Very adult ideas: discomfort should be accepted as a part of life
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Very adult ideas: discomfort should be accepted as a part of life -
As I follow your stuff, I find that I don't have the same new age sensibility you have about shamanism at all (if we can use that term, new age, as I don't readily have another). But even from the academic point of view I have studied, what you say is totally consistent with what I have found myself, doing research. For instance, in one of your earlier videos you speak about taking all the blame for events, as a means to shamanize. Drawing from and extrapolating from Freud, we can say that taking on the blame causes one to destroy oneself (an embrace of Thanatos, the destructive principle). And From Nietzsche, who urged us to destroy "the old law tables", destruction leads to rebirth. He understood that you cannot create without destroying first. Also the idea of ego as a limiting factor I found to be suggested in a very, very old, theory about the "triune mind" (look it up on google). According to the theorist, the middle level of the mind, which is the mammalian level, keeps us grounded in the present and in the body. Drawing from the principles he suggests, without this middle level -- (I assume we can safely call it ego) -- one would feel disembodied. A disembodied ego would be something akin to "spirit". (I don't think we need to go so far as to assert that there really is such a thing as a disembodied ego that floats around. I think it is more to do with our neurological wiring.)
Also, I have found that there really are filters we can have over our mind that makes it so that different people experience the same environment very differently. It really depends on your cultural conditioning, your character structure, your attitudinal stance, the level of your intellect and inner development and so on. You end up networking with different sorts of people and hearing different ideas from them.0Add a comment
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Handling Rejection | Clarissa's Blog
Oh, I’ve never been impressed by academics who are rude. I have a very deep notion that powerful people are subtle and that they do all their dirty work in a way that actually minimises the dirt. That, to me, is impressive. But once people start to get overtly smelly, my estimation drops from “aristocratic” to “bourgeois”.0Add a comment
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African terms of existence
Between the view of life as basically a moral discourse and as politically dynamic is a huge experiential chasm. My cultural affiliations -- the ones I feel immediately in my gut -- are with those who see the world in terms of power dynamics not in terms of competing moral discourses.
Maybe this relates to the violence in my blood, that sensibility that comes from being born African. If you speak a close enough strain to my language -- that being the language which takes into account that issues of life are related to issues of power -- then you will be culturally closer to me, even as an enemy, than anybody who espouses that life is basically a matter of making correct moral choices for oneself.
But there it is: the fundamental human schism. And those who speak about morality are often really speaking about power, where those who speak superficially about power are often really moral crusaders. You have to know the differences.
Writer Marechera's critical discourse is about power, and only lightly about morality. And his Western critics ) speak fundamentally in terms of a moral discourse. They even perceive a deeper discourse about power to be "mad", although perhaps this is a slip of the tongue and what they really mean is that is "maddening".0Add a comment
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summary
Marechera’s writing enables us to see the psychological effect of power relations, instead of simply leaping to conclusions about their moral status. His analysis of power relations is not limited to something isolated and set apart for its particular negativity, termed ‘colonialism’. Rather, his psychological methodology is consistent for pinpointing the effects of unjust power relations wherever he finds them.
His writing is philosophical and far-reaching as he is not intent on condemning the latest outrage of his time, but is rather taking a look at what it is in human power relations that can cause them to distort and shred the fabric of the human psyche, but his concern is with the psychological illnesses of society and the possibility of healing them. I deem his approach to be shamanistic, in the sense that traditional shamans directed their work towards diagnosing and healing the ills of their societies, which had resulted from social imbalances of power. Belief in society's totems can insulate the believer against a fear of death.
This has relevance to shamanism, for it is a sacrifice of the belief in totems through facing death that allows the shaman to see reality in a way that isn't determined only by his emotional needs. This is what is needful to produce detachment -- which in turn facilitates (although doesn't guarantee, as this depends on the quality of the character) a greater capacity for an ethical orientation in the long run.0Add a comment
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kwaChirere: Fragments from Zimbabwe war literature
BV summoned the rest of the unit who had been covering both sides of the bridge and we marched back to base.
I was too tired, frustrated and annoyed to talk to anyone.
I nibbled a few morsels of sadza and went to sleep some distance from the rest of the unit.
I just wanted to be myself.
The mine exploded next morning at about 8:00am.
I was fast asleep – BV came with the good tidings, he was overjoyed.
For me, it was a shattering anticlimax and all the risks I had taken came like a flood into my mind.
“What exactly did you do?” he asked.
When I told him, his jaw sagged and he snorted: “Pebbles in a pothole? I can't believe it!"0Add a comment
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Nietzsche's approach to philosophy is, above all, shamanistic, as Bataille recognizes in ON NIETZSCHE, where he speaks of Nietzsche as being someone subject to intellectual confusion in a way that brought out novel and divine perspectives. I do, of course, paraphrase.
His writing clearly invites a mode of personal transformation. However, viewed as a form of shamanism, is an imperfect shamanism, which doesn't really guide one to get to the bottom of the questions of existence experientially. There is too much incitement in his texts to emotionally embrace the values of the philosopher, for a completely investigative approach to be permitted. His barbs and jibes about gender (for instance) are rhetorically loaded and emotionally appealing to many.
That his approach to philosophy is shamanistic all the same should not be in any doubt. His ethics, far from being non-existent or fascistic (two very superficial interpretations) are based around mastering one's self. But, one does not begin to do so, unless one has already doubled one's subjectivity, so that part of it becomes the master and the other part is the self that is mastered. It is this doubling of the Self that is quintessentially shamanistic, and the key to all shamanistic practice and insights.
That which Nietzsche condemns is that lack of self-awareness. Without its ethical correlate, self-mastery, one would would not be able to develop the range of ethics that would be proper to one who one really was able to ascend the full ladder of one's being, which means ascending the ladder of human knowledge through awareness of spiritual hierarchy (starting from inner awareness and developing outwards). Notably, the 'Tarantulas', those who wreak vengeance in the intellectual sphere, are condemned in Zarathustra not just for the principles that guide them to pursue their goals, but because of the evidence given by their characters, as viewed on a shamanistic level: They lack the right to do what they are doing since they have no internal reference points -- that is, none of the self-knowledge that would come from shamanistic practice. Rather, they are completely "at one" with their behaviour in a negative cultural dimension, which means that it is behaviour without ethical considerations. As no genuine ethical dimension has ever been part of their experience, they are mere actors of values (know-nothings).
Here is the evidence he supplies for their lack of true knowing:
Their jealousy leadeth them also into thinkers' paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy--they always go too far: so that their fatigue hath at last to go to sleep on the snow. [my bolds]
Note: it is not just their jealousy leading them to act as intellectuals that is problematised, but that from the shaman's perspective (whereby the subject must necessarily double itself up to find its own self-appropriate ethics), that there is an inherent incongruity between their choice (to pose as intellectuals) and their ability to self-regulate their own choice. They are not masters of themselves as intellectuals, and so lack the right to claim this status. The incongruity between what they claim the right to, and what they actually have the right to, marks them as unethical. This is all a shamanistic approach to ethics.
Nietzsche's approach to ethics is shamanistic, but that which he does not do, in his writing, (although the outlines of what it means to shamanise, alone, are pointed out in Zarathustra), is to tell his readers of how to get to the bottom of their beings, to the point where they can create this mode of shamanistic doubling, for themselves, and thus develop, on the basis of this psychological doubling, their own inner co-ordinates for an ethical life.
There is a reason Nietzsche's variety of shamanism does not give us sufficiently knowledge about shamanistic means of self-development. Shamanism has traditionally been at home among hunter-gatherers and those of the lower socio-economic orders of various societies. The first principle of shamanistic knowledge and transformation is that one has to be thrown entirely onto one's own devices, to help one's basic survival. This kind of experience is very much more likely for you if you are living in the wild, or you are made a victim of the vagaries of class society (due to being found at the bottom of it). But Nietzsche wrote for those who were at least of the German middle-class.
Few from the ruling classes of society would have need to get to the bottom of their own psyches in the way that is necessitated for shamanistic thinking. The facilitation of a self-directed approach to ethics would thus have been far from these ruling types, in particular, due to their lesser need for a shamanistic approach (that leads to ethical self-governance) at all. They could more easily just rely upon brute power to keep up a comfortable social status, on the basis of principles that had no relation to self-knowledge.
On a practical level, self-knowledge is not so necessary for a ruling class type of person as it is for those who lack the material power to rule, and so must draw from the very depths of their beings to survive at all. But it was to the latter type of person that Nietzsche's discourse would have had the most genuine resonance, for it is this type who is always on the verge of being shamanised. Instead, Nietzsche alienated this type of person, and chose to speak to those self identified "aristocrats" whose place in society would have provided them a comfortable buffer against shamanisation. This is why Nietzsche has been so badly misunderstood -- interpreted exoterically and "comfortably", rather than from the position of being in the throes of extreme discomfort (leading to self-doubling), which, in our capitalist age of false values and beliefs, is the only position from which one can make ethical decisions at all (now I sound Kierkegaardian!)
Whereas he intended to represent an approach to ethics that would have been more rigorous than any that are in conventional use today, instead his writing seems to have encouraged upholders of the status quo, fascists and misogynists, to think well of themselves -- and to do so without any of the irony present in Nietzsche's own way of thinking. This failure is because they didn't get where they wanted to be by their own efforts. There was no attempt to grapple with the issues of life independently, but rather to take wisdom as cheaply as one thinks one can.0Add a comment
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It’s All About Convenience, Silly! | Clarissa's Blog
One of the deeper shamanic skills — which is a very costly one to use, but sometimes necessary — is to simply take the violence on offer into oneself in a mode of emotional equilibrium. It diffuses that way, and after a very long time, finally it is gone. That is what my memoir is about in fact. (Sometimes I even lose track, myself, of how to understand it in articulated terms.)But I had to cope with the generational violence my family had experienced in this way. Now, certainly, my father had extreme abandonment issues, which began when his father was killed in WW2 and then became most exacerbated by his loss of the Rhodesian war and the consequences for starting again that this brought about. Very, very sad things. One could use the crude modern parlance for similar sorts of emotional reactions to those that he developed, and say that he was “Borderline”.But one cannot allow oneself to become equally thrown off balance when one is in association with such a person. That was HOW I learned to develop my whole ‘shamanic’ knowledge about what it is to be in or out of balance. Actually it is life and death in some instances just to stay IN balance.So I learned all about psychological balance and equilibrium and how to maintain it, even when waves of crisis are rolling over me.That is what I consider to be my shamanic endowment (as well as insights into how balances are maintained).In the end, a shamanic type may need to bring an end to generationally infused violence by means of absorbing it and diffusing it, so that it no longer has any potency. That is what I finally managed to do. It’s what I write about in the closing passages of the book.I’m going to write another book, which invokes similar principles of absorbing force and diffusing it, called “parachute landing fall”.0Add a comment
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