dark aspects disappear they are no longer there in reality. But that is not the case at all, as experience shows. 'What actually happens is that the conscious mind is then able to free itself from the fascination of evil and is no longer obliged to live it compulsively.
The darkness and the evil have not gone up in smoke, they have merely withdrawn into the unconscious owing to loss of energy, where they remain unconscious so long as all is well with the conscious. But if the conscious should find itself in a critical or doubtful situation, then it soon becomes apparent that the shadow has not dissolved into nothing but is only waiting for a favorable opportunity to reappear as a projection upon one's neighbor.
If this trick is successful, there is immediately created between them that world of primordial darkness where everything that is characteristic of the trickster can happen-even on the highest plane of civilization. The best examples of these "monkey tricks," as popular speech aptly and truthfully sums up this state of affairs in which everything goes wrong and nothing intelligent happens except by mistake at the last moment, are naturally to be found in politics.
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.
The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psyche from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the individual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation, and makes society pay for his inefficiency.
He thinks the meaning of existence would be discovered if food and clothing were delivered to him gratis on his own doorstep, or if everybody possessed an automobile. Such are the puerilities that rise up in place of an unconscious shadow and keep it unconscious. As a result of these prejudices, the individual feels totally dependent on his environment and loses all capacity for introspection. In this way his code of ethics is replaced by a knowledge of what is permitted or forbidden or ordered.
How, under these circumstances, can one expect a soldier to subject an order received from a superior to ethical scrutiny? He has not yet made the discovery that he might be capable of spontaneous ethical impulses, and of performing them-even when no one is looking.
From this point of view we can see why the myth of the trickster was preserved and developed: like many other myths, it was supposed to have a therapeutic effect. It holds the earlier low intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he shall not forget how things looked yesterday. We like to imagine that something which we do not understand does not help us in any way. But that is not always so.
Seldom does a man understand with his head alone, least of all when he is a primitive. Because of its numinosity the myth has a direct effect on the unconscious, no matter whether it is understood or not. The fact that its repeated telling has not long since become obsolete can, I believe, be explained by its usefulness. The explanation is rather difficult because two contrary tendencies are at work: the desire on the one hand to get out of the earlier condition and on the other hand not to forget it.
Apparently Radin has also felt this difficulty, for he says: "Viewed psychologically, it might be contended that the history of civilization is largely the account of the attempts of man to forget his transformation from an animal into a human being." 16 A few pages further on he says (with reference to the Golden Age): "So stubborn a refusal to forget is not an accident." And it is also no accident that we are forced to contradict ourselves as soon as we try to formulate man's paradoxical attitude to myth.
Even the most enlightened of us will set up a Christmas-tree for his children without having the least idea what this custom means, and is invariably disposed to nip any attempt at interpretation in the bud. It is really astonishing to see how many so-called superstitions are rampant nowadays in town and country alike, but if one took hold of the individual and asked him, loudly and clearly, "Do you believe in ghosts? in witches? in spells and magic?" he would deny it indignantly.
It is a hundred to one he has never heard of such things and thinks it all rubbish. But in secret he is all for it, just like a jungle-dweller. The public knows very little of these things anyway, for everyone is convinced that in our enlightened society that kind of superstition has long since been eradicated, and it is part of the general convention to act as though one had never heard of such things, not to mention believing in them.
But nothing is ever lost, not even the blood pact with the devil. Outwardly it is forgotten, but inwardly not at all. We act like the natives on the southern slopes of Mount Elgon, in East Africa, one of whom accompanied me part of the way into the bush. At a fork in the path we came upon a brand new "ghost trap," beautifully got up like a little hut, near the cave where he lived with his family. I asked him if he had made it. He denied it with all the signs of extreme agitation, asserting that only children would make such a "ju-ju." Whereupon he gave the hut a kick, and the whole thing fell to pieces.
This is exactly the reaction we can observe in Europe today. Outwardly people are more or less civilized, but inwardly they are still primitives. Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all that.
This contradiction was once brought home to me in the most drastic manner when I was watching a "Strudel" (a sort of local witch-doctor) taking the spell off a stable. The stable was situated immediately beside the Gotthard railway line, and several international expresses sped past during the ceremony. Their occupants would hardly have suspected that a primitive ritual was being performed a few yards away.
The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousness is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is also why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity. We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.
It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the "mind," even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that? We can say, if we like, that one statement comes from the psyche, is psychic and nothing but psychic, and that another comes from the mind, is "spiritual" and therefore superior to the psychic one. Both are mere assertions based on the postulates of belief.
The fact is, that this old trichotomous hierarchy of psychic contents (hylic, psychic, and pneumatic) represents the polaristic structure of the psyche, which is the only immediate object of experience. The unity of our psychic nature lies in the middle, just as the living unity of the waterfall appears in the dynamic connection between above and below.
Thus, the living effect of the myth is experienced when a higher consciousness, rejoicing in its freedom and independence, is confronted by the autonomy of a mythological figure and yet cannot flee from its fascination, but must pay tribute to the overwhelming impression. The figure works, because secretly it participates in the observer's psyche and appears as its reflection, though it is not recognized as such.
It is split off from his consciousness and consequently behaves like an autonomous personality. The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, as a mythological figure, but, in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologems, as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations.
If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior.
Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them.
Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more "scientific." But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.
Actually, it is not surprising that this should be so, since even the most rudimentary insight into the shadow sometimes causes the greatest difficulties for the modern European. But since the shadow is the figure nearest his consciousness and the least explosive one, it is also the first component of personality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious. A minatory and ridiculous figure, he stands at the very beginning of the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle of the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a "quaestio crocodilina."
If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity or other has happened and been consciously understood. Only out of disaster can the longing for the saviour arise—in other words, the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow create such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo the tangled web of fate. In the case of the individual, the problem constellated by the shadow is answered on the plane of the anima, that is, through relatedness. In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness. This gradually brings liberation from imprisonment in unconsciousness, and is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing.
As in its collective, mythological form, so also the individual shadow contains within it the seed of an enantiodromia, of a conversion into its opposite.
http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/211-On-the-Psychology-of-the-Trickster-Figure-Jung
Psychologically, descriptive of unconscious shadow tendencies of an ambivalent, mercurial nature.
[The trickster] is a forerunner of the savior . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.["On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," CW 9i, par. 472],
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams.[Ibid., par. 478.]
On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure by C.G. Jung:
It is no light task for me to write about the figure of the trickster in American Indian mythology within the confined space of a commentary. When I first came across Adolf Bandelier's classic on this subject, The Delight Makers, many years ago, I was struck by the European analogy of the carnival in the medieval Church, with its reversal of the hierarchic order, which is still continued in the carnivals held by student societies today. Something of this contradictoriness also inheres in the medieval description of the devil as simia dei (the ape of God), and in his characterization in folklore as the "simpleton" who is "fooled" or "cheated." A curious combination of typical trickster motifs can be found in the alchemical figure of Mercurius; for instance, his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and—last but not least—his approximation to the figure of a saviour. These qualities make Mercurius seem like a daemonic being resurrected from primitive times, older even than the Greek Hermes. His rogueries relate him in some measure to various figures met with in folklore and universally known in fairy-tales: Tom Thumb, Stupid Hans, or the buffoon-like Hanswurst, who is an altogether negative hero and yet manages to achieve through his stupidity what others fail to accomplish with their best efforts. In Grimm's fairy-tale, the "Spirit Mercurius" lets himself be outwitted by a peasant lad, and then has to buy his freedom with the precious gift of healing.
Since all mythical figures correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them, it is not surprising to find certain phenomena in the field of parapsychology which remind us of the trickster. These are the phenomena connected with poltergeists, and they occur at all times and places in the ambiance of pre-adolescent children. The malicious tricks played by the poltergeist are as well known as the low level of his intelligence and the fatuity of his "communications."
Ability to change his shape seems also to be one of his characteristics, as there are not a few reports of his appearance in animal form. Since he has on occasion described himself as a soul in hell, the motif of subjective suffering would seem not to be lacking either. His universality is co-extensive, so to speak, with that of shamanism, to which, as we know, the whole phenomenology of spiritualism belongs. There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured. For this reason, his profession sometimes puts him in peril of his life.
Besides that, the shamanistic techniques in themselves often cause the medicine-man a good deal of discomfort, if not actual pain. At all events the "making of a medicine-man" involves, in many parts of the world, so much agony of body and soul that permanent psychic injuries may result. His "approximation to the saviour" is an obvious consequence of this, in confirmation of the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering.
These mythological features extend even to the highest regions of man's spiritual development. If we consider, for example, the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the Old Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction and his self• imposed sufferings, together with the same gradual development into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization.
It is just this transformation of thl:' meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster's compensatory relation to the "saint." In the early Middle Ages, this led to some strange ecclesiastical customs based on memories of the ancient saturnalia. Mostly they were celebrated on the days immediately following the birth of Christ—that is, in the New Year—with singing and dancing. The dances were the originally harmless tripudia of the priests, lower clergy, children, and subdeacons and took place in church. An episcopus puerorum (children's bishop) was elected on Innocents' Day and dressed in pontifical robes. Amid uproarious rejoicings he paid an official visit to the palace of the archbishop and bestowed the episcopal blessing from one of the windows. The same thing happened at the tripudium hypodiaconorum, and at the dances for other priestly grades.
By the end of the twelfth century, the subdeacons' dance had degenerated into a real festum stuttorum (fools' feast). A report from the year I1g8 says that at the Feast of the Circumcision in Notre Dame, Paris, "so many abominations and shameful deeds" were committed that the holy place was desecrated "not only by smutty jokes, but even by the shedding of blood." In vain did Pope Innocent III inveigh against the "jests and madness that make the clergy a mockery," and the "shameless frenzy of their play-acting."
Two hundred and fifty years later (March 12, 1444), a letter from the Theological Faculty of Paris to all the French bishops was still fulminating against these festivals, at which "even the priests and clerics elected an archbishop OT a bishop or pope, and named him the Fools' Pope" (fatuorum papam). "In the very midst of divine service masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised as women, lions, and mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a corner of the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out their games of dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, and ran and hopped about all over the church."
It is not surprising that this veritable witches' sabbath was uncommonly popular, and that it required considerable time and effort to free the Church from this pagan heritage.
In certain localities even the priests seem to have adhered to the "libertas decembrica," as the Fools' Holiday was called, in spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that the older level of consciousness could let itself rip on this happy occasion with all the wildness, wantonness, and irresponsibility of paganism.
These ceremonies, which still reveal the spirit of the trickster in his original form, seem to have died out by the beginning of the sixteenth century. At any rate, the various conciliar decrees issued from 1581 to 1585 forbade only the festum puerorum and the election of an episcopus puerorum.
Finally, we must also mention in this connection the festum asinorum, which, so far as I know, was celebrated mainly in France. Although considered a harmless festival in memory of Mary's flight into Egypt, it was celebrated in a somewhat curious manner which might easily have given rise to misunderstandings.
In Beauvais, the ass procession went right into the church.5 At the conclusion of each part (Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, ete.) of the high mass that followed, the whole congregation brayed) that is, they all went "Y-a" like a donkey ("hac modulatione hinham concludebantur"). A codex dating apparently from the eleventh century says: "At the end of the mass, instead of the words 'Ite missa est,' the priest shall bray three times (ter hinhamabit), and instead of the words 'Deo gratias,' the congregation shall answer •Y•a' (hinham) three times,"
Du Cange cites a hymn from this festival:
Orientis partibus
Adventavit Asinus
Pulcher et fortissimus
Sarcinis aptissimus.
Each verse was followed by the French refrain:
Hez, Sire Asnes, car chantez
Belle bouche rechignez
Vous aurez du foin assez
Et de l'avoine a plantez.
The hymn had nine verses, the last of which was:
Amen, dicas, Asine (hie genufleetebatur)
Jam satur de gramine.
Amen, amen, itera
Aspernare vetera.
Du Cange says that the more ridiculous this rite seemed, the greater the enthusiasm with which it was celebrated. In other places the ass was decked with a golden canopy whose corners were held "by distinguished canons"; the others present had to "don suitably festive garments, as at Christmas." Since there were certain tendencies to bring the ass into symbolic relationship with Christ, and since, from ancient times, the god of the Jews was vulgarly conceived to be an ass-a prejudice which extended to Christ himself, as is shown by the mock crucifixion scratched on the wall of the Imperial Cadet School on the Palatine 8-the danger of theriomorphism lay uncomfortably close.
Even the bishops could do nothing to stamp out this custom, until finally it had to be suppressed by the "auctoritas supremi Senatus." The suspicion of blasphemy becomes quite open in Nietzsche's "Ass Festival," which is a deliberately blasphemous parody of the mass.9
These medieval customs demonstrate the role of the trickster to perfection, and, when they vanished from the precincts of the Church, they appeared again on the profane level of Italian theatricals, as those comic types who, often adorned with enormous ithyphallic emblems, entertained the far from prudish public with ribaldries in true Rabelaisian style. Callot's engravings have preserved these classical figures for posterity—the Pulcinellas, Cucorognas, Chico Sgarras, and the like.
In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in magic rites of healing, in man's religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulated guise.n He is obviously a "psychologem," an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.
That this is how the trickster figure originated can hardly be contested if we look at it from the causal and historical angle. In psychology as in biology we cannot afford to overlook or underestimate this question of origins, although the answer usually tells us nothing about the functional meaning. For this reason biology should never forget the question of purpose, for only by answering that can we get at the meaning of a phenomenon.
Even in pathology, where we are concerned with lesions which have no meaning in themselves, the exclusively causal approach proves to be inadequate, since there are a number of pathological phenomena which only give up their meaning when we inquire into their purpose. And where we are concerned with the normal phenomena of life, this question of purpose takes undisputed precedence.
When, therefore, a primitive or barbarous consciousness forms a picture of itself on a much earlier level of development and continues to do so for hundreds or even thousands of years, undeterred by the contamination of its archaic qualities with differentiated, highly developed mental products, then the causal explanation is that the older the archaic qualities are, the more conservative and pertinacious is their behaviour. One simply cannot shake off the memory-image of things as they were, and drags it along like a senseless appendage.
This explanation, which is facile enough to satisfy the rationalistic requirements of our age, would certainly not meet with the approval of the Winnebago's, the nearest possessors of the trickster cycle. For them the myth is not in any sense a remnant-it is far too amusing for that, and an object of undivided enjoyment. For them it still "functions," provided that they have not been spoiled by civilization.
For them there is no earthly reason to theorize about the meaning and purpose of myths, just as the Christmas—tree seems no problem at all to the naive European. For the thoughtful observer, however, both trickster and Christmas-tree afford reason enough for reflection. Naturally it depends very much on the mentality of the observer what he thinks about these things. Considering the crude primitivity of the trickster cycle, it would not be surprising if one saw in this myth simply the reflection of an earlier, rudimentary stage of consciousness, which is what the trickster obviously seems to be.
The only question that would need answering is whether such personified reflections exist at all in empirical psychology. As a matter of fact they do, and these experiences of split or double personality actually form the core of the earliest psycho-pathological investigations. The peculiar thing about these dissociations is that the split-off personality is not just a random one, but stands in a complementary or compensatory relationship to the ego-personality.
It is a personification of traits of character which are sometimes worse and sometimes better than those the ego-personality possesses. A collective personification like the trickster is the product of an aggregate of individuals and is welcomed by each individual as something known to him, which would not be the case if it were just an individual outgrowth.
Now if the myth were nothing but an historical remnant, one would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into the great rubbish-heap of the past, and why it continues to make its influence felt on the highest levels of civilization, even where, on account of his stupidity and grotesque scurrility, the trickster no longer plays the role of a "delight-maker." In many cultures his figure seems like an old river-bed in which the water still flows.
One can see this best of all from the fact that the trickster motif does not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just as naively and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man—whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying "accidents" which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent. He then speaks of "hoodoos" and "jinxes" or of the "mischievousness of the object."
Here the trickster is represented by counter-tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic seances and cause all those ineffably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists. I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I called it the shadow. On the civilized level, it is regarded as a personal "gaffe," "slip," "faux pas," etc., which are then chalked up as defects of the conscious personality.
We are no longer aware that in carnival customs and the like there are remnants of a collective shadow figure which prove that the personal shadow is in part descended from a numinous collective figure. This collective figure gradually breaks up under the impact of civilization, leaving traces in folklore which are difficult to recognize. But the main part of him gets personalized and is made an object of personal responsibility.
Radin's trickster cycle preserves the shadow in its pristine mythological form, and thus points back to a very much earlier stage of consciousness which existed before the birth of the myth, when the Indian was still groping about in a similar mental darkness. Only when his consciousness reached a higher level could he detach the earlier state from himself and objectify it, that is, say anything about it.
So long as his consciousness was itself trickster-like, such a confrontation could obviously not take place. It was possible only when the attainment of a newer and higher level of consciousness enabled him to look back on a lower and inferior state. It was only to be expected that a good deal of mockery and contempt should mingle with this retrospect, thus casting an even thicker pall over man's memories of the past, which were pretty unedifying anyway.
This phenomenon must have repeated itself innumerable times in the history of his mental development. The sovereign contempt with which our modern age looks back on the taste and intelligence of earlier centuries is a classic example of this, and there is an unmistakable allusion to the same phenomenon in the New Testament, where we are told in Acts 17:30 that God looked down from above the times of ignorance (or unconsciousness).
This attitude contrasts strangely with the still commoner and more striking idealization of the past, which is praised not merely as the "good old days" but as the Golden Age-and not just by uneducated and superstitious people, but by all those legions of theosophical enthusiasts who resolutely believe in the former existence and lofty civilization of Atlantis.
Anyone who belongs to a sphere of culture that seeks the perfect state somewhere in the past must feel very queerly indeed when confronted by the figure of the trickster. He is a forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.
Because of it he is deserted by his (evidently human) companions, which seems to indicate that he has fallen below their level of consciousness. He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrusts it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god.
On the other hand he is in many respects stupider than the animals, and gets into one ridiculous scrape after another. Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and un-relatedness. His imprisonment in animal unconsciousness is suggested by the episode where he gets his head caught inside the skull of an elk, and the next episode shows how he overcomes this condition by imprisoning the head of a hawk inside his own rectum.
True, he sinks back into the former condition immediately afterwards, by falling under the ice, and is outwitted time after time by the animals, but in the end he succeeds in tricking the cunning coyote, and this brings back to him his savior nature. The trickster is a primitive "cosmic" being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness.
He is no match for the animals either, because of his extraordinary clumsiness and lack of instinct. These defects are the marks of his human nature, which is not so well adapted to the environment as the animal's but, instead, has prospects of a much higher development of consciousness based on a considerable eagerness to learn, as is duly emphasized in the myth.
What the repeated telling of the myth signifies is the therapeutic anamnesis of contents which, for reasons still to be discussed, should never be forgotten for long. If they were nothing but the remnants of an inferior state it would be understandable if man turned his attention away from them, feeling that their reappearance was a nuisance. This is evidently by no means the case, since the trickster has been a source of amusement right down to civilized times, where he can still be recognized in the carnival figures of Pulcinella and the clown.
That is one important reason for his still continuing to function. But it is not the only one, and certainly not the reason why this reflection of an extremely primitive state of consciousness solidified into a mythological personage. Mere vestiges of an early state that is dying out usually lose their energy at an increasing rate, otherwise they would never disappear. The last thing we would expect is that they would have the strength to solidify into a mythological figure with its own cycle of legends—unless, of course, they received energy from outside, in this case from a higher level of consciousness or from sources in the unconscious which are not yet exhausted.
To take a legitimate parallel from the psychology of the individual, namely the appearance of an impressive shadow figure antagonistically confronting a personal consciousness: this figure does not appear merely because it still exists in the individual, but because it rests on a dynamism whose existence can only be explained in terms of his actual situation, for instance because the shadow is so disagreeable to his ego-consciousness that it has to be repressed into the unconscious.
This explanation does not quite meet the case here, because the trickster obviously represents a vanishing level of consciousness which increasingly lacks the power to take express and assert itself. Furthermore, repression would prevent it from vanishing, because repressed contents are the very ones that have the best chance of survival, as we know from experience that nothing is corrected in the unconscious.
Lastly, the story of the trickster is not in the least disagreeable to the Winnebago consciousness or incompatible with it but, on the contrary, pleasurable and therefore not conducive to repression. It looks, therefore, as if the myth were actively sustained and fostered by consciousness. This may well be so, since that is the best and most successful method of keeping the shadow figure conscious and subjecting it to conscious criticism.
Although, to begin with, this criticism has more the character of a positive evaluation, we may expect that with the progressive development of consciousness the cruder aspects of the myth will gradually fall away, even if the danger of its rapid disappearance under the stress of white civilization did not exist. We have often seen how certain customs, originally cruel or obscene, became mere vestiges in the course of time.
The process of rendering this motif harmless takes an extremely long time, as its history shows; one can still detect traces of it even at a high level of civilization. Its longevity could also be explained by the strength and vitality of the state of consciousness described in the myth, and by the secret attraction and fascination this has for the conscious mind.
Although purely causal hypotheses in the biological sphere are not as a rule very satisfactory, due weight must nevertheless be given to the fact that in the case of the trickster a higher level of consciousness has covered up a lower one, and that the latter was already in retreat. His recollection, however, is mainly due to the interest which the conscious mind brings to bear on him, the inevitable concomitant being, as we have seen, the gradual civilizing, i.e., assimilation, of a primitive daemonic figure who was originally autonomous and even capable of causing possession.
To supplement the causal approach by a final one therefore enables us to arrive at more meaningful interpretations not only in medical psychology, where we are concerned with individual fantasies originating in the unconscious, but also in the case of collective fantasies, that is myths and fairy-tales.
As Radin points out, the civilizing process begins within the framework of the trickster cycle itself, and this is a clear indication that the original state has been overcome. At any rate the marks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead of acting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trickster's behavior towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful and sensible.
The devaluation of his earlier unconsciousness is apparent even in the myth, and one wonders what has happened to his evil qualities. The naive reader may imagine that when the dark aspects disappear they are no longer there in reality. But that is not the case at all, as experience shows. 'What actually happens is that the conscious mind is then able to free itself from the fascination of evil and is no longer obliged to live it compulsively.
The darkness and the evil have not gone up in smoke, they have merely withdrawn into the unconscious owing to loss of energy, where they remain unconscious so long as all is well with the conscious. But if the conscious should find itself in a critical or doubtful situation, then it soon becomes apparent that the shadow has not dissolved into nothing but is only waiting for a favorable opportunity to reappear as a projection upon one's neighbor.
If this trick is successful, there is immediately created between them that world of primordial darkness where everything that is characteristic of the trickster can happen-even on the highest plane of civilization. The best examples of these "monkey tricks," as popular speech aptly and truthfully sums up this state of affairs in which everything goes wrong and nothing intelligent happens except by mistake at the last moment, are naturally to be found in politics.
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.
The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psyche from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the individual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation, and makes society pay for his inefficiency.
He thinks the meaning of existence would be discovered if food and clothing were delivered to him gratis on his own doorstep, or if everybody possessed an automobile. Such are the puerilities that rise up in place of an unconscious shadow and keep it unconscious. As a result of these prejudices, the individual feels totally dependent on his environment and loses all capacity for introspection. In this way his code of ethics is replaced by a knowledge of what is permitted or forbidden or ordered.
How, under these circumstances, can one expect a soldier to subject an order received from a superior to ethical scrutiny? He has not yet made the discovery that he might be capable of spontaneous ethical impulses, and of performing them-even when no one is looking.
From this point of view we can see why the myth of the trickster was preserved and developed: like many other myths, it was supposed to have a therapeutic effect. It holds the earlier low intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he shall not forget how things looked yesterday. We like to imagine that something which we do not understand does not help us in any way. But that is not always so.
Seldom does a man understand with his head alone, least of all when he is a primitive. Because of its numinosity the myth has a direct effect on the unconscious, no matter whether it is understood or not. The fact that its repeated telling has not long since become obsolete can, I believe, be explained by its usefulness. The explanation is rather difficult because two contrary tendencies are at work: the desire on the one hand to get out of the earlier condition and on the other hand not to forget it.
Apparently Radin has also felt this difficulty, for he says: "Viewed psychologically, it might be contended that the history of civilization is largely the account of the attempts of man to forget his transformation from an animal into a human being." 16 A few pages further on he says (with reference to the Golden Age): "So stubborn a refusal to forget is not an accident." And it is also no accident that we are forced to contradict ourselves as soon as we try to formulate man's paradoxical attitude to myth.
Even the most enlightened of us will set up a Christmas-tree for his children without having the least idea what this custom means, and is invariably disposed to nip any attempt at interpretation in the bud. It is really astonishing to see how many so-called superstitions are rampant nowadays in town and country alike, but if one took hold of the individual and asked him, loudly and clearly, "Do you believe in ghosts? in witches? in spells and magic?" he would deny it indignantly.
It is a hundred to one he has never heard of such things and thinks it all rubbish. But in secret he is all for it, just like a jungle-dweller. The public knows very little of these things anyway, for everyone is convinced that in our enlightened society that kind of superstition has long since been eradicated, and it is part of the general convention to act as though one had never heard of such things, not to mention believing in them.
But nothing is ever lost, not even the blood pact with the devil. Outwardly it is forgotten, but inwardly not at all. We act like the natives on the southern slopes of Mount Elgon, in East Africa, one of whom accompanied me part of the way into the bush. At a fork in the path we came upon a brand new "ghost trap," beautifully got up like a little hut, near the cave where he lived with his family. I asked him if he had made it. He denied it with all the signs of extreme agitation, asserting that only children would make such a "ju-ju." Whereupon he gave the hut a kick, and the whole thing fell to pieces.
This is exactly the reaction we can observe in Europe today. Outwardly people are more or less civilized, but inwardly they are still primitives. Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all that.
This contradiction was once brought home to me in the most drastic manner when I was watching a "Strudel" (a sort of local witch-doctor) taking the spell off a stable. The stable was situated immediately beside the Gotthard railway line, and several international expresses sped past during the ceremony. Their occupants would hardly have suspected that a primitive ritual was being performed a few yards away.
The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousness is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is also why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity. We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.
It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the "mind," even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that? We can say, if we like, that one statement comes from the psyche, is psychic and nothing but psychic, and that another comes from the mind, is "spiritual" and therefore superior to the psychic one. Both are mere assertions based on the postulates of belief.
The fact is, that this old trichotomous hierarchy of psychic contents (hylic, psychic, and pneumatic) represents the polaristic structure of the psyche, which is the only immediate object of experience. The unity of our psychic nature lies in the middle, just as the living unity of the waterfall appears in the dynamic connection between above and below.
Thus, the living effect of the myth is experienced when a higher consciousness, rejoicing in its freedom and independence, is confronted by the autonomy of a mythological figure and yet cannot flee from its fascination, but must pay tribute to the overwhelming impression. The figure works, because secretly it participates in the observer's psyche and appears as its reflection, though it is not recognized as such.
It is split off from his consciousness and consequently behaves like an autonomous personality. The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, as a mythological figure, but, in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologems, as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations.
If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior.
Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them.
Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more "scientific." But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.
Actually, it is not surprising that this should be so, since even the most rudimentary insight into the shadow sometimes causes the greatest difficulties for the modern European. But since the shadow is the figure nearest his consciousness and the least explosive one, it is also the first component of personality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious. A minatory and ridiculous figure, he stands at the very beginning of the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle of the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a "quaestio crocodilina."
If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity or other has happened and been consciously understood. Only out of disaster can the longing for the saviour arise—in other words, the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow create such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo the tangled web of fate. In the case of the individual, the problem constellated by the shadow is answered on the plane of the anima, that is, through relatedness. In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness. This gradually brings liberation from imprisonment in unconsciousness, and is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing.
As in its collective, mythological form, so also the individual shadow contains within it the seed of an enantiodromia, of a conversion into its opposite.
http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/211-On-the-Psychology-of-the-Trickster-Figure-Jung
(c)2013; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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