Shamanistic doubling has a lot of different manifestations along a sliding scale of intellectual detachment with an opposite degree of emotional engagement, and vice-versa.
One sense of it is in having a vision that takes into account the likely or possible effects how identities can expand or contract in response to particular kinds of violence or provocations. I call that kind of an awareness an awareness of shamanistic doubling.
Shamanistic doubling of this sort involves seeing beyond the person to the kinds of responses they are likely to have to different types of pressure. All individuals respond in different culturally and politically directed ways (as well as on the basis of their individual personalities), by changing and/or by hiding something of themselves. In every interaction where physical or psychological pressure is imposed, subjectivity changes -- sometimes with lasting effects.
Insight into this kind of dialectic* of change ought to be more normal or everyday, but because we in the West adopt a metaphysics of fixed identities, we fail to see the world in a process of transition.
Where one has such insights about the realm of possibilities after undergone extreme experiences (akin to shamanistic initiation, through a close encounter with physical death or ego death), one can refer to the method of attaining these insights as 'shamanistic doubling'. That is because seeing into the realm of actualising or not yet actualized possibilities is akin to seeing into a parallel spirit realm. ('Intellectual shamanism' takes the idea of a spirit realm metaphorically.)
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* Shamanistic doubling invokes a sense of dialectics:
the term, "shamanistic doubling', acknowledges a sense in which present and existing reality seems to acquire 'a double' in the process of transition from one state to another.
One sense of it is in having a vision that takes into account the likely or possible effects how identities can expand or contract in response to particular kinds of violence or provocations. I call that kind of an awareness an awareness of shamanistic doubling.
Shamanistic doubling of this sort involves seeing beyond the person to the kinds of responses they are likely to have to different types of pressure. All individuals respond in different culturally and politically directed ways (as well as on the basis of their individual personalities), by changing and/or by hiding something of themselves. In every interaction where physical or psychological pressure is imposed, subjectivity changes -- sometimes with lasting effects.
Insight into this kind of dialectic* of change ought to be more normal or everyday, but because we in the West adopt a metaphysics of fixed identities, we fail to see the world in a process of transition.
Where one has such insights about the realm of possibilities after undergone extreme experiences (akin to shamanistic initiation, through a close encounter with physical death or ego death), one can refer to the method of attaining these insights as 'shamanistic doubling'. That is because seeing into the realm of actualising or not yet actualized possibilities is akin to seeing into a parallel spirit realm. ('Intellectual shamanism' takes the idea of a spirit realm metaphorically.)
***************
* Shamanistic doubling invokes a sense of dialectics:
the term, "shamanistic doubling', acknowledges a sense in which present and existing reality seems to acquire 'a double' in the process of transition from one state to another.
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